Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer is coming off a season where he won a playoff game and his team had a 10-6 record in the regular season.
The defense looked good, not great, and Kirk Cousins improved in his second year with the team. However, Minnesota lost a lot of talent in the offseason, and Zimmer isn’t exactly a betting favorite when it comes to winning coach of the year.
At +2200, Zimmer has the 17th best odds of winning coach of the year for the 2020 NFL season. Some surprising names that were ahead of Zimmer were Mike McCarthy, the former Packers coach who’s now with the Cowboys, the Dolphins’ Brian Flores and the Buccaneers’ Bruce Arians.
I’ll say this, though: coach of the year can sometimes be an award based on narrative, so maybe a coach like Arians, McCarthy or Flores has a lower bar to clear in order to take home the title. For Zimmer to win it, he might have to move pretty deep in the playoffs, or possibly lead the team to one of the best records in the NFL regular season.
However, one of those other coaches could just earn a playoff berth and win it, making it harder for Zimmer to win the award and putting him behind quite a few coaches on the list of potential candidates.