Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - Arif Hasan talks about how we should be judging the rest of the Vikings' season

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

Matthew Coller and Arif Hasan of the Wide Left newsletter talk about Arif's view on grading the front office and coaching staff as they attempt to navigate the rest of the season despite having a backup QB to take them down the stretch. Will they still make the playoffs? How should we grade head coaches? Will Kevin O'Connell adapt? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Purple Insider, Matthew Collar here and returning to the show, very special guest from the wide left newsletter now Arif Hassan has gone the independent route it's been really good for you and I'm really happy to see that your articles are now getting shared and everything else and you really are rolling along in the newsletter life as I have been for a couple years now so I'm happy to see that and glad to have you back. What's going on, man? Not much, not much. We were talking a little bit of shop before, you know, between two newsletter creators, secret stuff that we can't tell everybody, but you know, just very, very business. No, it's been going great. It's I, I get to write what I

want, which is nuts. Like what a, what a crazy life that I get to do that. Uh, and what's crazier is that people want to read it. Don't know what's wrong with them, but I'll take it. Um, but yeah, no, it's, it's been going great, uh, going independent, having my own schedule and stuff like that. So, uh, yeah, I'm really happy. Yeah. It's been such a interesting career journey for you to go from a king of the blog boys to then working for the athletic and then a pro football network and now go on your own independent route. But for people like ourselves, uh, I think we have been very, very lucky to be able to do it this way, um, in order to call our own shots. So people should absolutely go check it out. It's really good.

And, um, unedited work that is clean. You could read the whole copy. I very much respect that about you. That sometimes when you don't have an editor working for you, it could be a little bit messy. But I have questions for you. Now, what's interesting with your newsletter is you still write a lot about the Vikings

because you have a ton of Vikings fans who follow you. And then other stuff that comes up in your mind. But you've been following the Vikings just as closely as you normally would have. So I want to begin with this. How do we go about fairly evaluating a front office and a head coach when they have a backup quarterback playing professional football for them? Even if that quarterback has had a little bit success, I came out of the Bears game, a reef being like, I don't know, man, that's what happens. And then I look around the league and I'm like, Tim Boyle,

like, oh, look, the Jets, you know, the Jets are by rule, the Jets have to have four quarterbacks play per year. And they have now completed that accomplishment. But every team that is suffering from the backup quarterback disease this year with so many quarterbacks going down, I see a lot of criticism about their front office, their team building, their coaching. And I don't want to give free passes, but I also think we have to be realistic. So how would you go about evaluating this last stretch for the Vikings with this in consideration?

Yeah, I think that that's totally fair because it is kind of difficult because if you hold them to the standard of like them having the preferred starting quarterback, that's like tremendously unfair, but you can't, you know, preparing for a backup quarterback is part of the job, right? So you can't just ignore that. So what you have to do is you have to set kind of what you think a reasonable expectation for a backup, or in this case, the fourth backup would be because again, or I guess third backup fourth quarterback, because again, I mean, Nick Mullins was injured, Jared Hall was injured on like the fourth play or whatever, right? And so they're in a situation where they were playing their fourth quarterback.

So set what you think a reasonable expectation for a backup quarterback level performance is. And we get a ton of backup quarterbacks playing football every year. We should have a good understanding of what that what that is like. And at the upper end, it's as if you've got like the 25th best passing game is kind of a reasonable upper end of backup quarterback type play. And then, you know, obviously at the lower end, it's 32nd, right? And once you kind of account for that and the kind of results that you can get from that, I think you could very confidently say that the Vikings knocked it out of the park when it comes to figuring out a backup quarterback plan. Now they didn't do that at the beginning of the year, that would have been preferable, right? But, you know, still seeing an opportunity, hey,

you know, the Cardinals are getting Kyler Murray back back and so joshua dobbs is going to be available we've always liked him or whatever it is crazy always liked him had some interactions in cleveland or something like that um you know let's let's make a move and being kind of aggressive enough to make that kind of move and being bold enough to be like yeah there's a quarterback on the roster who knows the playbook but you know he we're not going to elevate him from the practice squad. We're going to have this guy who's been here for four days be the backup because we just think he's going to be better. And they were right. That's a very bold decision. They were right about that. And so I think that you just kind of figure out where a franchise is at any particular spot, figure out kind of what

the standardized circumstances that would be, what the expectation should be, figure out how they performed against those expectations. And I think the front office in that circumstance did a really good job. And then the other elements that have nothing to do with the backup quarterback, you know, like trying to figure out, you know, hey, they just extended Josh Mattelis right before the season. What was that about? That's kind of crazy. Hey, great move. Oh, my God. That's a steal. That's incredible. I can't believe they let go of Devlin Tomlinson. They let Zedaria Smith leave. Adam Thielen was a big part of the passing. What's going on there? Eric Hendricks, leader in the locker room. They let all of these guys go. Wow. Fantastic moves, it turns out.

So you evaluate kind of what you think, you know, is reasonable in terms of like a set of moves and then compare them against that, you know, given those circumstances. And I think that once you do that, you come away thinking, Hey, this front office is like pretty good at what they're doing, which is, I don't think the expectation, the understanding that people had coming into this off season, right? Because people are very frustrated with the 2022 draft. Now we've got another year of data. We've got, you know, kind of more complete data,

more sets of circumstances to evaluate them against. And i think that they're coming out looking pretty positive well and three players well two drafted one to udfa who have become above average starters instantly which we don't even expect for for first year players in general but let me circle back to the part about ranking 25th and passing which i i think what you laid out there is extremely reasonable as far as expectations go, which is here's what you would think would happen when you have to go to a backup and I'll put it in a different frame, which would be, I looked at all the quarterbacks for the last couple of years who were not the day one starter for the team. And then, you know, I shoved a few aside, like Kyler Murray, he's their starter.

I was about to say probably throw Kyler Murray out of the data set. Yeah. Right. So things like that, um, or some, a quarter starting quarterback was hurt. The backup had to play week one or whatever it was. I, I forget the process totally, but what I came out with was backups win about one out of every three games. They have about a 30% winning percentage when they start, which I know QB wins and so forth, but not shockingly starting quarterbacks win way more football games. And I always love when there's these Mahomes stats. They're like, you know, QB wins can't ever look at it.

Like, but Mahomes has won 90 out of a hundred games and has had all these different rosters and it means nothing. And you're like, does it mean nothing? So anyway, the point just being that your expectation for the rest of the season and the moment that Kirk gets hurt should be around. You win one out of every three games the rest of the way. If you win more than that, then you've outdone that expectation. Now that's all very logical.

However, we are also talking about a lot of those backup quarterbacks play for teams that never had a chance anyway, including where Josh Dobbs came from, which is Arizona. So a backup is not going to win very many games with the Arizona Cardinals. This team is not like that. They are a team that has a really good offensive line, great pass blocking. They have great wide receiving weapons and a coach who has been touted as a guy who can elevate the play of the quarterback. And for three weeks, he did that. And then for one week he did not. And I wouldn't be surprised if Kevin O'Connell at some point mentions trying to readjust the offense when he

announces whoever's going to be the quarterback, maybe a little bit more than he did for Josh Dobbs against Chicago. But I think that we need to elevate that expectation still to say, all right, well, one of your big things is that you can elevate a quarterback who is starting level, but maybe not potentially great. I expect stinkers from backup quarterbacks, but I also think that it's fair to wonder, all right, well, should, should it have been a lot better against Chicago with your game plan? And also, should you still make the playoffs? Should you be able to overcome this with all that you're given that is beyond what most teams have for their backup quarterbacks? Yeah, no, I think that that's fair too. I think that we, it's really tough to take aggregate data

and apply it to specific situations because every circumstance ends up being different and having that kind of uh manipulation of what you think is like a reasonable expectation i think it's pretty appropriate um but we also then have to ask additional questions like should we when we're evaluating the front office and how they have that and how they handle the backup quarterback situation we know that right now, for example, that defense, they're like eighth in points or whatever like that. And since week four, they've been like fifth, right?

They're a great defense. The fact that that's the case is a credit both to Brian Flores, obviously. And then also I think to the front office for managing that defensive turnover extraordinarily well, right? Should we hold their excellent management of the defense against them when we evaluate the backup quarterback, right? So that ends up being kind of part of it too.

And in some ways, yes, because we're just trying to isolate what the backup quarterback's doing, and we can have a bunch of different mini evaluations and then at the end come to a total evaluation and say hey they won two out of their four the backup quarterback 50 but that defense is like really good i mean you got to win a game where your defense only allows 12 points right you know that kind of stuff like you can do all of that um and i think even once you account for all of that i would say probably you're in a situation and we also have to take into account

hey justin jefferson not available for any of these games you got a rookie you've got kj osborne you've got you know one catch for jaylen nailer whatever that is right um you've got all of that right um so tj hawkinson and jordan addison are your passing game which is not awful but it's not great like it's better what the panthers have right but it's it's not great um plus the offense was designed around justin jefferson so it has to be adjusted. Right. So, OK, you take all of that. Probably you're winning 40, 45 percent of your games. And right now under Dobbs, it's 50. OK, great. That's good. I still think that you do have to account for the fact that Dobbs is the fourth quarterback. Right. Like you didn't have Nick Mullins. That was the choice. Right.

And and they made a decision that they didn't want Sean Manullins that was the choice right and um and they made uh you know a decision that they didn't want sean manning they wanted joshua dobbs full credit for that decision i actually think that that is a much more difficult decision in the moment than it now seems four weeks later right um that's that's a it's a crazy decision to make and they were right to do it um and so i i think that all of those are are part of that conversation and i think that even when you adjust for the fact that hey that offensive line is right like i think it's like third in pass block win rate holy crap um again a credit to the front office but again you gotta you gotta figure out where you want to make your adjustments where you

don't um but hey third up third best offensive line reasonable receiving core without jefferson um in in sano defense uh in a lot of respects um okay well so what should a backup quarterback do okay is that should we hold joshua dobbs to the standards of a normal backup i don't probably not so given all of that i would say that they exceeded expectations in handling that particular element but then all of the other adjustments we make are all credits to the front office as well so if we want to come to a uh not maybe not final but complete evaluation of that front office we would also include the fact that that defense was handled pretty well despite some missteps like the marcus davenport signing that offensive line was handled really well um despite kind of you know the weirdness with the ezra cleveland gary uh dalton riser whatever thing um and hey drafting receiver in the first round was inspired it turns out

who would have ever thought of it yeah nobody who would who would come up with a crazy idea like that certainly not anybody with their own newsletters uh well kevin o'connell gave himself credit a few times after some great Jordan Addison games. And I don't blame him for that. Well, let's talk about the two sides of this because you're talking about the front office quite a bit there. And I want to circle back to that. But from the coaching perspective, can anything happen the rest of the way where you would change your mind? And I don't know exactly where you stand on Kevin O'Connell at this moment, where you would change your mind about the coach, because I think it would be very

easy right now as we're having this very rational discussion. It's been a while since the Chicago game happened. And we're, I would probably say, I don't think so, because I think that if Dobbs struggles, then Dobbs look at his career record I look at how many teams he's played for. I mean, you had case Keenum and Jeff George show up here and do stuff, but even they were on a totally different level than Dobbs as a quarterback, a case Keenum had started a bunch of games in the NFL. So had Jeff George at just a different situation. And at the same time, you were given just enough, like good football nose candy against the new orleans saints to just be like oh it's another backup who's gonna win um but so there's a very rational part of me that says i wouldn't judge anything about the head coach even if they go oh for five but i also think

if we got to the end of over five and that happened uh i might feel differently and i think the fans would feel way differently because already some sort of seeds of doubt creeping in after feeling like, oh, wow, Kevin O'Connell has done this thing with Dobbs and now he should be coach of the year and, you know, they should give him an extension today and all those things. So how would, how would you feel about that? If they, if they did struggle the rest of the way badly could it change your mind or if they were amazing the rest of the way i guess that's too obvious right then obviously you're gonna think well i guess he's great um but but if it right yeah okay so don't answer that

part but if it goes if it goes down the route of pure sadness yeah i think it probably depends on how right that that happens if like a couple more injuries crop up, I'm just going to give them a pass. If it's like a bunch of really bad game management stuff, that's worth kind of some consideration. But, you know, it's tough. Like one of the reasons I wanted to kind of hold on to Mike Zimmer for a lot longer than a bunch of people is because of an individual game coaching performance. That playoff coaching in 2019 against the New Orleans Saints was, oh my God, it was one of the best coaching performances I've ever seen, right? And I think that you could put that on the same level. Maybe it's not even as good as what Kevin O'Connell did when Joshua Dobbs came in after Jared Hall's concussion. That was, as an element of individual coaching, one of the greatest things I've ever seen, right. That like deserves its own book,

that game, right. It's incredible what he did there. And you get, you, he gets that game for the rest of the year. In my mind, that was just astonishing what he did. Um, now the fact that Joshua Dobbs seems to be worse, the more he knows the playbook you know that's you know hey that will we can have that conversation and talk about how you know that impacts our evaluation of kevin o'connell as a coach that's totally fine and fair but you you gotta hand it to him you gotta hand it to him that he did that and it's really difficult for uh me to move past that plus the kevin seaford piece in espn about the brian flores defense really great piece i recommend that people read it one of the elements

in that piece that's like really interesting is that so brian flores the premise of the piece is that brian flores is uh pushing into it into the nfl a defense that the nfl has never run before which you always kind of have to be skeptical of a claim like that because nothing new under the sun but for all intents and purposes it's a completely new defense it's a radical shift from what uh any defense in the nfl is doing right now and from what any nfl defense had done over the past 10 years okay so that is like a crazy thing right but the thing that is important to note is that brian flores pitched this idea to kevin o'connell he's like hey looking for a new defensive coordinator here is my nutso idea i talked to the pit defensive court or head coach but you know he runs the defense right i talked

to the pit head coach pit perennial powerhouse right you know i i i talked right and i've got this idea for a crazy defense and kevin o'connell had to either be like look man this is the nfl we're not we're not going up against air. We're not going up against Air Raid. We're not going up against like AAC teams, right? Like you get your one game against Clemson every year. That's fantastic, right? You could have done that and it would have been totally reasonable. And he's like, you know what?

We're probably going to suck. So let's do something crazy because we might not suck if we do something crazy. That's part of coaching. He's like having that conversation and hiring Brian Flores and giving him the go-ahead to do stuff crazy that's part of coaching he's like he's like having that conversation and hiring brian flores and giving him the go-ahead to do stuff like that um making sure that you've got a defensive coaching staff because you can fire the rest of the defensive coaching that'd be fired at donato make sure the rest of the defensive coaching staff is on board with brian like doing that's part of coaching too and so he gets credit for that and so we can't just

look at the end of the year and say hey he's an offensive coach the offense didn't do as well as we expected that's not good especially those final games even after you adjust for the back of quarterback because the fact that the defense is doing well yeah it's a huge credit to brian forrest it's also a huge credit to kevin o'connell the way that he handled that so it would be very tough for me to come out of the final five games here and say hey i've got some doubts about his quality as a coach. I'll probably adjust my expectations. If they go, Oh,

and five, I'll probably say he's probably not as good as I think he is right now currently at the moment, because that's new information. You got to incorporate new information, but I don't think it would ever drop him below like a top, the top eight coaches in the NFL right now. It is astounding, you know,

all the stuff that they've been able to do. So, you know, I give them credit for that. Like, yeah, they're not as good in two minute situations this year as last year no coach could make them as good in two minute situations this year as last year it's a unreasonable standard but worth talking about but on the other side they've got a top five defense which uh i gotta be honest never would have dreamed in a million years when i looked at that roster that it would be as good as it is.

And later in the show, we're going to get to some of my predictions that I made before the season. And one of them was not that favorable to this defense. I sent you my predictions so you can make fun of me and also praise some of my brilliance. But we'll get to that in a minute. So this is a great point because think of it. I've started to think of it this way when it comes to coaching, because every game that I watch on Twitter, I see this coach is doing this wrong. This is coach. This coach doesn't know what he's doing,

whatever else. And here's a good example. Mike McCarthy. Okay. Mike McCarthy is a guy that people, people love as a pinata. Every time he punts when he shouldn't. Every time he mismanages a clock, it's just, let me get my Mike McCarthy beating stick and boom. And yet they've had top offenses almost every year since he's been there. They probably overachieved when Andy Dalton had to start. They overachieved when Cooper Rush had to start and Dak Prescott is playing like an MVP and everybody said, ah, he's getting rid of Kellen Moore. Oh,

what, what a fool he is. And he's actually outperformed Kellen Moore by a million miles. And so I think that Mike McCarthy is a great coach. And I have always thought this, I mean, the way that he did battle with Mike Zimmer game after game, those two game playing against each other have been really good, but there's also been enough goofy stuff or in-game management things that we judge him on and go, he doesn't know what he's doing or the end of these ridiculous games in the playoffs that they've lost or playoff games. And I can just hear my audience wanting to crash their cars if they're driving, listening to this, hearing me praise Mike McCarthy. But look at the record. I mean, it just, oh, well he had Rogers. Well, he doesn't now. And Dak Prescott is doing even better. And so I think that we often judge

coaches. Do you remember like the early nineties video games when they first came out with Madden, they had like four categories of a player. So it'd be like speed, catching, agility, break tackle. And that's like your whole player for a running back. Now you open up Madden and they have everything. They have like 700 categories, which is excessive and unnecessary for a video game. Not the point. This is how we evaluate coaches versus what's really going on.

We evaluate coaches on, do they put on fourth down? Did their play calls work on a given week? Does it seem like the players don't hate them and otherly just vibes, but when really there are hundreds of things going on to evaluate a coach. And to me, the connection with the players, uh, what happened with making that change? I mean, you could also criticize, like maybe not making the change earlier with Donatello, but the management of people has been at such a high level, including of this quarterback who shows up here

that there is no way you could push me off of this. I would just throw my hands up and be like, hey, look, I watched Trent Edwards and EJ Manuel and Brian Brom and Kelly Holcomb play for the Bills. And guess what? I could tell you those roads all lead to the same place. But it's going to be with the organizational stability under this coach. I am going to give a lot more leeway to that because I believe in all those categories that you see when you're really studying a team as opposed to just, hey, I'm watching a game on Twitter and Mike McCarthy looks dumb. Yeah, I think a couple of years ago, and because I was on the Mike McCarthy is dumb

train, and I've changed my mind too. But a couple of years ago, this Twitter account I follow, Adam Harstad, he writes for Football Guys, tweeted out, and I've tried to find this tweet before, maybe he's deleted it, I can't find it anymore, but I know it was him who said it, and it's stuck with me ever since. It was, we tend to evaluate coaches on the easiest stuff that exists for us to evaluate, which also probably is the least important stuff for a coach to get right. And I'm not saying game management is not important, right? Obviously it's important to be able to manage those final two minutes well, but like if you evaluated like all of these coaches on the fight their ability to handle the final two minutes the best coaches in nfl history all

bad at it or even bill belichick a lot of people talk about bill belichick and get no he's bad at it right pete carroll's bad at andy reed historically awful at it like known for being bad at it right um and it turns out like making sure that your team is ahead by enough in order for you to not be in those two minute situations or making sure that when they're a less talented team to be good enough to be put into a two minute situation. You know, that's that's good. Right. Like we know that Brandon Staley is not doing well because the Chargers should not be in those two minute situations as often as they're, they're a better team than that. Right. We also know that the Vikings punched way above their weight last year. They got into two minute situations more often than they should have been as a credit to, you know, what that team was able to do. Right. And Mike McCarthy and some of these other coaches that are bad at game management have put themselves into situations where they don't have to worry about those final two minutes because all that

stuff matters a lot less. The stuff that's the easiest stuff for us to evaluate is also the stuff that happens to be probably the least important. The personnel management, the coaching management, the ability to put together game plans and offenses, keeping everybody on task. Coaching is a lot of things. And when we talked to high school coaches, they don't talk about game ever. They talk about like raising people and creating good environments for people. Right. And then we kind of dispense of that when we go into the college level and then the professional level. Right. And college is unique because they also do recruiting. And that's an element of coaching that you don't really have to pay as much attention to, obviously

creating an attractive environment for regions to come in that's important the Vikings have historically done very well at that but just generally speaking like there's stuff that we talk about sometimes with game planning and play calling that we sometimes have a good idea of but like stuff like Joshua Dobbs felt comfortable enough to do x y and z that's enormous that's so big there's so many situations where a quarterback has had to start on a short week after arriving in a team where they have been disastrous i'm not just talking about josh freeman right carson palmer coming to oakland right is is usually the example i go to and he did awful i mean he shows up they ask him to start playing five days after he shows up.

He does terrible. In fact, he does terrible for the rest of the season. Oakland's like, that's fine. We don't need him anymore. And Arizona puts together an MVP quality season because Bruce Arians is a good coach, right? Like, that's a big part of it is creating these environments where players feel empowered, where coaches feel empowered, where you have the ability to either. And I personally, I prefer a collaborative decision-making process, but if you don't have

a collaborative decision-making process, the decisions that you make are right. Right. And it's just like those things. And sometimes these decisions are stuff that we don't see like, Hey, we need to spend a little bit more time covering nutrition because I've noticed that our players are a little bit tired at the end of games. And maybe that's a nutrition thing. Maybe it's a sleep thing. Let's spend a little bit more time making sure that we prioritize that. Most of the time, we don't hear about that at all, ever, unless it's like a crazy new coach who has got like smoothies, like Chip Kelly in Philadelphia, right? You know, like we don't, and now sleep science is uniform across the NFL, right? But like having, like noticing these things

and making these small changes, there's a billion of them. I talked about just two of them with nutrition and sleep management, but there's a billion of them. Changing your schedule throughout the day, trying to find ways to keep players focused, optimizing your use of technology, running efficient meetings, figuring out who's running what meetings, figuring out when to have giant team meetings, all offense meetings, just quarterback meetings, whatever, right? All of those are decisions that coaches make that impact the quality of performance on Sunday. And we never talk about them. And they're all way more important than figuring out whether or not to call a timeout at two minutes and 20 seconds or two minutes and 10 seconds, or not at all because the two-minute

warning is right there. Like that's important. You got to know that, but it's not nearly as important as figuring out what a player's day is going to look like on Tuesday. Folks, is there any better way to spend the holidays than attending sports? Knowing you guys, I'm guessing the answer is no. Well, there is a way to get to all of the events that you want to get to during the holiday season with affordable tickets. My friends, you are going to want to check out the game time app it's the fast and easy way to buy tickets to everything sports and also much much more shows concerts all on game time one of the cool parts about game time is that they have flash deals on last minute tickets and a low price guarantee which means if you find something lower in the section or row, they will credit you 110%.

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Terms apply. Again, create an account and redeem code INSIDER for $20 off your first purchase terms apply again, create an account and redeem code insider for $20 off your first purchase. Download game time today. Last minute tickets, lowest price guarantee. And some of those times, Mike McCarthy is hilarious when it comes to botching those end of games things. And how, how do coaches not understand the six points to botching those end of games things.

And how, how do coaches not understand the six points of death at the end of games? When you're up, when you're up by three, you see this all the time. You're up by three. You shouldn't kick a field goal. If you have a chance to go for it, because that means the other team will play aggressively and try to score a touchdown and win the game against you, as opposed to checking up for a field goal, which they so often do. That's, that's not the point. That's like the Ron Rivera special. I swear he's done this like a million times, but with Kevin O'Connell and all the stuff that you

laid out, I think that he would score extremely high marks on. We saw that from the NFL PA survey. And I think where you really see it too, is the assistant coaches that they've put together. Keenan McArdle could be an offensive coordinator. I think Wes Phillips gets high marks from people on his contributions. They have a good quarterbacks coach. They've put together this really, really strong staff of people, which Mike Zimmer struggled with because nobody wanted to work for him at the end. That was like Mike Zimmer is a brilliant X's and O's guy. But at the end, when nobody will take a job in your building, because you won't let them out of contracts or you'll punch them in the face on the way out. Like he did with, uh, you know,

Kevin Stefanski when he tried to get another job and he called them disloyal. And it was just like, okay, well like who wants this, right? Who wants this environment? I think environment matters a lot. However, this doesn't mean that Kevin O'Connell is perfect. What I would say though, is when we criticize play calling, that's a very dicey one. Cause I think there are totally insane play calls and game plans that teams bring in at whether it's against the Vikings or other teams, or I'm like, what, what was that supposed to be? Right. And that, that you can try to judge from the outside is some of the sheer logic like arthur smith running a play and i saw mitch schwartz tweeting about this so i'm stealing

it from him but running a play at the goal line that's a very difficult task for a center and sort of opens the door to like if somebody penetrates you're going to lose yardage and they just run it at the one yard line and get a safety like okay like that's that's a play call we could probably pitching the ball from your tight end to your quarterback let's just not and say we did i mean the same thing goes for throwing a pass to your quarterback or having delvin cook throw a pass like i think that there is there has been and there will be criticisms of kevin o'connell in a couple different ways one, I'm not sure he understands what running the football is, how to do it, when to do it, whom to do it with. So that's like all of those things. I think that when it came to this game plan against the bears, he asked Josh jobs to be Kirk cousins. And that's not a good idea because

they're so wildly different. And one is way, way better than the other one. The other thing is that the whole idea of kind of getting too cute. Sometimes you've got a third and one, maybe just get a first down instead of trying to take a shot or, you know what I mean? Like there's things within a game. There's micro things where I go, I don't know, man. And that's the hard thing is because it's the most blatant.

It's the most there. And I don't want to tell anybody, don't believe what you saw. Like, hey, that pitch from TJ Hawkinson to Josh Dobbs, it was fine. It's not fine. That was insane. And so I think that I think as we're evaluating the whole thing, we need to take the global view, the bigger perspective. What is the man's philosophy? Throw the ball to his best players all the time. That sounds good.

That sounds like that wins. Create an environment, a workplace culture, all that sort of stuff, which they've done at an extremely high level. And it seems that the front office of coaching staff are on the same page. The defensive coordinator and the head coach are on the same page. You corrected a very bad error of hiring at donatelle all of this is good and being able to manage a backup quarterback who comes in in the last minute says a lot about your ability to be a quarterback whisperer but i also think as we go forward if some of the other stuff crops up all the time where hey this you know these game game plans that maybe ask too much of the quarterback, not understanding how to create a run scheme, things like that, it will have its limitations.

That doesn't mean that it's like fire him, but it means that there are still things to improve on as he goes along. Yeah. And I think that what's interesting about this is that we can kind of compare and contrast that to like Mike Zimmer. Right. It was very good at some elements of good. I mean, obviously, he was like a 600, as you would tell us, he was a 600 coach. Right. And and all of that, you know, fine. Right. He's he's very good at some elements of coaching that are very important to football. And that's great. But what ended up becoming a huge problem is him not being able to identify what his weaknesses were in an honest and frank manner right like sometimes obviously we would ask like hey you're

really confident in this defense it's like nine rookies i i don't know man you i don't know if you should do the whole thing and he's like i've never had a bad defense and it turns out well now you do right okay fine maybe okay but like the two minute stuff like he hated ever being asked questions about clock management at the end of games and it's like bud you're bad at it we're gonna ask you questions when you're bad at it right like when you were down 24 points Kirk Cousins told me that the way they think about that game is a three possession game we'll play it like a three possession game. No, it's not score more points, right? Like technically I get why you're saying that score more points.

Yeah. I have as many possessions as possible. That's crazy. Right? Like, and that's, that's a coaching error for the quarterback to act like that. Um, and he, he, at the end of it, he got so testy when people asked about this clock management stuff and he's like, we work on it. And it's like, okay, have you thought about the process by which you work on it maybe that needs to be changed and he never you know talked about that right and i think that kind of being open to those kinds of

questions is like really important and i think that when we first asked you know kevin o'connor like hey this defensive coordinator thing i i don't know if that's working out. And he said the thing publicly is like, I stand by my defensive coordinator, at least for the first couple of games we asked him. And then after that, he was like, we'll talk about stuff at the end of the season. But it turns out he went to Ed Donatel and he was like, this is not working and I'm going to scout your defense.

Like I'm an opposing offense and we're going to see what we can do about it. And that didn't work out, but he tried to correct it, right? And he was open to understanding that this wasn't working out. And I think that having that openness and changing and having that adaptability, because you're always going to have weaknesses and trying to grow past them or cover them up or turn them into strengths,

whatever it is you do with weaknesses that works best for you, that's important. And to what extent that we can find he seems to have that i'm not going to call him the best coach in the nfl to me that's probably andy reed right but i do think that he's got an opportunity to kind of move into that position given his approach to a lot of these things which i think is really fantastic um but it also means being kind of open and honest about what those weaknesses are and you know making sure that he needs to make sure that he understands it he needs to make sure that when he does receive feedback external to the organization like from the press or whatever right um maybe his buddies when he talks to them in mobile um like you know taking

that kind of honestly and and taking it on and it seems like based on what was it seems like he's open to that so like maybe he'll hire a run game coordinator right that sure right because because the run blocking is mostly fine right so why is the run game bad he could have some conversations about that right um but like talking to some consultants who are really good at the elements of football that he's particularly not great at right having a conversation about like so he doesn't like because he's a young coach people seem to expect him to go for it on fourth down more often than he does that's not how that works so so you know having a conversation with like people that are a little bit more kind of analytics

forward which exists in the organization about kind of being more aggressive and fourth down. And hey, in the last couple of games, he was more aggressive and fourth down in situations where I wouldn't have gone for it. And I'm pretty aggressive about this stuff. That's kind of interesting, right? You know, having conversations with people who have interesting criticism, maybe they're not correct.

Maybe they're not better experts or anything, but have interesting criticisms of that. That's going to be important as he kind of continues forward as a coach because it's great being a top eight coach or whatever uh it's better to be a top three coach you should try to do that in my opinion yeah i mean so when we talk about a lot of these things and trying to evaluate through like fourth down decisions and so forth. Some of it is just purely taken off the table by having Josh Dobbs, your quarterback, where I saw at the end of the game, Oh, KOC lost this game. Cause he wasn't aggressive. Oh, he's quarterback through four picks. Like, I don't know. Like I wasn't in that moment. I had no expectation of, Oh, you got,

you got to get a first down here. You got to start throwing the ball. I thought, well, Justin Fields, the other team's quarterback run the ball three times, punted away and hope your punter doesn't shank it into the stands at the 20 yard line. Like if he pins them back. Yeah. If we pins them back, do we think, but those decisions, if that's Kirk cousins, I'm like, bro, what are we doing here? I mean, you're just, you're like giving away the game by not being aggressive because Kirk cousins is your quarterback. It's just a different, it's just a different evaluation for everything, which I think is the main subject here is like, how much do we have to change? But one area that I will watch closely, because I have gotten the impression as you were just

laying out there that O'Connell is very much on the self-aware side. I think that Zimmer lived in a different world. I think that Zimmer could, I think he could evaluate himself, but not change. So I feel like it would be like, it'd be like listening back to the podcast and say, oh, I say a certain word all the time. I need to stop doing that. And then I just never do it.

That would be Mike Zimmer saying, you know what? I need to connect with these players better. And then four weeks into the season. No, I don't think I will. I don't think I'm going to do that. No, I, I, I should, but I won't. And with Kevin O'Connell, and I don't think that was a great way to go about it with O'Connell. We almost have a little bit in real time here, an opportunity to see how much are you going to adapt to Josh Dobbs? If that's your quarterback, if it's Nick Mullins, just give me a white flag to wave around. Cause there's nothing that's happening this season if it's him. Uh, but how much, if it is Dobbs going forward, I'm assuming it's going to be, but I don't know. Then can you adapt to what

Josh Dobbs can do for you? Because it's not like he's without talent. He was starting for a team. He's won some games here, but if you put the full Kirk cousins, we're going to run our offense in there without Justin Jefferson for four straight games. Then, you know, you're going to have some that look like Chicago because this guy can't do that. If he's able to adapt and adjust, get Dobbs on the move a little bit more, a little more from the design run perspective, a little bit more on the rollout. So, I mean, look what Matt LaFleur did for Jordan Love. Jordan Love is being treated like he's the next Brett Favre today, but got to be impressed with the number of quick screens, motions, quick throws, getting the ball out of his hands,

really limiting Jordan Love's opportunities to turn the ball over. That's where I'm impressed. I'm impressed with Matt LaFleur almost more than I am than Jordan Love, though he played well. I want to be impressed by Kevin O'Connell's ability to adapt and adjust this thing to his quarterback

on the fly coming out of the bye because I don't think he did the greatest job in Chicago or really Denver. I think he had like maybe expectations that were too high and didn't truncate the offense enough. Can you make that change? And if you can, I'll be impressed. If you can't, then I'll probably just blame Dops. I mean, I don't know.

This is what's like so hard about this because there's i think there's there our reaction to losing football is always the same coach quarterback out of here like that's it or refs refs coach quarterback refs and if you were in minnesota for the last decade guards and then those were the only then those were the only options. Those were the only options. So I think that this is a little bit tricky. Let me change the subject a little bit just because we were talking about the front office to start and how they sort of built this thing and evaluating the roster as well. How do you feel about the quarterback situation going forward? Because there is a really good argument to say,

look at everything that they have laid out for you here. This team can compete going forward. They could certainly compete if Kirk cousins came back and played the way he did, but how can you bet on him playing the way that he did after an Achilles injury and at his age? And then there's the draft, but you're playing yourself out of draft picks the more games that you win, right? And there's certainty now, it seems almost in every other NFC North City, Caleb Williams is going to Chicago

and then Jared Goff, Jordan Love are going to be there and you are left with a really good roster and not sure who your quarterback's going to be. This is another thing where it's like, you can get every question on the test, right? But if you fail the essay, you fail the test. I feel that way about this quarterback situation. You can get the UDFA linebacker, right? And the hybrid safety, right? And the left guard for God's sake, they finally have one who can pass block oh my gosh we don't make enough out of that it's incredible doesn't matter doesn't matter if they fail what

happens next yeah i uh i sympathize with how difficult this decision is going to be because i have no idea what to do or what they're going to do right i think that the the it feels like the easy solution is the one that fans generally probably don't want, which is to extend Kirk Cousins, but you're right. The Achilles injury plays a pretty big role. Age plays a huge role. But Cousins is also playing like the best football I'd ever seen him play. It was just nuts.

And I don't want to be a prisoner of that, right? Like, because we've seen a lot of quarterbacks like end the season or play right before injury where they played outstanding stuff. And then you're like, man, we can recapture that. Andpture that and it turns out no you can't that's not how life works um you have to be cognizant of that right but there's a there's a kind of like a and football is like this but also humans are like this where like if if you let like cousins walk and he just does outstandingly somewhere else uh you're gonna like garbage, even if he probably wouldn't have replicated that, you know, in Minnesota. Right. That's just kind of how it is. Right.

Like I doubt that Stroud would have had the success in Carolina that he's having in Houston. Right. Houston, he's got pass catchers. Right. And that offensive line is like, I mean, it's not great, but it's not bad. Right. So you, we can't like, we can't just be like, well, they were absolutely 100% wrong about Bryce Young, CJ Stroud. I mean, they probably were, we'll see, but like, you know, it's not bad right um so you we can't like we can't just be like well they were absolutely 100 wrong about bryce young cgs stride i mean they probably were we'll see but like you know it's it's tough because if he does better elsewhere it's just going to feel like an indictment on you regardless of kind of how the circumstances would change that um now we don't have we're not going to have a great sample of jaron hall probably i mean maybe he plays the

final five games and that'll give us some clue right uh and so given that you know given that they're probably not going to be in a good spot to draft somebody given that they probably don't have the capital to move up in the draft despite how quarterback rich this class is going to be um probably uh what do you do and and i i think that that's pretty tough i I think that you personally, I think the Vikings are probably because they've always on this question specifically have tried to walk a tightrope and tried to split the difference and like, hey, we're going to find some ways to build for the future, but we need to win now because that's what the ownership tells us. And that's how we're wired to be anyway, because ownership wouldn't have hired us if we weren't

wired to win as many games as possible right now. So I think it's probably going to be a short-term extension for cousins again. And I think that they're probably going to draft a quarterback in the second round. I don't know. They have a second round pick this year. That sounds about right. So yeah. Who's to say, but I could look it up right now. I won't,

but we can probably draft a quarterback in the second round. Maybe like Michael panics or whatever. Right. Maybe he's a second round. I don't know. He's old. So I could see him in the second round, um, and have panics and, uh, in, in hall compete just like Malik Willis and Will Levis competed, uh, underneath Ryan Tannehill. Right. And, uh, and Will Levis is not playing amazing football, but he's playing encouraging football, I think. So that's something right. Um, and, and I think that that's probably the solution that they will hope for, depending on what the draft position is, you know, at the end of January.

Right. And then they can begin those negotiations with the cousin, with an understanding what the draft position is, what the draft capital is, what they've got the ability to trade and stuff like that. The one thing I'm not worried about is Justin Jefferson. I don't think, I don't think whether or not they've got cousins, there's going to make a difference to whether or not they sign him long term. Oh, I agree.

That's a money thing for Justin Jefferson. Money, please. So with this situation in particular, there is a split the difference, which is to bring back Kirk and to draft quarterback. And then you have your, we'll call it the delayed Alex Smith, because it should have been happening other times and wasn't. So yeah, there are chess openings where it's like accelerated this or delayed that. And it's like, this is, it wasn't the accelerated, that's for sure. It was the delayed. I think that's the most likely scenario at this moment. There's maybe another one where they win four out of five and like what they seen from Josh Dobbs and think that he can be that guy to be your bridge

quarterback through. And that's why like, normally you would say you can't judge anything on the final five games. And yet it still feels like there's no way not to, because we're going to see them. We're going to have that information. We're going to know. I think that they have to decide whether they really want to try to swing to

be great. I, that, that's, that is the big question here, because I think what a team like this could look at is the New York jets and go, you know what, if we draft the guy that's wrong, we're going to waste all this great roster building that we've done. And, and it's going to be zach wilson just tanking our careers and get us all fired um but or apparently according to today refusing to when we when we talk about jamarcus russell there's a lot of there's a lot of comps that come up for jamarcus russell i think zach wilson is the most jamarcus russell quarterback who's come out like just from day one this guy was not into this this was he's not built

for this his brain is not wired to be a hard-working football guy uh he's doing apparently quite selfish uh you know it seems like uh and not just because he's refusing to play i don't know what that's about um but just like he would just consistently not take the blame for how bad the offense was and the defense just got mad at him which for context you there's a lot of teams with bad quarterbacks and the defense is usually not vocally mad about that guy like that it they're like that's our guy he's the best quarterback in the nfl it's like the guy is like 20th in passer rating like relax no he's the best quarterback in the nfl okay great like, the guy's like 20th in passer rating, like relax. No, he's the best quarterback in the NFL. Okay, great. I'm glad that you're behind this guy. The jets are not right. No, they, they made it quite clear and something, something actually

slipped through the radar that someone brought up. And this is not to go on too much of a tangent about Zach Wilson, but that he was not a captain at BYU. And I think that makes you undraftable to me. If you're a quarterback, just like, I can't do it. I can that makes you undraftable to me if you're a quarterback. Just like, I can't do it. I can't do it. If your coaches and team aren't even putting in college the leadership on your shoulders, you're just not draftable to me. In fairness, he was like 19 and his teammates were all like 27. Well, that's true.

They all have like four kids. It still doesn't matter because he was going to have to do that in the NFL. Yeah, I think that if you want to take a swing to be great, there's also a chance it goes wrong. And then you end up, uh, with a lot of problems. But the thing is about that, even if you, if you have a solid foundation, like think of it as a race that you're running where the Vikings track is smooth and other teams tracks with bad lines the giants bad receivers all that stuff that's like having a moat that you have to jump over that has alligators people chase right right you're just running yeah so so if dobbs can win games then it should give them confidence that

like okay there are a lot better quarterbacks than Dobbs. Yeah. Dobbs can win games here. Like, you know, what if we got a good quarterback and that's crazy. Imagine. Yeah. Right. And so then you sort of start talking about, well, you know, can we get a bridge quarterback? Can we draft one? Are odds better at this to actually go somewhere salary cap, all that conversation. And so it will be interesting to see before we switch over to my great and terrible predictions that I wanted you to look at and heckle me or praise me. You have a tough time doing one of those two things sometimes, but I wanted to ask, like, how do you think this goes?

What do you think happens here the rest of the way? I think the Vikings win two out of the five, make the playoffs fizzle out against either like the Cowboys, Eagles or 49ers, depending, probably the 49ers. And we start having very unfair conversations about Kevin O'Connell's ability to win in the playoffs. I think I was going to go with same for the two out of five. But I think that they missed the playoffs because the rams are gonna win one more game than them that's oh that that's i think the i was actually gonna bring up uh speaking of like good coaches sean mcveigh when you talked about how like people didn't want to work for mike zimmer because one of the reasons because like

if you got good enough to be hired he wouldn't let you do that um which they it was so bad the nfl passed a rule about that like that's crazy right uh sean mcveigh has openly said yeah i i want i want to lose as many coaches as possible because that means i'm developing coaches well um oh no i don't have a coaching staff i better train a new one in and they'll do pretty well because i'm good at this like that's just as an example sign of a good coach um but yeah what are you doing with the rams just as an example, sign of a good coach. But yeah, what are you doing with the Rams right now? A, another sign of a good coach, but B, pretty threatening to the Vikings. Also the Packers, pretty threatening to the Vikings. So we'll see.

But I do think if the Vikings win like against the Packers and the Lions, which is looking increasingly unlikely, but those three games those two are the most important obviously but like it turns out like based off of i think it's the nyc simulator um it turns out like their odds of making the playoffs if they win the two games like the next two games which i think are both afc opponents um they win the next two games because yes it's the bangles right the bangles and the raiders they win the next two games their odds making the playoffs like 58 it improves their odds like by like three percentage points

if they win against the Lions at the Packers it moves up to like 85 like it's crazy just two out of those three games so obviously it's going to matter but obviously those opponents are the ones are competing directly with uh in the division that hold tiebreakers because it's a conference opponent hold tiebreakers because it's a conference opponent, hold tiebreakers because it's a division opponent, and also the Packers are directly competing with them for a wildcard spot. So obviously it's going to matter the most. The Lions are a very weird team. I don't know how to...

I mean, they just boat raced this last game, and then two games ago it was just like, hey, who are these Lions, man? They're not very good at all. But yeah, I think that it's going to be two of the next three. I think it's probably the next two to the next five, probably the next two. It may not matter.

I still think they probably make the playoffs. Cause I still, and maybe I just hold on to takes for too long. I still am not a Jordan love dude. I think, I think there's going to, I think something's going to fall apart there in the next couple of games. And the Packers are going to take a misstep here or there,

and that's going to give the Vikings an opening folks. I hope you've enjoyed listening to us. Talk about prize picks this year, but if you've missed it, here's how it works. You go to prizepicks.com and it is simple. You pick either more or less between two and six player stat projections, and that's it. Now you're playing. So if it's X number of yards for a quarterback, you just decide, are they going to throw for more or less than that number of yards? But it works with number of yards for a quarterback, you just decide, are they going to throw for more or less than that number of yards? But it works with lots of different options, receiving yards, touchdowns, even field goals, all sorts of sports as well.

PrizePix.com slash purple. Go there. Use the code purple for the first deposit match up to $100. One of the reasons I like PrizePix, it is very simple to use. You'd see how we do it on the show real quick and easy. And then we talk about our picks and also not expensive either. You can turn $10 into 250 by nailing just a couple of picks. So go to prizepicks.com slash purple, the code purple daily fantasy sports made easy. Yeah, I think the next two games are really what it comes down to.

I mean, if you can't beat two teams with backup quarterbacks on the road, then you don't deserve to be in the playoffs and you probably won't make it. You have to really beat both of them in order for anybody to meet, to be convinced. Okay. I sent you, I did in July, July 12th, I believe was the day that I published this. I wrote out 50, what I call bold predictions. Some of them. Yeah. There were two parts. Uh, hopefully you saw, uh, okay. All right. So I wrote marveling at how many that are worth. It's July a time to predict. And, uh, some of them

turned out to be really right on. And then some of them turned out to be really right on and then some of them turned out to be not so great so i was hoping that you would highlight the best and worst of my bold predictions going back before the season yeah yeah sure i went through them um and uh and what you said you gotta you gotta dare to be great and dare to be dare to be awful and i think you did that i think these predictions were appropriately bold and some of them were truly awful but let's talk about the good ones first um i just real quick get some out of the way alexander madison will gain 880 yards and catch 40 passes he's on pace right now for 840 and 38 and a half passes okay that's fire that's fire that's okay got it uh people maybe i'm in the wrong spot there wrong spot. There's a big industry for fantasy.

That's the one area of sports journalism that may be growing. Caleb Evans will be considered the best of the 2022 Vikings draft class. Now, I don't think that that was that bold, but... He barely played. You're getting it. That's bold. Okay. Yeah. That's pretty good.

That's pretty good. I mean, because I think what you would have said after last year is nobody's going to be the best person. Maybe it's up to me because I also kind of had that hot take, so maybe I was just like, yeah, obviously that was true. Look, what I thought going into the season, if a guy's standing on the sideline and catches an errant pass, he might be the best member of the 2022 draft class.

But Ingram has improved. Having a starting guard that's average is a pretty good draft pick at this point if he does that going forward especially in the second yeah yeah but evans evans has taken a big step and for the fourth round pick uh that's pretty good so all right good job me so those are those are the two i want to get out of the way really quickly and then here are the four that are like genuinely like that was pretty impressive uh two of them involve quarterback starting so aidan o'connell will start with the vikings face the las vegas raiders uh i i failed i forgot to read the reasoning on that one i assume it's because jimmy garoppolo is injury prone but yeah it was well i

figured a few things i figured josh mcdaniels will not win games for them i didn't know he'd be fired but they're not going to win uh jimmy garoppolo gets hurt all the time there's no way brian hoyer can play football anymore and so it will be this guy also i kind of low-key had a thing for aiden o'connell i thought like a lot yeah yeah i watched him in college and i was just like maybe this is like my mid-round person who i think is decent and uh so i thought yeah all right uh but that that one's a home run to have picked exactly which third string quarterback was going to play the vikings late in the schedule totally now yeah and he hadn't even made the team yet so uh and killer because he's a third stringer right um will levis will be starting in tennessee by week eight he started week seven and he's held on to that starting job

so uh incredible uh especially because we didn't know who was going to win the backup quarterback competition between him and Malik Willis. Malik Willis had already been there for a year and a bunch of draft guys really liked Malik Willis and they kind of didn't like Will Levis, even though I think if they'd compared the two, they probably would have ranked Levis ahead. Still those vibes go into it. Right. Uh, and then Ryan Danhill was the starter and just two, three years ago, he was playing outstanding football so uh i think a good good one there so i think those two are very impressive um the vikings offensive line will improve in pass blocking to the top 15 uh their third and pass block win rate right now but they will rank just outside the top 10 in scoring they are 15th now i don't think you anticipated a

quarterback injury but we'll take it. We take these wins. The Texans will be in the playoff hunt in the final two weeks of the season. You may have undershot it. They might just have it locked up by then, but I'm going to count that as a win. You know, that is a win. I was I was buying a few things. D'Amico Ryan's finally getting a real coach. I mean, yeah, they were hiring some serious tank coaches before

dudes who like i never even heard of and i mean david cully is all i mean where is he from right so uh they get a coach who knows what he's doing so bad people were accusing them of racist for hiring black like we were just like okay you just set up another fall guy. That's ridiculous. And they did. But D'Amico Ryan's man, that guy was legit in San Francisco with his defense and has been around the NFL a really long time, has really fought his way up the coaching ranks. And I think that speaks well to someone's odds. But also, if you were paying attention to the Texans,

which you shouldn't have been in any way shape or form but they had sort of quietly put together some players over the years and i'm just you know like laramie tunsell in that offseason they just got like jimmy ward and they brought in robert woods who not a great receiver but hey he's kind of a pseudo wide receivers coach and that turned out to matter a lot you know and you know it's yeah building right and that draft class from the previous year wasn't bad with like derrick stingley and jalen petre like there's like there's like players yeah they've been getting a lot of draft picks they spent their cap space on average players but average players are really good so i thought okay well and then cj stroud to me was easily the most fit and ready to play day one and be good.

Despite his S2 score? How? No, no, no. See, there is something we have to, when we snark about this, we have to be accurate. His leaked S2 score. His leaked S2 score, which is, by the way, and I think they're correct to point this out when they defend themselves, is an aggregate score, which is not what they say you should use to make decisions about evaluation and also the score is more about how a guy plays than it is that a guy is good or bad but it is fun to snark about oh i love snarking about it yes that uh it's it's almost like you shouldn't believe everything that comes out during draft season.

I can't believe it. Yes. Beautiful lies is what draft season is. But at least all the analysts get it right, as you mentioned, with Malik Willis going at the top of the draft. And so did Will Levis. Anyway, I'd rather join the fantasy industry than the draft industry. But that's not the point. So I've got, I've got the best gig.

Okay. By the way, which is just to tell you what other people think. Oh yes. Well, the consensus board, it does come up all the time now. And you know,

there, there have been people in the league who have said to me, I wonder what would happen if we just drafted off that consensus board. I'm like, I know what would happen. You'd probably draft better. Just seems to be. That's what it said.

That's what all the data says. Now I will say something about that because I'm delaying you getting to my bad predictions. Something about that is someone explained to me kind of how this works with draft boards and teams is every year, Dallas accidentally leaks their draft board. And I'm, I'm convinced it's not even the real draft board at this point. They've just made it a social media bit, but, um, when it comes to the draft board teams only

put on their board, the players they believe will fit with their offense and their defense and their culture and their, their length, weight, height, size. Like they have very specific things, which throws out a lot of players. So sometimes someone will succeed on another team and you'll be like, they missed on that guy when you could see why they didn't make that draft pick. Now you could say, well, shouldn't you just adjust? And that's probably valid, but, but it can be hard. You need guys who fit what you do in order to draft them so sometimes someone fits what someone else does and that's why they're successful so it makes it even harder to just draft off the consensus board i also think that

like there's there's maybe a hundred players that people i believe people actually watch and then i'm not sure how you could have time to watch the rest. There's 365 days in the year. I mean, if there's draft analysts who are watching the 400th player, just bless you. I mean, but I don't know how you would do that, uh, in any sort of depth. So I feel like it has a, like the top hundred would be really strong if the, if, if the draft analysts don't like players in the top hundred. Okay. But if you're like at two 50, I think that the can, it's like the team had something in mind for that player. That's why they picked them. You know what I mean?

Yeah, no, I think that that's fair. I should also like, so to, to add onto that point before we move on, um, to your awful takes, uh, is, is, uh, sometimes like they're very specific about why a player is off the board. So for example, like I know there's an example of a case where the Miami Dolphins really loved a player, and they couldn't put him on their board, because he had too many friends in Miami that were bad influences. And they were like, if we were in another city, we draft this dude, right? Because when he's not with those people, he's actually he's a good character guy, right right because when he's not with those people he's actually he's a good character guy right but when he's with those people he's unreliable so we can't bring him to

miami and it's like oh there's like no like we can't account for that in a consensus board at all ever right that's that's crazy um but that's very specific right also like um and i think the patriots are bad at drafting so this is like not a great example, but it is important to note that very often the Patriots have the smallest draft board in the NFL. There are drafts where they've come in with 70 odd, 75 players, right? Which is why you get situations where they draft Cole Strange in the first round.

You're like, what are you doing? So, well, they didn't have anybody graded with a first round pick. This was their top guy on the, like genuinely the top guy on their board. So they drafted him with a first round pick this was their top guy on the like genuinely the top guy on their board so they drafted him in the first round right uh and like and and it changes like i think generally speaking the approximate amount that you generally get is about 150 draftable players which is not to say that's you know because in the seventh round they start

drafting priority undrafted free agents and stuff like that um and sometimes it's like weird stuff like when i think it was the panthers drafted tommy sweeney because i think they were the ones that drafted him um they wanted to sign him as a priority free agent but he had agreed basically to terms with the new orleans saints because they wanted him to be the next uh tasem hill and and so he had agreed during the draft to sign an undrafted free agent contract with the Saints. Well, the Panthers heard about that and they were like, no, he didn't. And they drafted him. It's just like stuff like that happens, right? Or you need a special teamer. The consensus board doesn't really do that. They're not like, hey, Najee Thompson is really good at this stuff. So that's something to keep in mind.

Okay, your worst takes, but first, quick honorable mentions of good takes. Lamar Jackson will be an MVP finalist. Anthony Richardson will run for 1,000 yards if he had been healthy. Maybe he would have. TJ Hawkinson will rank number two in NFL tight end targets. He's number one. And non-defensive lineman or edge rusher will rank top three in Viking sacks. I don't think that's bold.

That's why it's an honorable mention. But Harrison Smith ranked third. Okay, worst takes. We'll start with the vikings ones lewis scene plays more than 500 snaps now he has not played a snap unless you count special teams which i don't he has not played a snap theo jackson has played snaps and in your description you were like hey this so because there was another one where you're like hey the minicamp depth chart says this we'll get to that one um but you can't always trust it i'm not going to trust that lewis scene is as low on me because he's so talented and you've got a new

defensive coordinator and guess what zero snaps so that was an awful take all right the one the one where you paid attention to the minicamp depth chart and we're wrong to kj osborne will have more catches than jordan addison addison is 54 kj osborne is 36 all i want to say neither one of these things are over yet lewis scene could press for 500 snaps i did is i don't even think that's possible i don't think there are actually is that left there isn't uh no let's play some offense i will say though that when i wrote this this was before i was having a conversation with jordan hicks and he was like dude josh metellus is for real like really really for real and i was like okay i i think i need to take that more seriously and then when he couldn't get reps on first team uh in training camp to start it was like right

off the beginning like right from the beginning of training camp, that take was over immediately. Yeah. And again, this was in July, but yeah, if you're a guy, if you are a guy on Brian Flores,

his defense that cannot find a role, it's really not good. So like that, I had no idea of the level of not good. And so that's, you know, the excuse there, as far as KJ Osborne,

the reason it actually still could happen is just health in general i mean like that that that was part of my evaluation is that addison had been banged up he had like gotten hurt at the combine and then got banged up in rookie mini camp yeah i've never even heard of before i've never heard of a guy getting banged up there's no contact how are you getting hurt they don't do anything and so i thought well addison should be better because of his talent, but Osborne has a pretty pristine health record. That was the part of it there. And yeah, that's been a miss.

Also, Osborne didn't step up the way that I thought he would. Yeah, and that's fair. And this is the only rookie take I put on here, right? Because I'm not going to hold you accountable for Bryce Young playing. Who cares? All right. Despite new kickoff rules Kenning Wong will gain a thousand yards returning now hey if you wanted to take into account injury

likelihood this is probably where he should have done it he has 79 yards returning um so and this one to me I put it on here because it's like you probably could have anticipated that total returns would go down that Kenning Wong wouldn't be available uh and so on so there's that that was uh i thought what i thought is that they would be aggressive like i thought that matt daniels would be like okay the whole world is going to these fair catches which they really haven't mostly it's just kicked out of the back of the end zone but i'm gonna go aggressive i'm gonna have but then wong will gets hurt and you know i don't know that he's ever been 100 right so yeah yep definitely missed on that one but that return that he had last week that was pretty good

again you could still get to a thousand you're saying these are wrong they're not wrong not yet uh Matt Jones will be considered the Patriots franchise quarterback by the end of 2023 I think that one's wrong now. That's a bad one. That's a real bad one. My, I was blaming Matt Patricia. I forgot about offensive line. That's as far, that is as far off as you can be. Yep. Yep. Mac Jones got benched three times and then they were like, all right, enough of this. He's just not going to start now. Mac Jones is Ryan Tannehill at the end of Adam Gase. The guy can play, but not with that situation. Yeah.

It's really funny is that. So my understanding is that the only reason that Bailey Zappi didn't start earlier is because, again, this is just like my understanding. I could be wrong about this. Bill O'Brien is like not super convinced that Bailey Zappi can run an NFL offense, which, you know, Mac Jones can't. So there's only the possibility. But that was that's my understanding why it took so long. So probably should have happened sooner. The 49ers will make the playoffs and still won't know who their quarterback is for 2024.

I think they're very wrong. Yeah, very wrong. Yep. No, I wasn't sure that brock purdy would be more than a flash in the pan and he is way more than that he's a great quarterback uh brian flores's defense will be improved but won't crack the top 18 in points against the currently eight seasons out of the head coach oh yeah two games against alliance also the head coach said the same thing the other day. I mean,

Kevin O'Connell said, I didn't expect it to be this good. I'm like, usually you don't get that from a head coach being like, yeah, I didn't think our defense was going to be this good, but I'll take it. But I did think just logically speaking, Flores would have better ideas than Donatello and they would improve. So. Yeah, no, I was, I'll be honest. I was in the same boat, but you wrote it down and I didn't. So that's true. Egg on your face of those who left Dalvin Tomlinson will have the highest PFF grade. So Zedaria Smith, Eric Kendricks, and Adam Thielen, all of higher PFF grades. The only player you mentioned, uh, has almost the exact same PFF grade as Dalvin Tomlinson, Dalvin cook. and by that time he had not signed with a team yet they are like four points apart in pff grade uh 59 to 54 58 to 54 something like that

a long-held belief for me it's not always about the moves you make it's about the moves you don't make and if they hit it jonathan bullard is doing what delvin tomlinson did for them. And if they had signed Delvin Tomlinson to a $18 million a year contract or whatever Cleveland gave him, that would look completely silly right now. It would just look like a terrible deal. And so that was I was wrong. I mean, I thought Tomlinson was an absolute monster for the Vikings last year. Me too. I thought he was a killer. Yeah.

I was like, I cannot believe they're just letting him walk. They don't have anybody on the inside. And to my credit, they still kind of don't. But Galvin Thompson would not have solved that problem. No, he would not have. No, it would have been the same. I didn't know if I wanted to conclude this in the worst takes, but I might as well.

The Packers and Bears will miss the playoffs, but Jordan Love and Justin Fields will do just enough to earn at least one more year from their respective clubs. Love is doing more than just enough, and Fields is doing way less than just enough. So you missed in both directions on that one. Okay, well, they very well could miss the playoffs. And Jordan, if they miss the playoffs,

but Jordan Love plays well, so again, not completely finished here. Again, I was on the fence about including this, but I think you're wrong. There is somebody, okay, it's fair enough, but there is a couple of people that I follow who are from Chicago who are like curating the 17 games, like last 17 games of fields and being like,

see, it's pretty good. And you're like, dude, come on. What are we doing next? Yeah. What are we doing here? What are we doing next yeah what are we doing here what are we doing here uh okay i can't imagine the bears with like the number one pick and the number four pick not grabbing a quarterback no that's crazy they take a strong safety and they're like yeah we just need a little more box safety yeah just you know we not we need Jaquan Brisker but again yeah um and then

the final one the Saints will run away run away with the NFC South by 3.0 games uh so first of all Derek Carr got booed off the field after he got hurt Jameis Winston was applauded onto the field first time I've ever seen that the Saints are third in the standings after tiebreakers behind the Buccaneers who they have the same record with and the falcons who have one more win than them somehow i understand why you did not have faith in the falcons uh but you did not account for the fact that they signed every defensive player in free agency they did and so uh yeah so that one really to me it's less about not having faith in the Buccaneers and Falcons. I totally get that.

It's more about having faith in Derek Carr and Dennis Allen and the Saints. What I thought was going to happen is that they would win nine games and everybody else would win six. That's what I thought. But it was foreseeable that signing derrick carr would be bad i did not think it would be this bad i don't know if anyone anticipated it being like a complete i mean this is uh it almost goes back to jim everett being signed by the new orleans saints almost way back wow that's that is way back but they were expecting to get a franchise quarterback and jim everett and i think he won like seven games was the most he ever got with the Saints so it didn't work out there but yeah this is um well actually the um Chris

Everett yeah I mean yeah I know the other day the other day it looked like uh Heath Shuler though or um Danny Warfel instead you got to be you got to wow Danny Warfel good lord it looked like the Mike Ditka era at the start of that game against the Lions. So yeah, we got some Chris Leak stuff going on here. Let's go. We really, we really held up the win over the Saints. And it's so funny how like some things can just look different two weeks later. And it's like, wow, that was a good win. That's pretty legit team.

Now you're like, oh, well, you know, you don't have to give it back. Yeah. I think the thing for me with Derek Carr is that like the two best receivers, because we didn't expect Michael Thomas to be any good when he came back and turns out nope uh but the two best receivers were like rashid shaheed and chris olave who are both deep threats and it's derrick carr it's like just figure that out you know it's like everyone's like alvin camara is going to make hay in fantasy because Derek Carr loves to dump it off. And it's like, I agree. And Alvin Kamara is doing really well in fantasy.

I don't know why you thought that that would mean winning games. No. Yeah, that's that's completely right. Well, that's what happens when you desperately try to sign a quarterback to more than they're worth. So keep that in mind for the future Vikings. Anyway, well, this was fun, Arif. I'm glad that we went through some of those predictions that were, you know,

we'll just call it hot and cold. I'd say I split the difference between ones that worked out and did not. The Wide Left newsletter, it is great. I have recommended it on my own to my followers, but people need to check that out. Very, very good Vikings writing and other NFL stuff and things that are on your mind as well.

So great stuff. Glad we could get together again, man. It's been a little while, but I'm happy we could do it. This was fun. Yeah, I loved it.

This was a ton of fun. Football. Football.