Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - Defector's Drew Magary loves talking himself into the Vikings (and why the Vikings don't have a better backup QB)

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

Matthew Coller gets together with Drew Magary of Defector to talk about how he enjoys the process of talking himself into the Vikings and how he's doing it this year -- hint, it starts with the offensive line. Drew also reflects on the brief period of Jim Harbaugh possibilities and why he wonders if the new leaders are going to be able to do everything they need to do in order to win in the future. Plus a couple fan questions on the backup QB, Mattison trade potential and first-year head coaches. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, welcome to another episode of Purple Insider. Matthew Collar here, and welcome onto the show. A guest who is a Vikings fan and has just released his Why Your Team Sucks about the Minnesota Vikings on Defector. Drew McGarry making his first ever appearance on the show, though we have chatted many, many times about the Minnesota Vikings. How are you, Drew? Thanks for coming on, buddy. This is 100% honest. There's nobody I like chatting about the Vikings with than you.

Like every time I text you, like, oh, mother, Garrett Bradbury's still here. It's like you're the best person to text that to. Probably against your best interest, but I do enjoy it quite a bit. Well, I appreciate that. What I want to talk about real quick is before I ask you what you're interested in with this team, because it has been the quietest camp that I've covered, which is I keep trying to tempt the gods to change that, but they haven't so far. Can we reflect a little bit on your rollercoaster of emotions during the Jim Harbaugh era as a Minnesota Vikings coach,

because when we talk about, you know, the conversations we were having as that was going on, I feel like you sort of got all in on that idea and then we're quickly off that train and all in on the Kevin O'Connell train. That was, that was quite a time in our lives That we haven't really reflected on a whole lot Well I The reason I So after Zimmer got fired I got like a tip from someone else Not you But they were looking at Harbaugh

This was back when there were rumors That they were sniffing around like Lane Kiffin And everyone was like ugh But then I got the Harbaugh tip Which I could not corroborate. But, you know, obviously ended up becoming public enemy anyway. And I had always thought I don't actually believe this now for various reasons. But but I had thought that the Harbaugh belonged back in the NFL, that he really wasn't.

You know, I think he had proven a not terribly good fit for Michigan, even though he had made the playoff this past season. And, you know, I still believe that he was a very good NFL coach, someone who would just by sheer force of will get you to win 10 plus games every year. So I was excited that prospect. And, you know, as we got closer and closer to it, you know, if you're a fan, one of the fun things to do is to talk yourself into these things, right? Like you always get taunted after the fact when it doesn't work out. Like, oh, you talked yourself into you sucker. Like it's always portrayed as sort of sucker to particularly this team.

Right. But, you know, that that daydreaming is part of the is, you know, is part of the enjoyment of football, because really, otherwise, you know, I should have abandoned the Vikings long ago, but I didn't because investing your hopes into certain things, even when they fail, is still worth it on a sort of morbid level. So Juan Harbaugh, I was thinking that he could do the same with us that he did in San Francisco. And I also thought maybe he'd be the one person with enough juice and enough authority to get rid of Kirk cousins and just start all over again. And of course that didn't happen. And I was, it was interesting to me when Chad graph, um, who covers the past now at the athletic, but he, he covered the Vikings for a while. And he said, you know, the day that they brought in Harbaugh, the day that they that everyone figured they were going to ink a deal.

Cause he, cause he essentially said goodbye to Michigan that day. But around 3 p.m., something happened and everything went sour between him and the Vikings. And then they ended up with Kevin O'Connell, you know, at midnight that night. So, you know, I I have every reason to believe that Kirk Cousins' name was invoked at that hour. And, you know, I think it was, I was despondent that I had, you know, sort of already sort of laid out my own, you know, existential redzi Adolfo Menzel would get his guy, and that it would, you know, there would be sort of a plan in place. And, you know, with O'Connell's hiring, it very much seemed like a second choice. I think it still does. I think that they ultimately hired the right person,

especially now that Harbaugh's been sort of exposed as a complete raving balloon, right? But, you know, it still strikes me that this team because of the mandate that quasi was given by ownership to be competitive while rebuilding so he had to say they're in a competitive rebuild which doesn't mean anything right that they that i still don't i'm still not confident i know who is running the ship there and whoever, I don't think necessarily has a unified plan. I think Adolfo Mensah, you know, has opinions and he wants to act on them. I don't believe that he has been given really the authority yet to do so. And so that I have to hope that somehow, however, in the next season plays out, it plays out in a way that convinces the Wilfs that they need to give him freer reign over this roster. And I do think that that could happen.

But again, I'm doing that thing where I'm deluding myself because I think deluding myself is the fun part. Yeah, no, it's an interesting point. I mean, that's a consistent bit on this show is when I have guests talk me into stuff that normally you wouldn't be able to reason yourself toward. But that space right there that you just talked about is one of the hardest things that this team is going to have to deal with, which is that the right long-term plan is probably after this season to make some

serious changes specifically at the quarterback position, unless it's like a 13 win season and O'Connell and Kirk are just the next you know I don't know Shanahan and Matt Ryan or something and they go like if that if that is not the case and it feels much more like a Sean McVay Jared Goff where you can try to get the most out of him but you probably need a little more there or even a Kyle Shanahan and Jimmy Garoppolo where they decided they needed a little more there but if but you also don't want to see the team have a terrible season that sets you up for that high draft pick quarterback because that means their entire decision failed to bring everybody back so it's like you want it to be good enough but also for them to live in reality about what the future is yeah i i as a fan i don't like i like the idea of tanking but you know you know

living through a three-win season really really fucking sucks like it's just unpleasant and i'll you know i'll never spend a three-win season you know every week being like well this is for the best like every time i watch them get their shit ruined, you know, by 30 points by Aaron Rodgers or whatever, like it's just not fun. The problem is, you know, I have to suspect that they have a plan for after this season, but then it makes me, you know, it baffles me that they did a lot of maneuvering this off season that hampered their ability to do that.

You know, they added, you know, years onto Thielen's contract. They added years onto Harrison Smith's contract. They gave Kirk a no-trade clause, which I don't really know the parameters of it, or at least, you know, according to you, and I trust you on that. So I don't know what their flexibility is going to be. I just know that there will be a little bit less of it in order to, you know, retain, you know, to run it back this season with a team that has lost nine games, two straight years. So, you know, that is where, that is where your confidence erodes because, you know, you,

you want to believe that they're on the verge of doing something sort of earth shattering and, and, you know, that there will be a sea change within the personnel that reflects a sea change in leadership. But, you know, they've sort of, you know, cut out some of their avenues for doing that. It could be completely wrong. Quase could be a genius and, you know, get his way out of all that, you know, this coming off season anyway, or they could, I mean, they could be good. Like they have a relatively easy schedule.

And I do think o'connell will end up being a good coach there's nothing he has done so far at least outside of personnel that i that i can really argue with in terms of you know making sure that they don't that he's not practicing the starters too hard making sure that justin jefferson gets the ball all the time like like all like his approach to like he doesn't yell at players, you know, like the way Zim did every five seconds, like all of that. I think he is the correct sort of modern coach. Like I think there's a strain of coach now, thanks to Sean McVay. I think Sean McVay is sort of the exemplar of it, but I think there are others like him, like Kyle Shanahan, that just don't coach the way that coaches used to coach. And I think that the

entire profession will move toward what McVay and what O'Connell are doing. And I'm glad that we, we hopped onto that train, but I don't, I'm not confident right now that, you know, that all of this is going to go smoothly. You know, I think that there's going to be some unpleasantries between now and whenever O'Connell realizes his potential, if he ever does. Right. And judging both of them right now is kind of a hard thing to do when everything sort of points to it wasn't their idea necessarily to go this direction. We're not entirely sure, you know, but it seems like and even when I asked Mark Wilf directly, how much were you involved in this?

And he said a lot as far as wanting to be competitive. And so I think it was pretty clear that the ownership did not want to take this huge step back. And it's hard to do also with Justin Jefferson on your team. It's really hard to, but as you brought up, when you make these decisions that sort of lock you into things for more than one year it's not just a short-term competitive rebuild it's a no actually in 2023 adam thielen still making 19 million on the cap um and with o'connell don't you think now you uh brilliantly write about bad coaching uh often throughout your career i think it's about it for o'connell getting through this first training camp and off season with just not stepping on his own feet if if you go through this without

making a complete buffoon of yourself you've gone past like half of the coaches who ever get hired who are like having guys run gassers or doing up downs or just saying crazy things or in matt patricia's case lying to your ownership really from day one before he was hired. Guiding through a quiet training camp is actually quite the accomplishment for a head coach. Yeah, and he's not unlike Brandon Staley where he approaches sort of how he thinks about the game correctly.

And then also, finally, and I think every team will do this soon. He has game management staff on hand in terms of analytics and in terms of in-game situations. And I know that Spielman and Zimmer said that they had a little bit of that, but that was never evident when they were, you know, when they were doing their job. There was no manifestation of that. It always looked like they didn't know what the fuck they were doing

when there were two minutes left in the game, particularly on defense. And that, you know, that was especially manifestation of that. It always looked like they didn't know what they were doing when there were two minutes left and again, particularly on defense. And that, you know, that was especially true last year. And so it's, you know, I think there are a lot of sort of foundational comforts to be had with O'Connell right now, but you're exactly right. Where, you know, if, if I see Adolfo Mensah trashing Kirk accurately to USA Today, and yet he, you know, he had to extend the guy for two years and give him a no trade clause. Well, all right. Who's running this team? Is it Kirk Cousins? Like, that's not good. that the guy we hired who is allegedly quite smart and who will not hesitate to tell you he's a smart guy, you know, can do his smart things instead of just sort of constantly running

into roadblocks everywhere. I like, I'll give him a grace period because it's his first time doing this job. But, you know, like I said, he's supposed to be very, very smart and I believe he's smart. But then there's also times when Quasi is talking in the press conferences

and he comes off like every other tech bro you've ever heard speak, who's like, who sounds a little bit human, but you're not exactly sure the motivation behind it. No, I had the same impression. And even my first impression of Kwesi at the podium was like, I think that he is maybe underestimating how hard all of this is, maybe a little naivety there. And that kind of hit him in the face with the USA Today article, where it's like, yeah, if you talk about your quarterback being good and not great and the great quarterbacks winning the Super Bowl,

people are going to draw conclusions about that, my friend, because you're the GM of a team. And he was right. He was right. Of course he's right. He was 1,000% right about Kirk. And I don't give a shit how Kirk feels about about it i certainly don't care if it offended him no i yeah i feel the same way i mean at this point they've made it very clear that kirk is the short-term option anyway

unless something really vastly changes so there's a a part of me that says that adafo mensa gets it it kind of gets where you're at but then how much freedom does he have to do all the things that he wants to do? And maybe some of that even included Jim Harbaugh. I'm not sure, but I thought the Jim Harbaugh thing was highly questionable that you would want to bring him back because in my mind, you have to hand over the keys of your entire franchise to him.

So maybe Kweisi was bailed out a little bit by the fact that that didn't work out for whatever reason. But I think that what's hard from my perspective, Drew, is just how do you judge Kweisi's moves aside from did it work or not? And then you have to judge the entire organization and not just him. But I think we're used to just putting it all on a GM and being like, ah, Spielman, he did this or he did that it was Spielman's direction and so forth but maybe even in some cases it wasn't entirely his direction but we just didn't understand that until this offseason and that makes you feel like a little less solid ground as you evaluate each move and each decision that they make well

also it behooved Spielman after the fact to say that his decisions were not his own, right? Because he won a job with Pittsburgh. He won a job somewhere else. And what better way to do that than to say, hey, look, the fuck-ups that I made in Minnesota were not actually my fuck-ups. I was forced to do them by ownership. And he had absentee ownership that spends all their time in Jersey and left Spielman

to sort of run things because they figured it was all in good hands, which was untrue. And now it feels like it's sort of like a gross overcorrection where they've gone from being absentee owners to being a little more involved than I would prefer. The only thing that gives me hope, though, and this is real, you know, talking yourself into things, is the draft class, because that draft night, that was a draft night, draft night right like you like they you know they could have gotten a lot of different cool people at 12 like i was hoping jameson williams somebody like that and then you know at the last second you know not only do they move down in the draft they move all the way down in the draft you know and you gotta sit there until like i wanted to go to bed like i'm not i'm not gonna lie like i wanted to

go to sleep instead i had to wake up another, I had to stay up another two to three hours for them to draft Lewis, Seen, and, like, you know, like, at the time, that was not a very pleasant evening. But now, you know, even with Seen still not having been promoted to the starting lineup yet, I think that the guys that they got, him and Booth, particularly Ingram and Asamoah and, and Chandler, like those,

it seems like a very, very good draft class and the, the, how they acquired that draft class, you know, that, that irritation begins to receive the more that I see Ed Ingram, just swallowing guys in preseason games.

Well, that's what I was going to ask you about. As far as your excitement. Now, everybody who follows the team gets very, very tuned up to talk about the offensive line. And you are among the many who can't always quite understand why the starting center is who he is. But the other day it was set on this very show by an offensive line expert, Brandon Thorne of Trench Warfare, that the Vikings this very show by an offensive line expert brandon thorn of trench warfare that the vikings have the bones of an offensive line that could be quite good uh and your fascination with it is also kind of kind of amusing to me but i could see why

it's been gone for so long it's been bad for so long that I can understand why there would be so much obsessional. Well, the other thing is that, you know, and I don't like pulling this card, but I played offensive line. So, you know, I played it for 10 years. And, you know, so when I watch, you know, when I watch, when I isolate Ed Ingram and I watch him in preseason games and grand, you know, you take the preseason with a grain of salt and all that stuff. You know, I see things that, you know, you take the preseason with a grain of salt and all that stuff. You know, I see things that, you know, I saw my better teammates doing right. Like I, you know, I, you can see like the technique is there and, and, and also he was dinged going into the draft for having balance issues. I saw no, you know, I saw no sign of that.

That might be different when he has to go up against like Rashawn Gary or somebody like that. But, you know, it was a very convincing performance. There's only one performance, and I'm well aware of that. The only place where I do disagree with you is that I don't believe in Garrett Bradbury at all, and I also do believe that they can still actively replace him and improve. Like I'm fully on the, yeah, if you want to sign J.C. T Treader or Matt Skura I'm totally fine with that because I don't think you can do worse than Bradbury because I think Bradbury is legitimate bust and I don't I don't think he belongs on the team whatsoever

so that that is a little too aggressive uh for my taste I think because you know what ends up happening a lot is and and look I don't think garrett bradbury's been anywhere close to good uh so yeah there's no disagreement there the one thing is that with tom compton this is what we dealt with it's like anybody would be better and it was like oh yeah have you seen dakota dozier and it's like i'm not i'm not convinced entirely that Chris Reid, just because he's a different person than Garrett Bradbury, will automatically be better. That if it's the same, but he's not as good at the things that Bradbury does well, and you've gone through this entire offseason with Bradbury,

you're just going to flip a switch and change the center? That's a pretty hard thing to ask. So I think that there's like... But teams do it. I mean, they got, so many of them to switch centers in mid season because of injury, but Mason Cole subbed in for Bradbury last season, in the middle of last season and was better than Bradbury. I like, I wish they kept Mason Cole instead.

Well, Mason Cole, they wanted to, but he costs too much money, which is a really funny sentence. But that's like, that's where we're at. So I'm not saying that I wouldn't take a look at Chris Reed at center with the starters, but the fact that he hasn't been it's, you know what? I think that this team, they had to, or they felt they had to get their own eyes on some players that if they had asked us, maybe we would have said, you don't really actually need to get your eyes on some of these players. And Garrett Bradbury is kind of the most definitive version of that.

The question is, if you have better guard play, how much of that can be covered up? And I think the answer is probably a little because the guard play has been just as abysmal. So even a small improvement to that should make it not as bad as it was. I agree with you there. And I also think that O'Connell believes to a certain extent that he can scheme his way out of it because you're talking about an offense that's going to have a lot of misdirection, a lot of motion, a lot of jet sweeps, things like that. And Bradbury, the nice thing I'll say about him is that he does play well in space, right? He pulls very well. If he, on screen passes, he finds guys very well. He can pull he pulls very well if he you know on screen passes

he finds guys very well like he's he he can move very well and that was his positive attribute but you know when you are in a when you're in a two-minute drill and it is an obvious passing situation and you can't necessarily do a lot of that fancy shit that's where everything falls apart. And so I, you know, I'm hesitant, you know, to believe that the situation can't be improved, not by Reid. You know, I'll be with you there. I'll say Chris Reid, you know, I can't know that Chris Reid's any better. But I do think that it is worth at least bringing in one, you know, low tier free agent to work out just to see rather than sort of crossing your fingers and hoping that by running like five jet sweeps a game, you're going to make Garrett Bradbury more useful than he is. Because they've already been trying to make Bradbury happen for three years now, and it's failed. So I'm not seeing how fourth year of it's going to be any different, even with new leadership in place.

Yeah. And if it looked slightly different in training camp, maybe I would give it some more time, but it just hasn't. But I will say there is something that comes from this, though, that Kevin O'Connell, it took four questions at the podium to kind of get this out of him. But Kevin O'Connell had to acknowledge when he's one on one in these past situations it's just not good and addressing the problem is the first step but also it's like okay they at least are recognizing what's going on here so o'connell is evaluating this and seeing that this is going to be an issue i think that many times you talk about talking yourself into it. I think that the Vikings, whether it was Spielman or Zimmer,

talked themselves into a lot of things that just went sideways on them. I mean, go back to like TJ Clemmings. They kept doing that thing over and over. It was like they had lots of, well, if he only this or he only that, and it's like, what? No, I mean, this is nowhere close. I was going to ask you this regarding Bradbury. As far as Viking players in the recent history who have driven you mad,

where does he rank? Oh, God. I don't know because, you know, when he pisses me off, it was sort of a function of the entire line pissing me off, right? Like, it's hard to separate him from, like you said, you know, the the guards surrounding him who were abysmal for years and years and years. And maybe that's better this year, but there's still a non-zero chance that it's not. You know, I I'm not I think I think Laquan Treadwell is probably the number one. Like he was just a deeply annoying player, and I'm glad he's gone.

I'm just astounded that he's still in football. Kudos to him for that. But he was a truly shitty player, and I'm glad he's gone. I'm glad he's still making money. Kudos to him and all that stuff. But I couldn't get him off the roster fast enough. The other thing about Bradbury is that when you know, when you have a weak link at center, that is not an enormous problem when you have a mobile quarterback, right?

If you have Russell Wilson, big fucking deal. He's going to kick out and he's going to go, you know, he's going to take the pocket with him, you know, 10 yards to the left, 10 yards to the right. He's going to get behind the protection where the protection is best. And I think you would probably agree with me that Kirk is not all that capable of that. But I do think that there is all the possibility in the world that this coaching staff does not believe that and that they can succeed by rolling out Kirk

on more plays than he has in the past. And that I think might end up being a shaky gambit, but I would bet you anything that is something that they attempt if they keep Bradbury in the lineup. Well, the best offense that they've had, the best that Kirk has ever had, was 2019. And it was a huge priority of Kevin Stefanski to roll out Kirk because there are things that Kirk does not do well that we focus on a lot. But one thing he does super well is throws it when he's rolling to his left or right i mean it's just like technically he is excellent in making those

throws and i think stefanski really realized that and moved the pocket quite a bit i don't think there's any real answer for having one weak link but they've had two or three in the past and there was absolutely no way to scheme around it so So I think that those things, I think every player on the offensive line impacts each other in some way or another. And so having Elf line at guard when he had never played guard since college and things like that, I think there was a lot of other factors that went into how much impact it actually made. That to me was really tragic because he was so good as rookie year as a center.

I was like, oh my God, i don't have to worry about this position for like the next 10 years we are next jeff christie that was not true we thought the same thing i mean honestly we were talking about like should we be writing about garrett bradbury rookie of the year or not garrett bradbury pat elfline rookie of the year and he's that good. Yeah, and it never came back after he had that injury in the NFC championship game. And probably just part of being undersized is you play a dangerous game as an offensive lineman. You can't lose 1% if you're that guy. Okay, so tell me before we wrap this up, because I have a bigger question for you to wrap it up. But just what do you want to know? What else do you want to know? Do you want to know anything?

You're sending me messages. What do you think of this guy? I like this guy. What do you want to know? We're here together. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier. And I think you already sort of answered it, which was who's really in charge here. I think that they're still sorting that out, but I'd like to know from you, if you have a sense, do you believe that eventually Kwesi will be allowed to take command of this franchise and shape it in his image? I don't, I mean, I don't think that as far as, so here's what you, here's an interesting like thought experiment is instead of doing collaboration, putting just this one smart guy in charge and seeing what happens. Like, okay, well, this guy's got a lot of answers.

Like have him call all the shots based on what everybody thinks, the scouts and so forth, as opposed to collaboration of we have Kwesi, but it's more like the Chairman with all of the other Chair people making these Shots and then it's right It makes sense if it's crazy and O'Connell running things like as a tandem And I liked what he said about Collaboration in terms of between Coaches and players like I think that's the correct

And modern approach and I know like guys Like like old fossils like Pat Royce you're like I'm for I'm for I'm bug grant or I'm for Whatever like like old fossils, like Pat Royce, you're like, whatever. Like that, that doesn't really, none of that really bothers me. And it doesn't strike me as buzzwords. It strikes me as legit. But you are correct, where it still needs to be top down. And so, you know, collaboration strikes me as an approach to leadership. But I need to know the leaders are still allowed to lead. And that's where I'm you know, that's where I'm concerned, because, you know, I feel like the Wilfs are meddling a touch here. And I'm hoping that they you know, they take their hands off as soon as they feel like crazy sort of has everything handled.

But, you know, they're you know, they're rich dunces from New Jersey. I don't know that they'll ever feel that way or not. Well, so Zach Lowe said something on his podcast once that I found to be very insightful is like a lot of GM's best skill has to be selling ownership on the right things that they should be thinking. Yeah, it's true. With Kwesi Adafo-Mensah, he just met them and this was his only team that was really interested in hiring him as a GM. So you have to kind of be like, yes, okay, well, let's try that. We'll do our best with what you're asking us to do for the start. But then as you get them to know you better and know your ideas better and know your direction better, can you sell them?

And this is not about selling them on a tank. It says selling them on doing the right things, basically with the quarterback position and with the roster as a whole to transition it from having the older stars to having the next wave of good players surrounded by a quarterback. That's hitting on Justin Jefferson the right time before he's super expensive. Like it's,

it's a tough needle to thread, but quacey cannot sell them on these things then he has not done what he needed to do here right like there are some owners yeah it's its own skill yeah right there's some owners you can't sell like what are you gonna sell daniel snyder like the guy's gonna do whatever he wants i think these are reasonable people though i do I do. I mean, if they weren't reasonable, I don't think they would have hired Quase to begin with, right? And I've never really had a beef with the Wilfs' owners, particularly in terms of how they spend. They've always been willing to spend, right? And the team has been at two NFC title games under their ownership. You know, I don't have much complaints about, you know, it's much better than being owned by, like, fucking Stephen Ross.

So these are, like, these are mild owner complaints. These are first world owner complaints. But you're right that, you know, Kwesi has to be able to, you know, convince them that they hired him for the reasons that they hired him. And I don't know. You know, I can't know that dynamic at all. And I'm not even sure Kwesi knows what that dynamic is just yet. And I think this season's going to go a long way to deciding how that's going to happen. And I have to have hope that something good will come out of it and that Kirk won't be here a year from now. But I hope to the same thing this offseason, and that didn't happen. Okay, last thing thing since we opened by

saying you talk yourself into stuff right here's your here's your challenge i want you to talk yourself and the audience and me into nine and eight being a good season oh yeah no i think that would be a good season because i like i said, I don't like, you know, regardless of sort of the long term benefit. I don't like I don't like enduring a season where you're genuinely, truly awful and unwatchable. Like I don't I don't like that. I know last year's eight and nine team was no fun to watch at all either. But I think if you're if they're 9-8, which I think they will probably be, I think they will be an 8-9 win team that has far more bright spots and is more pleasant to watch this year than they were last year. So you'll get the same result,

but it will be a more pleasant sort of journey toward that result. And I won't have much of a complaint about that because it will prove that O'Connell is competent and can win games even with a chord that he inherited and probably on a deep level doesn't particularly want at the moment. And it proves that they can make hay with sort of a roster that was all but forced upon them. So I don't have a problem with that because then it would give the Wills confidence maybe to, to loosen the reign of it and give them a bit more power over the organization.

I don't, I, and plus I like winning games. Like if they, if they beat, you know, if they beat Green Bay twice out of those, you know,

nine games, you know, that sounds very Washington to me, but, but like, you know, that's nice. I like that.

You know, I, I like, I like when they beat the teams, I want them to be like, I like a few good wins here and there. That's nice. Well, I think that if Kevin O'Connell proves, uh, clever on the offensive side and like he, he really knows what he's doing as a head coach game management, you mentioned that

even if you lost games, cause your roster wasn't quite strong enough, the whole process, like it would be right. Like, look, he's right. He's running the offensive things you should be running. He's enough the whole process like it would be right like look he's right he's running the offensive things you should be running he's managing the game the way you should be managing he's managing the players the way you should be managing the players that's going to work long term your roster just wasn't good enough that's to me the biggest thing you're trying to find out if it's a nine and eight season and why it could be a success even if that's the case even though on the show we do have the edict to talk about Super Bowls and that's it. But I think that you could come away feeling like this was not a disaster of a transition season. If you find

out that your head coach knows what he's doing. Yeah. I mean, that's, that matters more than anything else, right? If you have the right GM and you have the right head coach, you're two thirds of the way there. Like, that's great. Like if I don't have to worry about those positions for the next decade, and I only got a sweat quarterback, which I will, you know, I'll feel better about that. I'll feel much better about that than I certainly did a year ago. Well, this has been a really fun conversation. I'm glad we could get together. Allow me to say some nice things that your support of Purple Insider has been very meaningful to me because you have long been one of

my favorite writers. So when you said that you were reading my work, I thought this is awesome and also made me very nervous because I am not on your level of writing, but your work, Why Your Team Sucks, I read every single one of them, and people should too. And The Defector, man. It's just like as a person who went off on his own, away from big business, to see The Defector doing as well as it is, bringing on Kalen Kaler, who's absolutely fantastic. I just love to see it.

And like you're alive still, which is like amazing. Yeah, and you made content out of it. You also wrote a book. I got of it. Well, you are, you also wrote a book. Yeah. How about that? So all, all good things. Well, thank you for having me on it. I do. I love the newsletter. I read it every time it comes out. It's like, it's my number one appointment reading. So thank you so much for, for putting it out and thanks for having me on. Yep. Thanks for doing it, man. And, uh, we'll talk again soon. All right. See you, brother. Okay. Before we wrap up, I want to get to a few fans only questions because I understand I have not been good enough at getting a lot of your questions answered. And there's a lot of you

that are still waiting who have sent me fans only questions. So I appreciate your patience and I'm going to take every opportunity I can, whether it's after an interview or if it's another whole episode or a couple whole episodes this week to make sure that I get everybody's question answered. So I appreciate the patience. And if you want to jump in purpleinsider.com, go to the contact us or hit me up on a DM or send me just a regular tweet. Let me know that it's fans only. I'll get it in the file and I promise I'm going to answer these questions. I'm going to get to them. So let's get to a few here. We'll start with Travis via email. He says, if the team made choices that

indicated they were trying to win this year and we should be holding them to expectations of having 11 plus win season, shouldn't we be criticizing them to expectations of having 11 plus win season shouldn't we be criticizing them if they don't trade a high enough draft pick to get a backup quarterback okay i totally get what you're saying that's a if you're gonna go all in and you're gonna go get zadarius smith and keep daniel hunter and pay all these guys, then why would you leave the door open for Kirk Cousins just getting hurt for a few weeks and having your season go entirely down the drain? The problem is that when it comes to the backup quarterback position, you're in a real tough

spot there because the guys who are decent backup quarterbacks make decent money that the Vikings did not have. So I'll give you an example. Like, let's say that, you know, Hey, look, uh, you know, Mitch Trubisky doesn't win the job. Let's say that it's, uh, Kenny Pickett, then Mitch Trubisky will make, or at least in terms of his average annual value. So this isn't his cap hit.

I've just got the dollars per year here. 7.4 million. Actually, let me even call up the cap hits to make this point because this will show just, it costs money to get good backup quarterbacks. So if you look at like, here's an example, Teddy Bridgewater is going to make $6.5 million on the cap. Do you have $6.5 million on the cap? No, it's just a fact. Like Jacoby Brissett, 4.65 million. You don't have that.

Marcus Mariota, though, you know, competing for a starting job, presumably has won 4 million. Mason Rudolph, 4 million. Trubisky, who was, yeah, it's a little higher than this for average annual, but even his cap hit over $3 million. Taylor Heineke, $3.6 million. Case Keenum, $3.5 million. The Vikings literally don't have that. I mean, they have technically $10 million in cap space right now, but at the time that

they were making these moves, they were really running up against the salary cap to get some of these guys' contracts restructured and everything else figured out. And then when they got to the end of the day, they still had a little bit of cap space. But when you have 10, you don't really have 10 because you can't run that to zero. So you more have like five and you really want to keep five more million in reserve because injured players will happen and everything else. And if you have to make any other move at any other position, you need some space to be able to do that.

So having 10 million is really in finger quotes. That's the 18th most in the league. So it's not like 10 million is a lot. It's actually not a lot at all. So it would have cost quite a bit to get any of these decent backup quarterbacks, even Nick Foles and Tyra Taylor and CJ Bethard and Andy Dalton. Those guys are all making more than two and a half million dollars. Colt McCoy, two and a half million. Kyle Allen, the bottomest of the bottom of the barrel, $2.4 million. What are the Minnesota Vikings paying Sean Mannion?

Let's scroll all the way down here to the bottom of overthecap.com and find out. Sean Mannion is making $1.03 million, which is right on par with Easton stick, Will Greer, and Josh Johnson. Who's been on every team in the United States of America. Josh Rosen is making 965 K. So you're basically paying the same as Josh Rosen is getting to be a team's backup. That's kind of the point that when you're making these these moves that there wasn't extra space in the budget for those guys and now you could say well okay well you've got a couple million go get one but who who's giving you their guy who's saying like arizona's not saying oh yeah

sure you can have our relatively decent backup quarterback in colt McCoy. Of course, they're not going to say that like they want them like trade. Somebody tweeted me trade for Gardner Minshew. Why would they trade you Gardner Minshew? I mean, so they're going to say, give us a second round draft pick and you're going to do it. Like, no, you can't be a complete idiot just because, just because, you know, this is a serious need for you. It's not worth trading a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth, maybe. But even then, like that's a kind of a stretch and no one's giving it to you for a fifth. So those things have to add up like the commanders or the Browns or the bills. Like these teams are really happy with their backups. If you call an offer a fifth, they say no.

Because that's valuable to them. There's no option here to make a move. The only, I mean, even like Seattle. Like, is Seattle giving you Geno Smith if he loses the job for a seventh round pick? Of course not. So, I don't think that those two things can be conflated. That they are trying to win and that they don't have a good enough backup. They've been trying to win for years and haven't had a good enough backup.

Like last year, they had the same guy, Sean Mannion. I mean, even in 2018, it was Superbowl or bust. And it was like Trevor Simeon who, you know, is okay. As far as backups go, he was probably the higher end of backups, but the rest of this time it's been hot seats and jobs on the line and they still had Sean Mannion. It all came back to the money situation that there just isn't an opportunity there. And that's why they drafted one, by the way, like they drafted Kellen Mond to be their backup and maybe develop to something more, but be their backup. So they did spend that asset, but it hasn't worked. It has not turned out. And those two guys are adding up to like 2 million already.

So, you know, I don't know the, the, the point just being that you're already paying Mond a million. So if you pay another guy, like three, 4 million, then are you not signing Jordan Hicks? You'd rather have Jordan Hicks. If you're going all in to try to win, right? It's a real no-win situation. Of course, of course, you want a much better backup than this, but I can't say you guys aren't taking winning seriously because of your backup, because I ran those numbers and it was like a 25% win percentage if you play a backup in the NFL. That to me says everybody deals with this. Even those good backups we named are not very good overall.

All right, let me get to just like one or two more. This one comes from at rat trapping. Hey, collar fans only question. I'm watching the first quarter and one of the few Vikings that stood out to me was a Caleb Evans. Seems like he's had a quiet, steady camp and his action with the two seems like a good sign. Any thoughts on how he might fit into this year's plan? He should not fit into this year's plan at all.

If he's fit into this year's plan, something went very wrong. A Caleb Evans is big and he is athletic and he is not ready to play NFL football. And it's really reflected in his snap count. I mean, he played almost the entire game. It was noticeable that he was in there in the fourth quarter. He is a project player by definition, somebody who has really nice skills athletically, but is not ready to play in the NFL. And he missed a couple of practices, which may have set him back even a little bit. So they got him a lot of work. And I think that's a good thing to do. And they should take swings on middle round corners. I

remember someone saying, Hey, didn't you hate the Caleb Evans pick? It was like, no, someone who's a fourth round swing at a corner. Who's really athletic. Yeah. Do that all day long. But if we're talking about this year's plan, that would mean several people got hurt and you're in a pretty bad spot. Um, so I, I don't think that that's something that you want to see happen. What you want to see is that Patrick Peterson ends up retiring probably after this year and you have Booth, a Caleb Evans, and maybe you resign Cam Dantzler if you like him. And if you don't like him, a Caleb Evans is the guy that you stick in there because you feel good about his development. That's probably the best you can do for a Caleb Evans. You let him develop for a year. It might

even take two for him, but at least for one year, you let him develop on the bench and in practice and in training camp. And then you go from there. That's why he probably in the third preseason game will also get like 40 snaps long term. He could be a starter with his physical skill, but short termterm you want him to remain on the bench playing special teams, learning how pro football works. That's a, that's essentially where you want him right now. Uh, okay. Next one from ICU too ugly. Uh, Mr. Collar decided I'm your fan version of talk you into. Okay. Uh, let's see. Last time I tried unsuccessfully, the cousins could have a pop-up season like Matt Ryan, 2016. Uh, okay. Here's my next one. Alexander Madison

trade value. I once saw a GM trade a fourth for a backup tight end, a fifth for a backup kicker. Also saw a running back get traded for Deandre Hopkinskins so talk me into someone seeing madison as a cheap starter and offering a center or backup quarterback um that one is very hard to talk you into because uh now okay i get where you're coming from with rick spielman made some bad and ludicrous traits it's not that another team wouldn't give you a fifth round pick for Alexander Madison. Like that might happen, but why would you do that? A fifth round pick is worth almost nothing. And Alexander Madison is worth something. He is an insurance policy. If Delvin cook goes down, you think that Kenny Wong Wu is good. We don't know that you think that Ty Chandler might be good. You don't know that. You think that Ty Chandler might be good. You don't know that either. They're playing against fourth stringers.

They don't have experience being a good, solid NFL running back like Alexander Madison does. And if those guys are great, then if Delvin Cook goes down, you can mix all of them in and that will be fine. You want to keep your good players. You don't want to be giving away bad players. And if someone's going to give you a starting center, that's not happening. Like, this is not a good talk me into, but it's just like no one is giving you a starting center that the best case scenario possible with the center thing is that someone loses

a job battle and maybe they try to trade him at the last minute. But again, why are you trading? If they've lost the battle to someone else, are they better than Garrett Bradbury? Like probably not, probably not. Or the gap is so small. It's not worth giving up a reasonable player for, for someone who's been cut and David Johnson and a second round pick were sent for Deandre Hopkins, David Johnson, for all you fantasy players out there will remember David Johnson was a terrific player at the time. At the time he was considered a star running back. It was traded for Deandre Hopkins and those other trades are horrible. Why would you want to be the one doing that, right?

Like trading a fourth for a tight end, a fifth for a pick. Like those are not players. Those are not players that are equal to Alexander Madison. Chris Herndon is not Alexander Madison. Like Kari Vedvik is not Alexander Madison. Not a good player. I'm not saying he's great. I'm not putting a Hall of Fame jacket on him. I just saw

him go for 173 all purpose yards against Seattle. I just think he's good. He could play. He could be trusted three out of the four games last year. He goes for over 90 yards rushing. Like that's a guy who knows what he's doing. So I'm sorry, but I cannot talk you into this because it's just not a good idea. So I lose. I lose the challenge. You win. I can't do it. Sorry. That's 0 for 2 that I could not talk you into either one of those.

Okay. Let's see. Maybe we can get one more here. Let me look around and see what we've got. We've got a lot of center and a lot of backup quarterback questions, and I'll try to get to those. But, you know, I feel like we've already spent some time there. Uh, let's see here. Okay. This from at cam causey on Twitter. I feel like we're starting to get a good picture of what we can expect from the roster, but what

about expectations for a brand new coaching staff? Is it realistic to expect a fully reord rebuilt coaching staff to succeed in year one. Has there ever been an attempt to quantify the impact on expected wins? If we say the roster is capable of producing nine wins, do first year coaching staffs typically get out of their roster what is expected? I do believe that PFF did some work on this. And I don't think if I recall correctly, I don't think that there was a real definitive answer because it's, you know, if you're, yeah, I mean, you could compare it to the expected wins, but you think about someone like Sean McVay in Los Angeles, right?

Where Sean McVay was not expected to reach the number one offense in the NFL in 2017 when he took over for Jeff Fisher. I'm sure that the expectations for that team were probably like eight wins. God, do a little bit better than Jeff Fisher and it'll be a victory for Sean McVay. And then he comes in and he blows the doors off it in part because they went out that off season and added a ton of talent. That's not what the Vikings did. That's not what the Vikings did. That's not really comparable. And then there's like Matt Patricia. So he takes over for Jim Caldwell, who is a good coach, but flawed. And then Patricia just totally tanks the thing.

Well, their roster was also starting to fall apart. And Patricia was a joke as a head coach. I don't think we have a joke as a head coach situation here. So I think it is a case by case basis. And with this coaching staff, since the gamble that they made was that they're going to improve on what Zimmer did before, then they have to live up to that. And, and we shouldn't give the first year pass because that's, that's not the bet they made. We, we should hold them to, you need to be better than the last coach or otherwise, why did you fire the last coach? Right? We know it wasn't just to do with wind total, that it was also to do with the organizational culture, the general feeling and everything else. And I think that that has turned around in a lot of ways, but ultimately your culture

is as good as your win total. If Kevin O'Connell doesn't win anything, guess what we'll be saying about the culture in two years that it's bad. That's a reality of the NFL. Everyone's culture when they show up on the job, day one is great. Everyone's happy. The last guy got fired, whatever. Let's see it after two years, if it doesn't go well. Right. And that's what usually is the

determining factor. So to me, it's no free passes and the expectations should be high, even though it's a first year coach and just looking around more are going to fail than succeed because they're taking over teams where the last guy got fired. But I also think that in this spot, there's a lot of talent. There's an experienced quarterback to work with two of the best receivers in the NFL. One that has a case for the best receiver in the NFL. Like we have to grade the coaching staff versus the circumstance. When you are given a mature roster, then it should, then that should be the performance. So I don't think that we can look at it and say, well, history tells us that first year coaches don't always

completely take their team to a next level. Of course they don't. Some are tremendously bad. And, and if O'Connell is, then we'll find out probably pretty fast. I don't get the sense so far that he is, that he's going to fall into that category probably pretty fast. I don't get the sense so far that he is that he's going to fall into that category. Um, but I don't think we can really look at just history. Um, trying to think if there are any comparable situations, like, let me just look real quick if the, because Patricia is the comparable situation, like in a bad way, but he's not that he's not going to be Matt Patricia. Uh, I would be really shocked if that were the case. I mean, maybe like Dallas going from Jason Garrett to Mike McCarthy.

And then, you know, a couple of years later getting 12 wins, that's a similar situation, but Dallas really overhauled their roster. They got a lot of great draft picks, um, maybe Cleveland, but their previous coach before Kevin Stefanski was completely incompetent. But Stefanski came right in, one coach of the year. Stefanski, if you're looking for a comparable coach to Kevin O'Connell, it's easily Kevin Stefanski. I think they're very similar. So I think that the expectation should be fairly high for O'Connell, and we shouldn't be going, oh, learning curve, learning curve, learning curve. Hey, at this point, if there was going to be a big learning curve,

then they shouldn't have kept the roster the way it was. Um, that's kind of how I look at that. So there's a couple of fans only questions for you. I will continue to run those down and get through them as we go along, keep sending them. There's going to be more fans only episodes as we go. And we will talk to you later.