Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - From Vikings practice at US Bank Stadium -- the offense isn't back up to speed yet and Michael Pierce is good

Episode Date: August 7, 2021

Matthew Coller and Sam Ekstrom podcast live from inside US Bank Stadium following the Vikings' practice. The offense hasn't looked sharp since Kirk Cousins came back and it's hard not to wonder how the attention surrounding the Vikings recently has impacted them. Justin Jefferson's injury is reported to be "not serious," but the other receivers have not risen to the challenge with Jefferson out. What's going on with Anthony Barr's absence and what does it show about this team overall? And a Danny Etling update... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to another episode of Purple Insider, Matthew Collar here along with Sam Ekstrom inside US Bank Stadium. Sam, it has been a long time since we have podcasted inside of U.S. Bank Stadium. In fact, Purple Insider has never podcasted inside of U.S. Bank Stadium because last year, pretty much as soon as the games were over, it was skedaddle, get out of here as fast as you can. But today, the Vikings hold a practice inside the stadium with fans in attendance. And you know what? We're not going to talk about vaccinations or COVID or anything in this episode. Come on. It's so fun.

Purely this practice and this football team and what this tells us about this football team. So I enjoyed it. I liked last year a little bit more the real scrimmage. But since preseason games are back, this was a little ramp up to football back inside the stadium in front of fans. Can I make up a word? Scrimmage-ish. It was scrimmage-ish. The ball like advanced, you know, when they ran plays, they simulated punt situations. They didn't really finish drives. That was the one disappointing part to me. Why would you stop at the 20 when you can practice red zone? But we did see kind of all four teams, all four

quarterbacks, everyone on the roster got involved and easy to tune out sometimes when that's happening with the third team, fourth team. But I think we saw a lot of the competitions playing out. You know, they got Dantzler and Breeland, for instance, both got some first teamwork. Udo and Dozier got some first teamwork. We talked to Adam Thielen about this afterward. The wide receiving core is pretty battered right now. Arguably, your wide receivers one, two, and three were not out there, depending on how you view D.D. Westbrook, but Justin Jefferson, AC joint sprain, out. Adam Thielen, a little shaken up on Friday's practice, looked like a right leg injury. He didn't do live drills. DeeDee Westbrook still

a ways away. So it was BB, it was Osborne, it was Smith-Marset in there with the first team. And yeah, I think we got to see some guys making plays. DJ Wanham looked good and a pretty good sample size of reps today so I'm curious what some of your takeaways were well my biggest takeaway is that without Justin Jefferson and Adam Thielen out there Kirk Cousins has not looked very good in fact even when they were there Kirk Cousins over the last couple of practices since he's come back has really struggled to get in a rhythm there have been a lot of plays where he throws it away or he's sort of patting the ball and looking around today there was for the third straight day

another sign of frustration from cousins where it appeared that someone ran the wrong route i don't want to accuse whoever because it's hard to say who did it but he kind of looked over at them and smacked his hands together and seemed very upset. And for the third straight day, even when Cousins has been upset, there is really no one around him to come over and talk to him or say, this is what's going on or pat him on the back. Hey, get back to the next rep. It's pretty much Kirk Cousins alone by himself out here is how it feels after the last couple of days. And even while he was watching some other reps by himself, it was kind of away from the team.

And I know he does that sometimes when he's frustrated as he sort of walks away from everyone. But the demeanor of Kirk Cousins over these last couple of days, I think you can sort of feel it. The amount of stress that has come along with these couple of days and being at the center of a national conversation, having a hospital drop their connection with him, having arguments with people inside the building, with people frustrated within the locker room, within the building with him and I've always felt like you know distractions are a little bit overrated but a distraction of this magnitude I don't see how that wouldn't impact you so is it Justin Jefferson and Thielen not practicing is it Kirk Cousins feeling the pressure of everything that's coming down on him right now but these last three practices have been tremendously bad for the offense I mean I, I just, I have not felt for the first team offense that they have done a whole lot right in the last three days. No, I'm with you. I mean, his whole demeanor starting with the press conference on Thursday,

I think it was just seems clenched. You know, he's, he's tight. He's seems unhappy. You look, you watch him on the field and he's being, he's aloof, not a lot of smiles. He's being kind of set off easily by little things going wrong. And to some extent, you want your quarterback to hold players accountable, but you also need the quarterback to be able to shake things off. And that applies to something as simple as a misrun route and something as big as this external controversy that's brewing around him, which I think is different than typical football problems, which Cousins has experienced in the past and has, to his credit, I think been pretty good at bouncing back from those type of situations where everyone's quitting on him, the fan base is mad,

and then he'll come back with a good game and just gives you a taste of what he can be. And that's been, I think, one of his better traits as a Vikings quarterback. But this is something different. This is something that is outside of football that he can't necessarily stay off of Twitter and escape it. I mean, he's probably seeing it on national news programming, honestly. It feels like it was that big of a story this past week. And he doesn't seem to be so far handling it brilliantly. And there's probably been a lot of fallout from that press conference. And I have no clue how aware he is about it,

but I would guess that he is somewhat aware that it hasn't been a good week for him. So it's still early in August. He's got offensive line competition in front of him, receiver injuries on either side of him. So there are reasons why this group would be out of whack, but Cousins hasn't helped it. And it comes back to what we always talk about, Collar. Is it going to be another season where things have to be perfect around him for him to be good? Because things aren't perfect right now, and he seems to be being brought down with it. And that can't happen if you're going to be a quarterback that rises above and deals with adversity and gets the team to the playoffs. So anybody who's ever been in a job or a relationship has conflicts, right? I used to work at McDonald's. I used to work at a grocery store and there were people that I worked with

that I would have conflicts with, but sometimes it would be like a one day type of thing where we have a bad day and you're arguing with the person and maybe you need to go to your separate sides of the grocery store that day. A manager doesn't get along with you or is mad at you for something. And then the next day you say like, you know, whatever, let's get over it. Let's move on. And then there are issues that go beyond that, that linger and that cause awkwardness, tension for long periods of time. And you would say that, you know, with relationships that you have with friends or with family or whatever. I feel like it's the same thing with cousins where a bad game against Chicago, where maybe there's a postgame comment someone doesn't

like or whatever, and you're getting ripped apart by ESPN for losing a football game. Well, they've all dealt with that before. That is a short-term one day. The NFL will move on the next week. You get it all strapped up again. You go back to practice. You shake it off and you go back out. That's something Kirk Cousins has dealt with many times. This one is different. I mean, this is an everyday thing that is not going away, that is going to continue to hang over this team. And there's no shaking it off, I don't think, because you have such differences of opinions in the locker room, in the front office, from the head coach.

And I just feel like these last couple of days watching him play football, he has been the shortest fuse I've seen for outbursts when things go wrong. And also the most off for someone who is a very talented and very experienced in this system quarterback who you would think would be operating much more comfortably at this point in training camp than he has been maybe some of that is shaking off missing those days but uh jake browning was once again the better of the two quarterbacks today

he made some good throws and they created some explosive plays during practice and if they maybe this sunday will help of them taking a whole day off and just sort of you know resetting the batteries but i don't know that it will and so this is going to be a thing to watch going forward is do they get this offense back on the same page especially without justin jefferson which we need to discuss as well. So your reaction to that, and then we can talk about Jefferson's injury. Yeah. I mean, this is not an easily correctable mistake to use the Christian ponder term. This isn't something that you can consult the film about and learn from and put behind you. I mean, the cat's out

of the bag. The press conference happened. It can't unhappen. And barring, I guess, an epiphany on Cousins' part where he kind of changes his mind about the vaccine and gets it, and his coach is very happy with him, and he has peace about it, this is going to linger because it's not like he can play a game the next week and do better and sort of right the wrongs that, you know, happened in the previous week's game. So you're right about that. This is a perpetual issue that might leak into the regular season. And we've kind of discussed at length, like of the problems that we've witnessed, you know, what's going to have the biggest impact on the 2021 Vikings. And this is becoming a bigger and bigger and bigger

storyline. So I, I'm not, well, I'm not going to say that cousins is like shot, you know, obviously we're not going to go that far. He's only been back for three practices since his return. Um, I don't know how much we're going to see of him in the preseason either. It's very possible that we go into the regular season kind of wondering if things are all right. And this might be a conversation topic for the next three, four weeks, especially if he doesn't have his full complement of receivers. It just might not look right. And we've seen bad preseasons before that look all right. And we've seen good preseasons where things go bad. So again, I don't want to put too much stock in it, but I think it's worth

keeping on the radar. I think I've said this before about what training camp means to me. And it's usually taking a snapshot of where the team is to start the season and getting a feel of the tenor of the team. So in 2017, when Sam Bradford jumped up on Mike Zimmer's back and knocked him over after throwing a touchdown and Delvin cook was as explosive as any player I've ever seen. Uh, and Stefan digs is roasting people and Bradford looks healthy and strong and everything, which obviously didn't last, but the defense is just tearing it up. You could really tell this is a good football team. And this is a football team that's on the same page. And that is starting to sort of discover its leader in, uh, Sam Bradford, which, uh, yeah, again, did not last past week one, but that was

the feeling coming out of that camp. This feels like 2018 because that was when John D. Filippo and Mike Zimmer and Kirk Cousins and the offensive line all sort of weren't on the same page or had some something going on. And I remember having a conversation with Robert Mays at that camp and he was like, you guys are going to be so good, this team. And we were like, I don't know, man. I mean, there's just something that feels wrong here. That was when Cousins got frustrated and threw the football into the road. He was so upset with the offense, defense, whatever was going on that day. And there were sort of little barbs that were being taken already. And so here we are with that same kind of tension. And if they don't find a way to move past this, I think we're going to get a lot of practices like this. And I think we're going to

get games like this. And then who knows where where this goes so they have several weeks here to figure out how to get past what has happened in early in camp and maybe that's the only silver lining is when it happened because if it happened right before the season you'd be picking them to go 6 and 11 right now the way that this team feels so let's move on to some other individual things that's just the feeling though from it was not a good practice at all for the first team offense um Osborne Smith-Marset Chad Beebe your guess is kind of as good as mine right now for where that stands because even though Osborne has been good um he seems to be the the wide receiver three but Chad Beebe is the more trusted guy Smith-Marset seems to be on the outside three, but Chad Beebe is the more trusted guy.

Smith-Marset seems to be on the outside of that, but I think he is more explosive than the other two. I think we feel like, what is the deal with D.D. Westbrook? Are we going to see D.D. Westbrook at some point here? But they have not really been given much of an opportunity since Jefferson went down, just the way that the practice reps have gone to really even shine since that happened when they got the opportunity because the offense has just not been operating well. Yeah, I I'm going to say something stunning right now. Prepare yourself. OK, I want to sit. You're standing right now.

You might want to sit down. OK, I'll lean on something. I don't think KJ Osborne has been as good with pads. Uh-huh, yep. And I live and die with every KJ rep, especially every KJ target. So I've watched them all closely. Especially since we bother you about it every day.

Right, I mean, yeah, and not just you. All of our colleagues are on me about it. I think he's been kind of on the wrong end of some bad throws. Like today, I believe it was Cousins tried to go deep to him and overthrew him. He was open. But it hasn't been like the stellar sparkling plays every day. Now, it's not like other players are doing that either. Like BB, to me, has been normal, if not maybe a little below average for what we've seen from him,

Smith-Marset has been elevated in the snap count by default. And I don't know if he's doing a lot with it. I mean, the only guy who's kind of got the green arrow upward trajectory is Blake Prohl right now, who is putting his name on the map. I don't know if he's a roster lock by any means, but he did make some really nice plays today. I thought he's made a few in the past couple of practices, but those guys look better when Justin Jefferson and Adam Thielen are attracting attention. So if you give a top

assignment to Patrick Peterson to guard KJ Osborne, well, yeah, he's not going to look as good. So that I think is maybe what's happening a little bit with this receiving core. It's definitely thin right now. Westbrook confounds me, but the fact that he's not on the pup tells me that in the team's mind, he's got to be somewhat close. But we haven't even seen him really do individuals. He's catching punts. That's it. My guess is they don't want him cutting on the knee, which means no route running. So it's going to be a bit for Westbrook. And I think Westbrook still has a place on this roster, like, you know, not only on the roster, but to contribute because you could do a timeshare at

wide receiver three and probably pull it off. You know, if Westbrook has a great week of practice, he can get the majority of reps. Osborne can fit in there too. Maybe it isn't one guy. You can ease Westbrook in and get him involved more as he gets healthier, but it's a little muddled right now. And I would have loved to see KJ explode kind of as the wide receiver one or two the last couple days. Hasn't happened, but I think you can't expect too much from the kid. Want to remind you to go to SodaStick.com to get your original Minnesota sports-inspired goods. If you have not seen it yet, you've got to check it out.

A couple of my favorite designs are the Duck Duck Gray Duck and the Randy Moss Goat goat which you've got to see all their apparel is screen printed here in minnesota on super soft super comfy shirts and hoodies you will love it we're going to hook you up with free shipping on your next order by the way use promo code purple insider for free shipping that's soda stick s-o-t-a-s-t-I-C-K.com. Original Minnesota sports inspired goods. Code Purple Insider for free shipping. Well, and this is why I think Chad Beebe at this moment with BC Johnson out for the season is probably safe in his position

that you have to have somebody who you can trust. And I know that fans are not ever excited about Chad Beebe making the team, but he continues to do it because of how much they trust him. The Westbrook situation, I agree. When someone's not even running routes yet and we're into August, that means you're just being pushed back all the time

because I know that it feels like, oh, it's early in camp. There's not even a preseason game yet. The guy's got plenty of time to ramp it up. What we know about these players and guys who have been injured in the past is if you aren't starting at the same starting gate as everybody else you are behind the whole way so we saw Pat Elfline not get in until week three of 2018 we saw Latavius Murray not have his full burst until probably week five or six of 2017 like these are similar types of injuries um Delvin Cook was kind of the maybe the outlier there when he got hurt but even uh dd westbrook got hurt later in the season with the acl injury

mike hughes missed a few games to start um 2019 after his acl injury so there's every injury that's ever happened and how people have come back but my point just being you cannot count on dd westbrook for week one we've talked about about Christian Derusaw for week one. Now let's get into Jefferson's injury specifically. Sort of an interesting turn of events. He goes down. Everyone is like, dead stop. Oh my God, what's happening, right? We all get the video from Andy Mack who got it and it looks bad. I mean, he immediately grabs his shoulder. Our friend Jeremiah Searles texts me that's an AC joint because he's just seen a lot of human beings get hurt, I guess. And Jeremiah was right.

And then the leaked reporting is, well, it's not that big of a deal. It's totally okay. But Jeremiah said, this is an injury that can keep you out for some weeks he i mean it's not devastating it's not career ending or season ending this isn't an ambulance showing up but i think that what's being put out there on the day to day or the no big deal is interesting because that doesn't really match up with what the injury is and i think that what we're going to see is maybe no Justin Jefferson in any preseason game, and they should slow play this as much as possible and not try to get it back out there. At the same time though, the

offense is not practicing particularly well. And sort of, you have this thing lining up of, is he going to miss a lot of practice before you go into week one? I will be very interested to see how accurate it is that it's like no big deal or that it's day-to-day because I feel like we've heard this many times with Vikings injuries, and I'm not trusting that yet. Not to say that he's going to miss the season or even week one. It's just the way the reporting sounds is if he's coming back like tomorrow, and I'm not sure that that's going to be the case so I guess we'll see yeah I would hold him out for joint practices for

sure because there might not be quite as much you know respect from an opponent's players to you know maybe not like hit him after the whistle like something something crazy like you don't want a Denver cornerback roughing him up or pressing him too hard or something. I think they hold them out this week. But the Rappaport tweet is a little more encouraging to me than even the Schefter tweet because Schefter had it so fast that there was just no way to have any information about it. They had to do further tests.

And then Rappaport seemingly had the information after some tests were done. And it's a spectrum, right? You know, there's grade one, grade two AC joint sprains. Sounds like this is the lesser type, the less serious type. And I look back at last year in the NFL, Cortland Sutton, wide receiver for the Broncos, had this injury September 10thth just a couple days before the regular season he missed one game and came back the next week so that's an encouraging timeline

because that would mean that he's good for the regular season Kyler Murray is a quarterback he had an AC joint sprain in his throwing arm and he played through it so you can come back pretty fast from this and maybe if it was the regular season, Jefferson wouldn't miss any time at all. But because you have the luxury of time, there's no reason to rush him. There's no reason to have him play against the Broncos next Saturday. Get him a couple snaps in the second one if you want, but I don't think it's necessary. I mean, I'm way more concerned about Jefferson being healthy for week one than I am about the offensive chemistry at this point. I think you've got to prioritize him being ready.

Treat him like you do Dalvin Cook. They've handled Dalvin Cook with kid gloves the last couple training camps, including this one. He barely did anything today. And it's not as if he's getting hit, you know, but they're not putting any mileage on him at all in August because they want him to be able to, you know, last into November and December. And if they handle Jefferson the same way, I'm fine with that. You're right that with this team, they don't have a lot of credibility for downplaying injuries. But, you know, even Patrick Peterson and Adam Thielen seem to be clued in that this wasn't going to be all that serious. Um, so I would guess we'll see him at practice before the end of the month for sure.

Um, is it next week? Maybe not, but my gut says that he's going to be fine. We'll see though. I'm not trying to yell fire. I'm just saying that when it comes to what they put out there about player injuries, I'm not willing to take that at face value because of the history and recent history of what's gone on there. And Mike Zimmer makes fun of us for the tweak thing.

And I get that because we made fun of him for the tweak thing. But Zimmer sort of tells it a little wrong. Like at first, yes, he may have thought it was a tweak, but then weeks and weeks later, he also called it a tweak and sort of downplayed it. And by that time they had to know it was much more serious. So yes, there's not much credit to be given for them with injuries and timelines and all that sort of stuff. And the people who told Ian Rappaport and Adam Schefter work for the Vikings. So clearly like putting these things together. So again, I'm not saying it's serious. I'm not saying he's going to be out for the year. I'm just saying, let's keep a close eye on this as you'd expect, but I wouldn't take it at face value

that he'll just like be back tomorrow. what record would the Vikings have if Justin Jefferson had been lost for the season on that play? Boy, I, um, I knock him down and remember I had him at 11 and six and that was before we knew Rogers was back. So, you know, that might change to like 10, 10 and a half. I'd probably knock him down to nine. You know, it's hard to give any one player a war of like a round number. That's not a decimal point less than one. But Justin Jefferson is the type of player that could be worth a win or two because he affects your quarterback and your quarterback is the engine. So if the quarterback, like if that's the engine and, you know, there's no, like, you know, if your car is running without oil in it, it's still going to run, but it's not going to run as well. And that's kind of what, you know,

Jefferson provides this offense is just it, the trickle down effect, Thielen gets tougher assignments and, you know, suddenly they can stack the box a little more confidently and stop delvin cook so it would be bad um i think they would lose one or two more games without him in the mix if it had been like a collarbone or something absurd but um i how do you view that i go to seven and ten wow because i i think that attempts to do wins above replacement mathematically are very strong for what someone was worth in terms of what the results were, but trying to project how that would change, like the quarterback, as you said, is worth the most wins. And if someone who goes out, who has the biggest impact on the quarterback, how do you separate those two things without Jefferson? i think that

opponents at this point in adam thielen's career can take him away we saw that in the first couple of weeks to the point where he's not as dominant and then who is next so if justin jefferson is even only 90 of justin jefferson i think you lose a game right there if he's not at 100 and isn't great because we've talked about the point with if you know everything isn't right for Kirk well that would be a thing that wouldn't be right for Kirk on a massive level and if he was gone for more than that I think that they're they're just not a very good offense without um Justin Jefferson so let's talk about a couple other things that we saw today um I'll start in a weird place. Danny Etling threw passes and didn't look terrible.

Danny Etling is a guy that the Vikings picked up off waivers, which makes me think, I don't know how long Nate Stanley is sticking around. Is that a weird place to start the observations in QB4? But it just made me think combine Zimmer's focus on availability, if you will, with the fact that Danny Etling did not look clueless playing NFL football out here with third teamers. I think they're going to go with him and probably cut Nate Stanley soon. Yeah. I thought you were going to go with Danny Chisna to start, but no, let's start with that link though. Um, that feels like almost better than

50, 50 that Stanley doesn't last on this team and it's not even exclusively the vaccine issue stanley just doesn't look very good his arm strength which i thought he was known for i i thought it was the accuracy that was his problem he doesn't look like he has great touch um around like on those short passes, like screens or even checkdowns. I feel like it's a struggle for him. I've not been impressed. And then the vaccine issue kind of is a tiebreaker, which is the team can't say that, but they can think that, and that can inform their decision to keep Ettling, quote unquote, based on performance.

And the performance has been fine. They don't have to make this decision for what is Mond on a 10 day timeline. So it'd be like Tuesday. We don't know because he's sick. So we don't know what type of, it's about the symptoms. Yeah. Yeah. We don't know what type of symptoms he has.

Well, I don't want to spend too much time on Danny. I was just saying that was sort of something that popped into my mind. Dan Chisna was good today. You mentioned Blake Prohl was good today. We're still rolling the Udo and Dozier thing, but I'm not sure that I spotted, I could be wrong, Wyatt Davis taking even second team reps today. I thought it was Udo and Dozier going back and forth, first team, second team, but he may have mixed in the second team.

I noticed mostly the third team. And I know zimmer has said why davis is very physical he sort of complimented him the other day but that one looks really far away i think i just said the other day that i would still bet on him to win the job and then i wonder if i should double back on that after today i mean because he really complimented only udo and what they like there and And then to see Wyatt Davis on the third string, maybe I should just live with that take that Wyatt Davis eventually will play out because of talent, but it seems like they're happy with Udo and not super happy with Wyatt Davis.

Yeah. Go back and watch the Mike Zimmer press conference. If you haven't, it's on our YouTube page. He, um, he had a lot of very candid stuff about the offensive line. And a lot of it was kind of pessimistic, like about Christian Derrissaw's timeline and talking about Wyatt Davis. He said he's physical, but, and whatever this means, Collar, that he needs to work on the bending. He needs to do the bending better. Same. But he went on to provide some more context as to why health is so important for these young guys. And both Davis and Derrissaw have not had perfect health. There are so many complexities for a rookie offensive lineman, especially on the interior,

where they might be blocking a three technique, a nose tackle, a linebacker. And when you lose any time in the preseason or the training camp, then you're getting behind on those nuances. So it was almost like Zimmer saying, this is why we can't bring rookies along as quickly as you guys want. He said, if all things were perfect, yeah, we want the rookies to play, but there's A, B, C, and D that they have to master first. It's way tougher than college, specifically on the offensive line. So it seemed like the beginning of Zimmer providing the reason why the rookies won't be playing. And in Wyatt Davis's case, yeah, he's getting the third team reps. And I think Zimmer did end his comment about Davis by saying, quote, he's got a chance. Doesn't feel like it right now, though, to my eye. And this is one where there is a long way to go. And we've seen rookies emerge before. But today

with him almost exclusively with the third team, that made me go, oh, I might have to walk back that take. But we'll see next week when we get a preseason game. If he's taking fourth quarter preseason reps, then we'll know he's way behind. If he's getting in preseason reps then we'll know he's way behind if he's getting in fairly quickly then we'll know okay he's right in the mix for that battle he's just mostly practicing with the second team right now as he gets back up to speed uh let me give you something that is a good note for the vikings defense michael pierce i was watching him one-on-ones and i guess this is good or bad, but I think it probably leans toward good.

He demolished Garrett Bradbury a couple of times, but just walked him back, basically picked him up one time and drove him back in one-on-ones, and then got a decent amount of 11-on-11 work. And so at least to my eye, Michael Pierce looks pretty good for someone who's coming back from the calf injury and who has not played. But he looked pretty good in those reps and maybe was one of the reasons the offense was struggling. Yeah, there was a run play when they had their preferred defensive line in there. It was Tomlinson, Pierce, and I think Weatherly and Hunter. They actually rotated Weatherly and Wanham, which is also interesting, but they ran a play up the middle against that front,

and the running back just disappeared. There was nowhere for him to go, and I bet Mike Zimmer is going to watch that on tape and say, hey, that's what we wanted. That's what we wanted all of last year, and we didn't have it, and finally, I can see what it looks like. Uh, that's what, it's clear to me that that is like a gigantic emphasis for, for Mike Zimmer is to have those big guys in there, stop the run on first down and get in some pass rushing situations. It couldn't be clearer that that's the intent of, of the Michael Pierce plus Delvin Tomlinson signings. Uh, and yeah, that is a positive step. They're working in Pierce slowly. That calf must be coming along. And Pierce told us it was coming along faster than expected.

The leaks that came out indicated that Pierce would miss a couple weeks of training camp. And we're getting to that stage. So I think that he's right on track. And he's looked good from what I've seen in the limited reps. I think Delvin Tomlinson also is just a really good football player. I noticed they moved him over the kind of the five technique, which is right directly over the tackle on a couple of plays and then had a linebacker come to the outside. So I wonder if they're sort of fiddling with how they're going to use some of these guys.

There were some blitzes that we saw that were sort of classic Zimmer type of blitzeses one of them worked for a pick six for dj want him uh but let's end on this which overall was an interesting practice and we're going to have more purpleinsider.substack.com to check out sort of the full breakdown anthony bar wasn't here wasn't in practice yesterday ryan connelly got out with the first team. We've seen Cam Smith mix in, Nick Vigil taking most of the snaps. There was a little Chaz Surratt, but mostly with the second team. Guy doesn't show up at all, even standing with a ball cap on the side for two straight practices.

I mean, what do we think here? I mean, this is obviously a thing to ask Mike Zimmer. It could be an absence. It could be an injury. But if this is another one of those, like, all the dominoes have to line up because if one of them falls, a lot of the things fall. And as much as you can debate Anthony Barr's contract, his cap hit, all those things, which actually is kind of overstated if

you look at what his cap hits have been. But anyway, it's not going to work. I mean, there's no Eric Wilson here. Nick Vigil is not Eric Wilson. And you're really lacking in any sort of playmaker or leader if Anthony Barr is out. And again, I don't know what it is. No one has told us. But to have him not here for two straight days is one of those things where you raise an eyebrow when it's someone coming off of a shoulder surgery that caused them the whole last season. Yeah. First time I've thought about Ryan Connolly, I think all camp, um, when I saw him today. So we've talked about how the team operates around injuries,

notable players. They often will clue in a national writer about what's going on. That hasn't happened with bar, which I guess might be a positive sign. If you're a Vikings fan, that this is some excused absence and, and confirm for me, he was not seen at Friday's practice?

Correct, Friday or today. And he wasn't obviously here today. So two days in a row. And to add to it, he was out the day before the vet day. And I think Mike Zimmer insinuated that he was kind of getting his own vet day, but it didn't align with the other vet days. We thought it was an injury. And then we kind of

thought, no, it's not an injury because he came back for one day and now he's gone for two. So all of that is a little convoluted, but we've seen this defense struggle without him. Now, there are other reasons for that, but just historically, it has not been as good when Anthony Barr's not on the field. And Eric Wilson made plays like his ability to just kind of get to the football, whether that being a sack or an interception or a forced fumble or a blocked kick. He just had a nose for it. I don't know if Nick Vigil or Troy Dye have that instinct. I'm not sure if Troy Dye is good. I know Nick Vigil is good in coverage, at least analytically. I haven't seen much of him. So yeah, I'd be a little worried if, I mean, and frankly, if either linebacker misses like any significant amount of time this year, I am going

to be worried because the depth that they have is not Anthony Barr. That's for sure. I think the sort of takeaway from this practice, just to sort of put a bow on all of this is the fragility of this team, that all the things we talked about, could they get the offense back together and on track? I would expect it. Is Jefferson's injury super serious? Probably not. Is Anthony Barr's absence the end of the world? Probably not. Is the offensive line situation a total wash already? Like, no, not necessarily, but these are a lot of things that are sort of stacking up and they have a month and a half here to resolve them. And, or just over a month, I guess it's what 36 days or something. And I think that that for me becomes like the broad storyline of this team is there's

a lot of boxes to sort of check off of resolutions to problems. Can you check them off? And some of them are health and we won't know, but can you get the offense back on track? Can these players get back up to health? Because if they do, then, you know, I think that there's a chance that they are the team we thought they were going to be and just went through a lot of stuff here. But if they don't, then it's a very tough starting point to the season. That's kind of how I am walking out of US Bank Stadium feeling today.

Yeah. And I think it's kind of last year a little bit, except the fragility is in different places. Last year, the cornerbacks were fragile. This year, not quite as much. It's the linebackers that are fragile. When last year, the linebackers had Eric Wilson. Last year, I would have said, now, granted, the offensive line was bad last year, and I think they were still kind of fragile, but I think it's even more so this year right because you had reef before and you knew what he was yeah exactly so I think that it's kind of shuffled around a bit and even as much as they've fortified this team like you know the defensive line better this year it was fragile last year um so I I think that to some extent, every NFL team has those areas. It just feels like this team, they are just under a microscope. They're extremely important positions that are fragile. And especially when you're talking about the psyche of your quarterback being one of the fragile things, that can be a concern. And then the group in front of him and

around him, like the offense was supposed to be the solid part of this team. And I think we're realizing that a couple of cracks in that foundation. I think that's a good way to put it. And we will be here with you along the way as we go forward, as they try to resolve the issues that we've laid out today. So it's never not interesting. And we will be back with you again very soon here on Purple Insider.