Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - Former Viking QB Sage Rosenfels talks about what makes a good offensive coach

Episode Date: September 30, 2021

Matthew Coller is joined by his former radio co-host and former Minnesota Viking Sage Rosenfels to talk about what's working for NFL offenses today. Sage is driven crazy by the Chicago Bears leaving Justin Fields out on an island and breaks down why Matt Nagy's offense isn't built to succeed. On the other side, Klint Kubiak and Kevin Stefanski are dominating the offensive world -- why are their schemes so much better? Sage also talks about what made Brett Favre a great leader. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to another episode of Purple Insider. Matthew Pollard here and joining me driving from Kansas City to Omaha. It's been a while. Sage Rosenfels, former Minnesota Vikings quarterback. What is up, Sage? How are you? I'm just living that journeyman life, traveling around the Midwest per usual, and got to see some good and atrocious football on Sunday. Yes, and that's partly what we're going to talk about. I've got some Vikings questions for you. I want to ask you about Kevin Stefanski, who's coming in here with the Cleveland Browns. And

I want to get to Chicago. But do you ever think of like keeping a map of yourself for all the different places you are? Every time we talk, you're like in a different place or about to go to a different place. Like you live the journeyman life in the NFL and now after the NFL. It is interesting. You know, I ended up in Omaha, Nebraska. It's a place I had never played. It never lived. Didn't go to college there from eastern Iowa with Iowa State. Of course, my journeyman career. So what happens is I choose to get out of town about every other week. It seems like I leave for between three and five days, sometimes even longer, depending on the situation for what the reasons are. And I usually try to combo it up with work, with some of it slash play and, you know, try to find some business in there.

But also maybe it's an excuse to go to Miami in January. So you are correct. I do get around a lot, traveling around a lot. You know, I do radio shows in both Houston and Chicago on Tuesdays. And it seems like, you know, every other week, I'm in a hotel room somewhere, Austin, Texas, this time, there was Kansas City this morning. Sometimes, of course, it's in Omaha as well. But yeah, I definitely I lived that journeyman life as a player. And I feel like I'm still living that a little bit in my post career.

Yeah. And I enjoy finding out who you had dinner with, including one time, Matt Moore. You just you said, oh, I randomly had dinner with Matt Moore. And then the next year he beat the Vikings after like coming out of retirement. So it's sort of funny, the people that you run into because of your journey. But it really is that that and I think I think the Twitter. Yeah, I think Twitter is, you know, I had dinner with Colin Cowherd about a month ago. I was out in Los Angeles taking my son out to college. And, you know, once you drop him off, he doesn't want to hang out with his dad anymore. He wants to go hang out with his new roommates and his buddies. And so, you know, Colin had occasionally made comments on my tweets. And so I sent a message, hey, you want to grab a beer or something?

And I said, you know, we have a four-hour dinner. And I feel like I know Colin Cowherd a little bit. So it's like it is very random like that. Twitter definitely helps with the connections to random people. And then you sort of build those relationships over time. And and yeah, it's definitely all part of the journeyman lifestyle, as you always like to say. I really hope that you and I get to go to the NFL combine together again, because that was quite an experience just walking around with you. And it was like, OK, here's Brady Quinn. We're going to talk to him.

And here's Chris Sims. You know him. And it was sort of a it was a fun time to listen to you talk with all the guys that you know from the league so well there there are only so many quarterbacks that play in the league for an extended period of time right that's one thing but two uh and what you what you didn't mention other than just fairly well-known quarterbacks, is the trainers, the equipment managers, of course all the coaches that usually stay in the league for a long, long time. Eric Sugarman is going to be the trainer, I'm sure, with the Vikings for a long time. But if it's not the Vikings, he'll end up somewhere else for a long time and have a 40 year, you know, trainer career. And in all of his assistants as well.

Actually, I just saw one of his assistants, Tom, at Eagles game. Now he's obviously he's moved back to Philadelphia. And, you know, the players change in the NFL and the all the other people, they don't change that much at all in a lot of ways. Right. And a lot of the guys that you played with are now coaches. So at the combine, like Wes Welker is coaching. He walks by us, says hello to you. So it's, uh, that was a, that was a fun experience. I hope we can do it again if the combine is back to normal, um, this year, but let's talk some football, man. I mean, uh, you and I have talked for years about Matt Nagy's offense and the Chicago bears. And I knew, I knew that you were

watching that game tearing out what hair you have. Um, no, no, no, you've got it. You've got a decent main still, but, uh, you were, you were, I'm sure beside yourself watching this, Justin Fields have to stand back there and try to do everything the same way they put it on Mitch Trubisky. And you would have thought that Chicago would have learned from last year that when they started to make things easier on Trubisky, he actually had some success. And Justin Fields is a much better quarterback prospect. I think if you're the Vikings, you're absolutely thrilled

with Matt Nagy already mishandling Justin Fields only a couple games into his career. If you're a Chicago Bears fan, I should say this. If you're a Chicago Bears season ticket holder in that box they send you at the beginning of the year, that's now all fancy because all the teams do this and they have all your nice tickets in there ready to go. You should get a free pack of Rogaine for all the people who are literally pulling their hairs out of their head out of frustration out of sometimes disbelief um watching the bears offense hurts my heart it does it hurts my heart

and you know college football there are a lot of teams shoot most teams it seems like at this point they they love the shotgun they're in the shotgun most of the time they've got these jet sweeps and they've got these little token fakes by the running back as he crosses the quarterback but it's really just a drop that pass and you can get away with it in college you know the field seems bigger when the hashes are bigger that's one but two the players are just slower and less athletic and less knowledgeable to really understand the details of an offense so it's just a more wide open game the nfl game the defenses are just so much better they this is all you do all the time the players are are bigger, faster, stronger, but they're also much smarter,

and so they identify things faster. They know what the weaknesses and strengths of their defenses are. The game planning is so much further beyond in complexity and detail than college game planning. And being in shotgun consistently is the hardest thing to do. And I almost tweeted this yesterday, but if you're, in my opinion, if you're an offensive coordinator in the National Football League, or let's say you're an offensive lineman in the National Football League

and a quarterback, the plays in order from easiest or plays you want called a lot to the plays you least want called starting off running plays all right if offensive linemen are getting they're getting five yards a shot offensive i must say let's just keep running the ball keep running running plays okay that's the easiest thing for the quarterback and for the line they can go out there and they try to move move the ball uh with with running plays secondly the bootlegs off the running plays okay which aren't as good in shotgun by the way running plays aren't as good in shotgun either right the angles are all screwed up uh it's it's hard to describe on a podcast or radio show but they're just not effective now you do see runs sometimes go for 8 10 15 yards out of shotgun but it might be third

15 you're on a draw for 10 and yeah they're all spread out because they're playing for the pass of course you're going to get 8 or 10 yards but in reality running the ball from under center as a quarterback it's over time. It is better for the running game. But two, then the bootleg game is better. So the second thing an offensive lineman loves, bootlegs. They literally just come off the ball and try to eliminate penetration, but they don't really have a responsibility. You don't have to block Khalil Mack or Miles Garrett for four or five seconds.

So that plays easier. Screens, there's different types of screens. There's wide receiver screens, which we all know there's the ones where they sort of catch it more, come in towards the line, and then try to shoot up the numbers. There's running back screens. There's also tight end screens, which, by the way, are great off of play action. And the next one, play action. Why?

Because the defense has to play the run for a couple seconds before they can truly rush the quarterback. So we're going in order here. Now we're talking about three-step drops. You get the ball out quick. Then there's five steps. Then there's seven steps. And you could probably do that in order three, five and seven from the shotgun. Even more complicated because the defense knows the threat of run and or bootleg is just not going to be as good.

Right. So in that order, of course, the Bears with a rookie quarterback who's pretty raw and hasn't been in this type of offense has been the NFL. Any any rookie quarterback right they have them in shotgun 90 of the time it doesn't make any sense at all it's it's like you're trying to do the hardest thing on the guy and they did the same thing to trubisky yep and i would say the same thing and what you said earlier the second half of the last season as trubisky is out the door they decide well let's do an offense that's sort of more like Minnesota's or more like the Rams let's get a full

back in there let's get a tight end in there let's line up and let's run the ball with David Montgomery then let's do some play action stuff then let's do some bootleg stuff and they were doing that and they were having success it's not the best offense in the nfl they weren't putting up five or six hundred yards a game but it was efficient it made sense it had an identity even if matt naggy's coaching didn't have all the precise details because i would see things i'm like that's not really the best way to block that on a bootleg at least how i was, eh, that's not really the best way to block that on a bootleg, at least how I was taught from what I think some of the best coaches in the industry who run that type of stuff, Shanahan and Kevin Stefanski and Matt LaFleur and all those guys.

They weren't doing the same, but having said that, they were still having success. Now, come to the next year we're right back to where we were before right we're right back to shotgun right back to five man pass protections oh we can get up we get into that pass protections there even when you're in shotgun there's five man there's six man which is usually you're running back to staying in and and seeing those any blitzes but then he's getting out or he can stay in shift say the help on the left tackle before he gets out on some sort of route you've got seven man which is either two backs or you have a back and a tight end who's staying in right now you only have three guys going out you have various ways to try to help

out those offensive linemen who again you're asking them to do the hardest thing to do which is shotgun in the pocket the bears run almost all five man protections so they're making it hard on their line with the play call all right and then there was a time in this game where where cleveland ran straight cover two straight cover two all right the Russian four, and the Bears, they leave in seven guys to block. There's three guys out in the route. Well, of course, no one's going to be open. When teams play cover two, those are actually the times you want to get

your running backs and tight ends out. So you can force the events to spread the field. And boom, a lot of times they take away the deep stuff. But you hit that running back on those check downs, like we saw with the 49ers the other day. They hit who's checked on that little burst route. Boogie scores a touchdown. Well, because the defense was playing for the end zone. They were playing coverage in that situation.

So, I mean, I said on the radio day in Chicago, I got traded from the Houston Texans to the Minnesota Vikings in 2009. I got traded to a team, to a head coach that had worked under Andy Reid in Philadelphia. And when they won in Philadelphia, no offense to Brad Childers, but I promise you it had nothing to do with Brad Childers. Nothing. All right. It was Jim Johnson, one of the great defensive coordinators in NFL history. And an offense, to be honest with you, it wasn't a great offense. But it had Donovan McNabb. Had a great quarterback and usually a very good offensive line.

This had nothing to do with Brad shoulders. So when Brad comes in, the offense that I showed up to was like, man, this is so archaic compared to what i was just in with kyle shanahan which was detailed but also very creative had some complexity to it but also very simple for the quarterback within that complexity and this feels like the exact same thing it's like a coach who was in Kansas City under Andy Reid. And I promise you, Matt Nagy's influence on Kansas City success had nothing to do with Matt Nagy. You know, and and here we are in Chicago going with the same situation. And and Brett Favre is not going to show up anytime soon.

And they don't have a young Adrian Pierce in the backfield, and they don't have Hutchinson and McKinney and Sullivan and all those guys along the offensive line either. They've got Jason Peter, who's three years past his capabilities, and he's just sort of done, and then they're just making it as hard as possible on him with this ridiculous offense there's my rant but other than that i mean it's going fine uh the thing that um i really don't understand the defense did have five sacks you know it's baker

mayfield wasn't amazing in the game they held him in check but baker mayfield wasn't asked to do too much he was asked to run the offense, hand it off, bootlegs, occasional back shoulder throw when you get a good one-on-one on the outside when the team's trying to stop the run. Don't ask your quarterback to try to do too much.

And that's what Kevin Stefanski's doing. And that's why they're one of the best teams in the National Football League. Well, and I want to ask you about Stefanski in a minute, but you look around the league right now and the best offenses in the National Football League. Well, and I want to ask you about Stefanski in a minute, but you look around the league right now and the best offenses in the league, which through three games includes the Minnesota Vikings with Clint Kubiak.

And you have Matt LaFleur running this similar offense with Aaron Rodgers. And he was an MVP last year, looked pretty good to me the other night against San Francisco. Jimmy Garoppolo went to the Super Bowl. Jared Goff went to the Super Bowl with the Rams running this kind of system. Ryan Tannehill has revamped his career in Tennessee under Arthur Smith running this kind of system. I mean, it's just all Matt Stafford is a MVP candidate for three games, right? It just is working in so many different ways and i think what

we're seeing even here sage is clint kubiak adding these um mcveigh ish or kyle shanahan ish elements that maybe gary uh kubiak did not have last year and it's just working and there are guys open and there's not a lot of pressure i was just telling jeremiah searles earlier today um when we recorded the show was that like the true pass sets the times that the offensive line has to just stand in their pass block are very limited in the shotgun and instead of like I think athletes work really well with a bootleg offense and with and with a with a play action offense I guess I I just don't understand why they would see it work last year and then come back this year and say no no we're going to go back to my offense and that's the part that feels very children'sy where it's like no it's my offense it works and I'm going to do it no matter what the situation that's the part that feels very children's see where it's like, no, it's my

offense. It works. And I'm going to do it no matter what the situation that's just not good coaching. Ego is the greatest inhibitor to creativity and growth. It is. And Matt Nagy has a, an ego that he really truly believes that he is right even though it seems like everybody else believes he is wrong and that ego is going to prevent him from having success as a head coach it's going to prevent him from being an offensive coordinator where the next job he has and it's going to prevent justin fields Chicago Bears from having consistent success this year. The Bears don't do anything well, anything. And I'd be honest, and David Montgomery, by the way, I know he's not my Iowa State guy.

He's playing great. He is, when they give him the ball, he is making some really good runs, but he's not getting enough opportunities. And they're not putting him in situations where he can have success i mean the first third down this game by the way versus cleveland they run like a crack toss to the left hand side cleveland has a will linebacker on the line they've got a safety down that way because the will linebacker is going to blitz it's 32 defenses usually play a fifth or even sixth guy near the last scrimmage on those situations and the bears run right into it like that's just common sense you don't run that play but mack naggy just i don't know i don't know why he thinks like that play would work that's

the very first third down the game get stuck for a negative two uh run. And that that ego creates stubbornness and creates, again, a lack of growth and progression and advancement from an offense. And and I don't know, maybe it's because he it's not his style, because he not one of the branches on the Sean McVay tree, that he wants to be on the Andy Reid tree, just like Brad Childress did as well. But you don't have Pat Mahomes at quarterback. You don't have Kelsey. You don't have the cheat at the wide receiver. And usually Andy Reid's one of the best offensive line coaches in the league as well. And Nagy's decided not to do that what clint kubiak is doing is exactly what i thought he would do and i think when you learn this offense

you don't learn in a year you have to be you know underneath one of those coaches for three even four years and you of course learn a lot of details from them but you also learn from watching the other teams that run a similar style of offense and matt maggie obviously has no interest in running it uh no interest in con those types of plays it's not who he is and it's gonna cost him his job job, and that's that. I think Matt Nagy becomes a good offensive coordinator someday, if and only if he goes and coaches for a person that he has not coached for in the past, because he needs to add detail and add creativity and add the Kubiak,ak Shanahan McVay style of offense into his repertoire.

There is something about there is something about snapping the ball from center into the quarterback's hands, not shotgun, hanging the ball off hand to hand and or bootlegging without having the ball be in the air in one way or another. There's something about controlling the football and also making the defense play the game laterally so as a quarterback you can get outside the pockets and actually have time to throw and then possibly hit a guy on a crossing route who just because the linebacker had to play the run, he overplays it. Now he's out of his cover three or cover two drop and boom there's a big hole right there and uh the bears don't run and they do run bootlegs they i can just tell they're very poorly not only designed but they're they're running them against

bad looks like not you don't run bootlegs versus all the looks. If you watch a good NFL game, the quarterback either has the ability to audible to a better play because play one is a bad play, or the head coach or the play caller is calling two or even three plays in the huddle because, hey, these are the two or three plays. This is the first one. If you don't like it because we're calling it for man but they're in zone, let's run a zone play. Well, what type of zone? What's a cover two type of zone it looks like? Well, let's run a cover two play, not a cover three play.

There's all these complexities that go into each and every play call, in particular pass plays, and Matt Nagy just doesn't understand that he just doesn't know it and uh that you know that's as simple as it gets and I think what we're really seeing is just the separation that is as wide as you know whatever the uh the parting seas between the coaches who know what they're doing and the coaches who don't know what they're doing and when you can watch a game and and maybe this has always been the case, but I feel like it's really clear now when you can watch a game and tell, oh, this coach has not modernized what he's doing,

or this coach has not really studied what's working in today's NFL. They're not ahead of the game. And the Vikings this week are going to face someone who's the exact opposite of Matt Nagy. I even was looking at the fourth down decisions and no surprise, Cleveland was number one in the league in terms of matching up with what the analytics say for fourth downs. And we saw this in 2019 where Kevin Stefanski, I think, brought in a completely different offense from John DeFilippo and it was immediately successful for Kirk Cousins

he had his best career season that year and then they've carried that on from last season to now this year with Clint Kubiak um Kevin Stefanski I think his has really emerged as one of the best coaches in the NFL stage why do you think that that is well let me add to that, and I will get to Vansky. You know, Pat Shermer, if you went with Pat Shermer and said, Hey, Pat, what was the offense you ran 10 or 15 years ago? Because he was a Philadelphia guy. His offense he runs now doesn't look like that offense. He is advanced. He is advanced, and you even saw it in Minnesota that he was a lot of run,

a lot of boot and play action, and a lot of three-step, especially in that Case Keenum year. And then DeFilippo comes in, boom, we're in shotgun. You literally saw that stark contrast right there. You and I went over it time and time again back in those dark days of Vikings football, Kevin always wanted to run this offense, but he did not know the details of it. And when he got that OC job after D Flippo got fired, when they hired Gary Kubiak, I talked to him. He said, I was, I said,

how was that? You know, you know, hiring Gary, you know, because he's a guy that you think, okay, he's, he might step on your toes. You're the OC, but everyone knows is it actually gary's offense he goes oh i was the happiest person in the organization that they hired gary because i wanted to learn the fine details of that offense and here i go one of the originators of it and so and then because he's a younger guy and also because clint kubiak's younger guy, they're going to advance that those basic principles to another level because, well, younger people are just a little bit more creative. Right. And their minds work that way. And of course, Kyle Shanahan, he took he takes it to a whole different level that I think sometimes could be almost too much. It's almost like he tries to get too creative. And I think the other guys, LeFleur, Stefanski, McVay,

they don't go, I think, to the complexity of Kyle. And I think they might have more success because of it, because they stick to those basic principles more. So Kevin's done a great job of, of course, learning from Gary, becoming a better play caller, when to call a screen, when to call this, when to do that. Of course, the bootlegs and the play action type stuff. And you see that offense, again, it's not like super high powered, but it's just so consistent. And you combine it with a really good defense.

And Gary Kubiak used to say all the time, it's like, I'm an offensive coordinator, but at the end of the day, a lot of times, teams that win Super Bowls have great defenses. And even those Broncos teams with Elway back in the day, with Mike Shanahan, their defenses were awesome back in those days. It wasn't just like a high-scoring, you know, St. Louis, you know, fun and gun or whatever it was called that they had going on there. So Kevin understands the value of defense and good defense and good defensive lines.

And they've created that, you know, type of football. It's a style of football. It's not always super pretty, but it wins a lot of games. It wins between 10 and 13 games consistently in this league. And the shotgun stuff wins four to six games consistently in this league. And that's just a fact. Right. Unless you have Russell Wilson, Patrick Mahomes, that's just a fact right unless you have russell wilson patrick mahomes

that's pretty much or peyton manning calling all the shots or tom brady calling all the shots tom brady's running the tom brady offense yeah but even right now you look at you look at that team that's a defense heavy team and tom is he's dropping back some but we all know if you go into the analytics i know you're a football focus guy but he gets the ball out quick yes his back foot hits and fastest in the league yep he identifies defenses on drop back passes and he gets the ball out he does not want to go back there and hold the ball hold the ball hold the ball and when he does he knows he's holding the ball and you can actually see his eyes looking down at the line

because he's already identified the defense at the snap. He already knows what he's going to have to do. The question is, does he have time to hold on to the football long enough for those routes to open up? And you can see Tom move around the pocket a little bit on those plays. But otherwise, he identified defenses quickly, and he gets the ball out. He is not trying to throw the ball 60 yards down the field but when they do it's on play action when he's thrown his post routes or his go routes a lot of times they are on some sort of play because he knows and that offense knows

that that's the best way to buy time for your quarterback you know what's so interesting they even ran by they even ran a bootleg with tom brady in that first game or a couple weeks ago with uh with gronkowski on the goal line they ran a bootleg with tom brady on the goal line you don't see too many boots from him because even though he claims he's still fast um he's not he's not very fast uh but he's still as fast as he was 20 years ago that's true true. Yeah, you could say that about him. But, you know, the other thing I've noticed about Clint Kubiak is that his demeanor is very similar to Kevin Stefanski. This is not a salesman at all. And, you know, when you're around, you cover enough coaches.

You kind of know who's trying to get themselves a head coaching job, who goes to podium trying to give you uh uh all the information and try to you know look i know so much about everything and that kind of thing um but clint kubiak is as quiet as it comes kevin stefanski was very much understated like that too and i feel like those guys and and even matt lafleur doesn't seem to be like a huge talker uh i feel like no he's very very quiet i feel like this all three of those guys sean mckay is the outlier there for sure for sure um and i feel like that matches up though with their quarterbacks um because their quarterback like kirk cousins i think is not the easiest guy to work with and aaron rogers is absolutely not the easiest guy to work with. Um, but it sounds

to me like Clint Kubiak is taking all of the feedback Kirk Cousins gives him and Cousins really knows the game. He really knows what works for him. I think that that plays well when you have guys like that, rather than being the going on it's 18 to 22 year olds you get a lot of rah-rah you get a lot of emotion by the coaches get a lot of sales the nfl is not that so when you find an nfl coach who's always a salesman've got to be very weary of what and why he is selling. Because there's really no reason to sell anything in this league. It's a win or lose league only. It's about production and winning.

And the question is, do you get it done consistently? And I think what LeFleur and those guys have done their general attitudes are it is about this consistent sort of race to now 17 games it's not the ups and downs and when you have a head coach who's all fired up and all down and all fired up and all down you're going to get that out of your offense not of your team but you want a consistent quarterback you want a consistent offense over the one that puts up 500 yards one week and can't do anything the next week and again especially with a complementary defense you don't have to be a high-powered offense to win football games on national football if you have the right type of defense and so yeah i think those guys

are looking at it as more of a steady way. I will say, you know, Sean McVay, he is that rah-rah guy, but it doesn't seem like he's selling anything. That's just his personality. And I feel like the coaches are always trying to sell you on something, which is very much, you know, coach talk. And a lot of times football coaches in general are sort of salesmen, whether it's high school or college,

because you're selling to people to go out there and do things they wouldn't normally do basically run into a wall for you and so that salesmanship matters in a lot of levels but in the national football league the salesmanship is like hey if you do this really well we're going to pay you millions of dollars yeah right that is the sell You don't have to go out there and convince somebody to play hard because if they don't, the scouts will see it, the GMs see it, the whole league sees it. We don't want to pay that guy. He doesn't work hard.

He doesn't finish plays. He doesn't hustle. He doesn't do those things. That's the difference between college football, high school football, pro football from the salesman aspect of coaching. Fans are going back to stadiums, so you have to be ready with the best Minnesota football gear. That's why you have to check out SodaStick. I saw a ton of SodaStick gear around training camp. I expect to see it in the stadium as well. There's so many cool designs on hats, t-shirts, and hoodies

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your eye out for our soda stick giveaways I wanted to ask you also about leadership in the quarterback position and the relationship between Mike Zimmer and Kirk Cousins has been, let's just say like awkward is probably the best word I could use to describe it. Uncomfortable might be. And Zimmer has sort of begrudgingly over the last couple of weeks said that he's happy with how cousins is leading the team. And he says it in a way of it's better this year, not he's a great leader and I love what he's doing, but it's like, well, it's improved kind of thing. Uh, but I, I wonder just, I mean, you played with Brett Favre and you've obviously, you know, lots of quarterbacks have been in, you know, around the game for a long time. I guess I wonder what you think the best quality in terms of leadership is and what its tangible impact is.

I think, number one, authenticity. I think a quarterback and or coach who is authentic, when they're talking. It doesn't seem like they're either making excuses or they're sort of making things up on the fly. If you can really feel them and connect with them, you know, if you want to go into the Brene Brown world of, you know, with with no authenticity, there is no connection. And life is about connections and relationships are about connections. Right. And if you're not an authentic person, life is about connections and relationships are about connections. Right. And if you're not an authentic person,

you're not going to have those deep connections. If you make a lot of excuses for, for plays not working, but you know, it didn't work because of somebody else, the offensive line, the receiver, the, this, the coach, you call a play. You're not going to get players to follow you and to want to be there for you because at some point you're going to be the one that takes the blame for something. I think players love it when a quarterback just says, I got to play better. I got to do this better.

You know, or we as a team have to do this better. I think that's big. I think being consistent every single day. I think you walk into the building and you treat the guy who's washing the floors the exact same as you treat the Wilfs when you end up talking to them at some function. I think that people see that. I think those are some of the things that people look for. But just being consistent every single day and being one of those guys. And whether you like it or not, for me as a guy from a small town in Iowa, I had to find a way to connect to the guys from the south side of Dallas. From a big city, from a place that I have very little to do with as far as my history and their history

but how do you connect with those guys and if you don't at least try to connect with those guys they won't appreciate that and they want everyone the quarterback gets enough of the credit and enough of the pay and all the things to make the last guy in the roster who's from a completely opposite side of the world as you feel that you appreciate him and that you guys are in this together that type of relationship to me that creates great leaders yeah and um that was that's teddy bridgewater uh i remember teddy bridgewater had this sort of corner of the locker room um where he called it the neighborhood and the guys from south florida he'd kind of have them over there.

And if somebody was in the neighborhood that wasn't supposed to, they got fined, but it was like a couple bucks and they would give it to charity kind of thing. And one of the guys was a seventh round pick who wasn't really any good and didn't last long in the league, but Teddy still invited him over. Like with guys who are stars and guys who are pro bowlers and things like that um you know making those guys feel like they're valuable as part of the team

I think is a is a huge deal for leadership I will say you know you know since we're on I'm doing a Vikings podcast here and I'll bring up the Favre of 2009 I mean for the guy that was a surefire first ballot hall of famer had been the mvp i don't know what three times at that point won the super bowl all those things i would regularly see brett you know admit chatting with or giving his time to a guy in the practice squad yeah if a guy in the practice squad walked up and said hey can you sign this or whatever not only would brett sign it but he would say, oh, yeah, Boise State, you know, and then make a comment, you know, or even like maybe a joke. But there is this connection thing where that practice squad player felt like, holy cow, Brett Favre knows who I am.

Right. And the wrong types of leaders separate themselves from the team rather than immerse themselves right in the middle of it. Yeah. And I think that that's what Zimmer is talking about, because he said specifically that he's that he feels like Cousins has been more a part of the group this year than he has been in the past. But I guess where I think it'll be tested, Sage, is when they get to some tough times. Now, I know they went 0-2, but the offense played well and Kirk played well through those first couple of weeks. And then they get a big win here. So everyone's sort of like feeling confident about themselves. We haven't seen one of those tough games and then how cousins responds after the game and that kind of thing. And even how Mike Zimmer responds to a bad Kirk cousins game. We have not seen that this year.

Mike has been sort of very nice since the whole COVID thing about Cousins so far this year. Since then, he's been much nicer. Not to scare the Vikings fans out there, but I just watched that Cleveland tape. Yeah. And that's you guys play this week. And I don't know if Kirk's going to have a good game and that d line is phenomenal i mean they've got two first overall picks who are freaks of nature on each side uh and they're you know so good and they and joe woods does a great job of scheming to get those guys one-on-one with the tackles. He loves putting those linebackers up in those A and B gaps,

which means the running backs can't be chipping and helping out. People have to squeeze down sometimes and help out that interior part of the pocket, which means a one-on-one's on the outside. They stop the run extremely well, create a lot of third-and-long situations. And as we saw Justin field sitting back in that pocket a guy who's twice the athlete as kirk uh got sacked i think nine times in that ball game um so i i would assume that mr kubiak is going to do whatever he can to limit those pocket passes right uh to limit you know kirk being back there in that same spot um but

yeah you know at the end of the day, the Viking Dolphins has played pretty well in the first three games. But I was talking to my college offensive coordinator the other day discussing the Cyclones, and he said, you know, what I always believed is if you won 52-51, both the offense and defense did their job. Now the defense will say, we didn't do our job, we gave up 51 points. But you know what? You gave up one less than our offense did and if the offense if we win the game 11 to 10

damn it we did our job we scored 11 points so defense gave up 10 it's that complementary football it doesn't matter you know how you do on offense is did you win the game or not and i think that might be one of the issues with Kirk Cousins over the course of his career is that it does seem like his offense has a lot of times done fairly well. They're never an embarrassment. They're always good to sometimes really good. But the question is, are they good and really good when it really counts,

when it matters, against who? And does it end up, yeah, they had a really good offense, but they're 8-8, 9-7, or had a really good offense but they're eight and eight nine and seven right or does that really good offense translate into 12 or 13 wins right and that hasn't happened in his career nearly enough right and that's where i refuse to throw out qb wins as a stat because i mean a lot of times it comes down to does that guy make a play at the times that you need him most does he have a drive does he keep sustain a drive or something like that and you see it over a long period of time and so cousins is sort of fighting that uphill battle against that not that the two losses were his

fault in the first two weeks of course i think people sort of conflate like calling it oh every single loss is on the quarterback like that's not what we're saying. Well, I will say I disagree with you on this stat. I disagree with all the Twitter folks out there because I know it's a Twitter conversation is winning a QB stat, right? But I think there is a mix. I think there are some quarterbacks who just win. Tom Brady just knows how to win. Peyton Manning just, of course, knew how to win peyton main just of course knew how to win

peyton manning won with to be honest with you a pretty average football team around him i mean their offensive line was always atrocious of course he had the two good receivers and dallas clark at tight end and defense was always actually probably about 20th or worse in the league and they would have been even at the bottom if it wasn't for peyton being on the field the entire time so there's times you're like, the quarterback played well and they lost. It's not the quarterback's fault. There's also times where the quarterback just played okay and they won because of everybody else. But I do believe the really, really good ones, they win all the time.

And it's not because their team is better. It's because, yes, the quarterback is so good that they they just win games that's just what they do no matter what their stats are now we are on the same page with that i i think that um especially over a large sample size like think about how much the roster around great quarterbacks like changes over and yet they win and they win and they win and they win. And I think that, you know, there are a lot of other quarterbacks who they sort of go, which way the wind blows them. Like if it's a good team, if it's Jared Goff, it's a really good team, he's going to succeed. If it's not a good team,

he's not. And that's sort of, you know, who that guy is going to be. That's, that's most quarterbacks. Oh, that may be about, I don't know, five to eight guys in this league that they, they're that they're only as good as the team around them. And then there's about those four or five guys that can take an average team and make them really, really good. But for the most part, quarterback's really just a product of the team around them. Well, Sage, it has been a lot of fun to catch up with you. I'm glad I could catch you while driving from Kansas City to Omaha

in typical journeyman fashion. And I look forward to us doing this again soon it was really great to catch up with you man i know i owe you one i appreciate you uh coming into my my class the other day teaching this little sports broadcast boot camp class at my brother's high school in in las vegas i appreciate uh uh you coming on a couple weeks ago and uh by the way the trees are changing here i'm guessing are they fully changed up in minnesota at this point not quite it's been a little bit warmer here it's been like in the 80s recently so i think that we're probably maybe another week or two away gotcha well one of my favorite times of the year is uh late september and early october and uh uh definitely the best weather in the Midwest,

best time to live in the Midwest. And I never knew that when I was playing football. I never realized how awesome falls are in the Midwest in general. I was always out at practice and stuff or in meetings all day, and now I really get to enjoy these beautiful fall days. The autumn wind, my friend. So, Sage, I appreciate it, man. Really great to catch up with you again and we will do it again soon, buddy. Okay. Sounds good.