Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - Have the Vikings been unlucky?

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

Matthew Coller and former Viking Jeremiah Sirles talk about a metric that shows the Vikings as the most unlucky team in the NFL and discuss the dynamics of the trade deadline Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to another episode of Tuesday Morning Left Guard. Matthew Collar here with our left guard, Jeremiah Searles. And Jeremiah, I'm looking at your eyeballs. They seem to be still intact, meaning that they did not burn and fall out of your head after watching the tape of Vikings and Bears. But I have to say, I just, I just got done. I was just watching the game back on the all 22. And by the end, I was laughing at how many opportunities Justin Fields missed in this game. And I came to a conclusion, Justin Fields can't count. He doesn't know how to identify how many people are running at him and what to do afterward. And so if there's any conclusion to take away from that game it's that man can't continue to play football as a starting quarterback in the nfl

but other than that i don't know that's what i got i mean the biggest thing for me is that looked like a jv high school football game right the the turnovers there was a fantastic video someone put together on twitter whereas like every time someone in that game like dropped a ball or like there was like a pop out of it. It just was the sloppiest game I can remember to date of watching. Like it looked like preseason game two. We're not a single starters on the field. And you're like going through your Rolodex and the roster, like, who's that number 52 playing receiver? It was just so sloppy and brutal to watch. And I don't know.

Everyone says it. It's hard to win in Soldier Field. I get it. We came out of there with a win. And there's no easy Ws in the NFL. And I get all that. But to have this team where I thought the losing of Jefferson might kind of galvanize this offense, kind be like okay all of us are gonna have to pick up the slack with 18 out we're gonna come out here beat up on a bad Bears football team get ourselves on track and do all the things

very uninspiring kind of lackluster not a lot of effort it just didn't pop like this team is ready to try and galvanize it almost looks like they're teetering on i might just pack it in and call it a year i i do have to say though after watching the tape that i had texted you after the game and i said kevin o'connell said that kirk played pretty good and i don't know what to say about that because he averaged five and a half yards for pass attempt. I want to take it back a little, just a little slight attraction because there were two throws where he dropped absolute dimes. And I'm not even talking about the Addison one. The Addison one is a very hard catch. It's a good throw, but it's a very hard catch. But there are two that are about as routine as it gets for NFL players. One by Hawkinson and one by K.J. Osborne, that are just terrific throws by Kirk Cousins that are straight up bouncing right off the old mitts.

And this actually leads me to what I wanted to talk with you about, because there was a chart that was put out by ESPN about their luck factor and all the luck factors this year and who's lost the most expected points added. You'll never guess the Minnesota Vikings are last. They have the least luck in the NFL. But some of the factors that are attributed to luck, I'm not entirely sure that I fully agree. One of them is drop passes. another one is how many fumbles you've recovered or not recovered which you know is probably leaning more toward that how much luck would you attribute these first six games to their record versus their actual performance luck's a funny thing in the nfl you either have it or you don't and you know it's one of those things where the ball we call it the ball bouncing your way right that's kind of the the tape

lingo of like man the ball just didn't bounce our way there or whatever it may be and I don't know if the Vikings used up every single ounce and drop of that last year because the ball bounced the Vikings way a lot last year but it also does feel like it kind of comes in spades. Like once it's there, it just nothing can go wrong. Everything's going right. The one-handed catches, the punt drops on the three and bounces straight up in the air, and you miraculously catch it on the inch yard line and all those things.

But when you don't have it and you feel like you've got to press to make a play, sometimes that luck ends up just being more of anxiety and more of like tightness as a player of trying to force something to happen and then you make the routine things a lot harder because you're thinking about it instead of just like they become natural and I think that's part of what's going on with this Vikings offense right now is the ball hasn't bounced our way at all in the first six weeks I mean mean, fumbles, interceptions, first play of the game last week, the ball gets ripped out of Josh Oliver's hands. And those types of things start

to compound and live in the psyche of a football player. They live in the back of your brain and your subconscious where you're not actively thinking about it, but it's kind of always there. And it's always kind of picking at you like, Hey, we gotta be, we gotta be better. We can't have what happened last week happen or whatever it might be and you start pressing a little bit more a little bit more and you start to have a little bit more mental errors you have to start more mistakes and it just compounds on itself and so the unlucky streaks are really just kind of a accumulation of errors but there is a such a thing as luck in football there really is and for whatever reason the NFL is just certain teams have it and don't when

he bounces year to year but the vikings just don't have it this year they just they just don't and you can manufacture some of your own luck but i just don't think the ball's bouncing the vikings way this year definitely hasn't in a lot of ways i mean philadelphia brandon powell has a really good punt return to the other side of the field the plus side if, if you will. And then he gets it popped out. The guy's never fumbled in his life and then just has like this. That's a bad bounce. Even Josh Oliver. I mean, how many tight ends of his size and strength are having the ball come out, but maybe trying to do a little too much. TJ Hawkinson has not dropped this many passes in his career, but there is a part where I go back and go well hang on a second because you

almost lost to carolina and chicago if not for fumbles return for touchdown so that does have to count a little bit uh field goal kickers have been very good against the vikings we've come to expect that always and forever so that's another part of it too but i think that you know when you're asking kj osborne or asking tj hawkinson to make diving catches of which they should because they're supposed to be good players and those are balls that you expect a good player to catch but it seems like they've really required these windows to be very small on a lot of these plays for tj hawkinson and i don't know that that's ever really been his game and that's not to excuse it It's just to say how much is luck there? Strip sacks on Kirk cousins,

not luck. Those are a thing that have happened since when was he drafted 2012 to present? He has always stood in the pocket for too long. Hasn't moved, gotten strip sacked happens all the time. That's not a luck factor there. And so I wonder about last year when you talk about luck, like, okay, some of it, but Patrick Peterson is no stranger to catching interceptions as opposed to having the bounce off his face and go into the end zone for the Chargers. The fact that the Chargers caught those bounces certainly was a bad luck thing for the Vikings or the Justin Herbert didn't just overthrow everyone, which he chose to do against the Dallas Cowboys. But the point being that when you play on the razor's edge all the time and you're always having to hope someone makes a great catch, always having to

hope that you recover a fumble or don't get a strip sack or the other guy misses a field goal because you're playing this, this even type of game all the time. Sometimes you're going to have a run where a bunch of these things go wrong and you end up two and four. It's like, I feel you, but also there are some good teams that are among the worst lucky teams in the league, like Baltimore, that's still winning in part because they're a stronger team than you are. So this has always been the pendulum swing.

So I have empathy for it only to the point where they should probably be a four and two team instead of two and four but I don't know how much different I would feel about their long-term chances based on their strengths and weaknesses yeah you know and luck is is something you talk about usually like the end of game end of half right because those are the the parts you really look at of like you need the big catch or you need something to go your way but the teams that don't have to worry with that are the ones that take care of business in the first and the third quarter right that they're not having to manufacture some type of aha moment play there at the end of the game because they've taken care of establishing the run understanding what they

want to get to on offense and not putting themselves and giving the defense in third and long situations where they can blitz and go after and do what they want not letting the offense be in third and three and like good game management from that perspective on a player's side you know and you're in a rhythm versus at the end of the game like okay it's now it's do or die time now and everything's under the microscope. Every step matters. If your hat placement's wrong, a hold here,

the route is a half-yard shallow, whatever it may be, can kind of attribute to that idea of like, oh, that was unlucky or that was lucky, versus you look at teams that have some balls that don't bounce their way, but they're in control of their run game. They're in control of where they want to go. It doesn't seem like unlucky. It just seems like a minor fix.

And you nailed it just then when you're talking about when you live on the razor's edge, which the Vikings constantly do for a couple years now. We talked about last year. That team last year was very close to having four or five more losses on that L-com if things didn't go well at the end of the game, and we're not seeing them go right for us. So I don't think this team's drastically different in certain aspects from last year.

It's just we're putting ourselves in very similar situations at the end of the game, and we're not capitalizing. We're not going on top of what we can do to make the big play and go there. And we're asking TJ Hawkinson now to be our number one pass-catching guy now that Jefferson's out and you're putting more on his plate and you paid him so rightfully so right it's like hey buddy you're cashing that check every Wednesday like the rest of us and yours is a lot bigger than a lot of these dudes on here so you need to step up just like when you paid Kirk Cousins to be something

that he wasn't which was not Kirk Cousins he is what he is he you knew what he's going to be but that also goes back to we've talked about this for years when you pay people a certain amount of money you expect them to all of a sudden be something that they weren't the year before they haven't been through their whole career just because their paycheck is higher and that's something as a fan you got to look at and be like how different is Hawkinson from last year to this year or are we just expecting him to be a better player because we paid him x amount more dollars and that that's an attributing factor too not saying that guys don't get better over their time but to think that guys can take these giant ginormous leaps into the huge role player that they're going to be just because you paid them is not really something you can do as a player you are kind of who you are and i think the fans kind of can

spin themselves into that a little bit too 100 when someone gets paid the expectations rise for them and it changes how you view it and i think that that's a natural thing to do because you locked into tj hockinson not only are you down a second round draft pick for acquiring him but you're also down now a lot of cap space over the next couple of years. It's really like a three year contract. And is it too much to ask to bring in a second and 17 dime that hits you in the hands or, you know, a ball in the end zone, maybe turn your hands the right way so it bounces down if you don't catch it as opposed to volleyball uh my wife broadcasts big 10 volleyball and i see these great setters that's like what he did in that game set it right up and it's it's i mean i think that it's fair to look at him and also there were some run blocks in this game that just made me like oh tj my guy like come on what are we doing here and uh and there's a real contrast to watch Josh Oliver run block where he throws human beings like they're sacks of potatoes. And then TJ

Hawkinson, who always seems to be getting only about a shoulder pad or an arm when he's trying to block someone. And all the shortcomings start to really shine when you're looking at it through the lens of someone who's paid a lot of money. He's also had about as terrible of a start to really shine when you're looking at it through the lens of someone has paid a lot of money. He's also had about as terrible of a start to the season as you ever could have projected. Like this was not who he was last year with all these drops. He hasn't been as open. And I think that, but that's not luck.

I mean, that's a guy who's played badly and has hurt you. I mean, so that's where, okay. Yeah. There's been some fumbles that are bad luck because you didn't recover them and so forth. But also, if you have to rely on nobody playing bad, it's the same as the right guard discussion we've had many years in a row.

It's like, if you have to rely on no one on that offensive line ever struggling, it's going to be a rough ride for you. And I have very little sympathy for a team that ranks 27th in third down conversion percentage to say oh it was just those old football gods swinging the hammer at you i don't i don't know that makes it a little harder yeah and that goes back to and you might have the stats in front you i'd love to know what our our like average third and whatever is you know because i have a

feeling it's a lot worse than it was last year. Right. And most teams that are really terrible on third down conversion percentages are even worse on first down. Right. It all works together. And going back to the Hawkinson thing, it also is when you get paid a lot of money like that, you also get more attention from the opposing defenses, right? Because you're now known as the guy and I didn't see it as much this game with Chicago maybe a little bit but you know I would expect to see a little bit more safety over the top of TJ Hawkinson a little bit

more how do we disrupt him at the line of scrimmage how do we beat him up in the run game a little bit to try and get him off his game with the absence of Jefferson. And now you accumulate all of that with what the defenses are doing to Hawkinson and what they're going to do to Osborne, what they're going to do. Like they're, everything's going to be different the way that defenses attack this Viking offense now. And it's really going to be up to those guys to step up to the plate and say, all right, no Jefferson, we're all going to have to collectively play better. But when they all don't collectively no Jefferson, we're all going to have to collectively play better. But when they all don't collectively play better, and I'm going to say all because everyone took their turn in this game from Kirk to Alexander Madison to Hawkinson, Addison, like everyone took a turn of being poor, not just good.

And like, oh, well, he's a good player. Like they took turns of being poor. And when you're missing your superstar, you can't afford to have anyone playing poor. Everyone's got to be playing at least above board and on standard. And when you're taking your turns like that, you get results like we did. And luckily, we found a way to win that football game by the football gods on the defensive side of the ball.

But offensively, we have those type of performances. We're not going to be able to score enough points to win games this year because our defense is beat up again. You lose Davenport now for could be four to six weeks could be eight weeks who knows you know and so you we saw what this defense was without him at the beginning of the season we're going to start working our way back to what that may be this offense has to score 28 points a game to give us ourselves a chance to win folks if you know me then you understand how much i love going to sporting events when i go to another city what's the first thing i look for who else is playing when i'm going there to cover a game and i'll tell you what i'm using now these days to buy

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insider for 20 off your first purchase terms apply again create an account redeem the code insider for 20 off download game time today. Last minute tickets, lowest price guaranteed. Right. And that's what I'm tying it all back into because the discussion is this in regards to luck. What do you do at the trade deadline? That's what it really comes down to.

Do you believe that your luck can swing the same way? It kind of went back the other way against the Vikings at the end of last year and is not yet recovered like after the buffalo game there were a lot more things that went wrong from them including wearing the wrong cleats in uh lambo field at one point but it started to even back out after that and you could make the argument hey well eventually we're not going to fumble all the time and, and have it recovered by the other team. And we're going to recover some. And you saw it, like you said, start to come back in this game where they caught the interceptions, they picked up the fumble and ran it for a touchdown and so forth. And I wouldn't expect them to just make all these mistakes the

rest of the way. But when we go through, how have you played as a football player, Alexander Madison, both guards. I mean, Jordan Addison has been good as a sidecar to Justin Jefferson, little different story against Chicago. KJ Osborne has been disappointing. TJ Hawkinson has been disappointing. Oh yeah. And by the way, this side of the ball has to drive all your success because other quarterbacks, I mean, some aren't good, but I don't know that they could be worse than this from what we saw for, for Justin Fields. Like, so are, is this going to work? I mean, where you can't really run the ball 18 times for 44 yards and so forth. And you're

supposed to convince me that on a week to week basis, you are suddenly going to snap into it. And all these guys are just going to be magically much better. That's just a hard sell for me, which means that it is a sell for me still after this, that this didn't change my mind. Could be a real head-butting battle in the front office and at TCO Performance Center because I think the coaching staff wants to argue, hey, we've had bad luck. We could turn it around. Just give us time. And I think the front office probably wants to argue, we should trade Daniil Hunter for a second. How will this go?

How would they handle this? Man, this is a tough one for me because the the inner fan of me and a guy that played with Daniil and a guy that loves the Vikings can't imagine what it would be like to ship off your your guy right he's been the guy on that defense for a long time but the 30,000 foot view put my GM and my owner hat on you start looking at this and you have to be you have to be realistic about what this team's potential is this year and no one on that team is going to say our goal is just to try and you know go 500 and maybe sneak them back door away into the playoffs the goal of the Vikings is like every other 32 teams the NFL to win a Super Bowl and I think right now you look at this Vikings

roster and you go we have certain pieces in which we think we could be a Super Bowl contender on offense and a couple on defense but overall we're not close we're not close and if we just keep banging our heads against the wall and we're down a second round pick and we have this guy that has trade value and can help us in the future of this team as the gm you have to go all right i gotta make a tough move here but this is why they pay me to wear the gm hat and i'm gonna take heat right there's no way you don't take heat for it but if you do it and it plays listen to me if you do this you better have a strategy put in place to tell people why you did it right just to do it and to trade daniel hunter all pro level

caliber guy and just be like well you know we thought we could get some picks from him in the future like you have to have a roadmap to why this makes sense and you have to go through it with everyone in that front office and come to an agreement of like if we do this we are doing xyz after it and if we just do this to do it, then we're toast. We're done. We're crushed. But I can see a path in which they have a plan to trade Daniil Hunter, get maybe something out of the trade to help build a young player

maybe for next year that's on the rise, and then get some draft capital out of him, and then say, okay, our plan is to go get another edge rusher in the draft or bolster up this XYZ position. We're going to leverage it into getting this and all of that. And I think all of that makes a lot of sense. But then you flip it back to the coaching side and the coaches go, well, how do you expect me to win when you trade away my best players? And that is where you say the headbutt.

You're exactly right, because that is the inner workings of a team where everyone says we're all on board. We're all in this thing together. We're all family. But at the end of the day there's the owner the gm the head coach position coach and the players and the only people that the owners are afraid of are the fans that's it they're the only ones that they're afraid of and so this this goes south the owners are going to look at the gm the gm's gonna look at the coach and and it goes right down the line right that's the old adage that poop rolls downhill right and it all ends up down at the bottom. But I think you got to trade him.

I think all that to say, I think you got to trade him. You've got to find some draft capital and build for the future of this team because this team's just not good enough right now. You can absolutely talk me into this team getting back in the playoff race. I fully believe it. We've seen it from Kirk Cousins before, but will they actually make the playoffs? No, I don't think they will. Because when you look at their schedule, they could get to six and six or something at some point, but then they have the

Lions twice and the Lions are for real. Jared Goff is 13 and four in his last 17 games. Their offense is rolling. Their offensive line is fantastic. Jamison Williams stepped up last week. So now they got another guy, it looks like, and their defense is coming along. So that team's winning the division. They're stronger than you. You got to beat them twice. Cincinnati looks like they're getting it together after the early injury screwed with Joe Burrow. That last set of the season is very, very difficult. And so, yeah, you can have like a fake little banner, got back into the playoff race like they got for 2020 and 2021. But we have seen this movie so many times before,

so much to the point that the Vikings in 2020 beat the Chicago bears 19 to 13 in a game where they barely allowed any passing yards. And we went like, Oh, they're coming along into the playoff race. And the same thing happened. They're also another injury away on defense from being pretty much a disaster. As long as again, they're not playing Justin Fields. So even though I think that the, that the coaching staff has a, has an argument and they could even use analytics to make their argument, like, look, we've just had bad luck here. Knowing the personnel, knowing the players and who they have and the upside to this team, I think that there really isn't much of an argument to keep Daniil Hunter, but I can see where the coaches would resent the

heck out of that. But then you go down the road here, you've decided year after year, you're not paying him. And you could have extended him last year. You could have extended him this year. And if you weren't going to do that and you were all on board with not doing that, well, you can't be mad now when it's time to trade him. That's how I look at it. If you didn't pay him, maybe, well, you know, who knows? This is why the collaboration thing thing we all kind of went like okay we'll see everybody have fun collaborating because the decisions like this are extremely hard and that's where they kind of sow some seeds of resentment if things don't get

turned around really quickly and resentment that's that's why you always want to say it's a united front, right? And I think right now it's like the old high school debate team. You have coaching staff in front office, and the owners are going, make your case. And whoever makes the best case is going to win, but the other guy has to get on board with it. Whoever loses, whether it's Kwesi or whether it's KOC, has to get on board and can't let a Zimmer or Spielman situation 2.0 manifest where they don't speak, they don't talk, each other. You're just kind of coming to work every day. Like, what are we even doing? Like, what's the point? If we can't even get our crap together upstairs,

like how we expect them to be able to get the crap, to put it on the field for us to go do our best. Right. And the funny part is like the young players have no idea what's going on. And this team is very young in certain spots, right? They're just trying to survive week to week and hoping that they don't come in on a Tuesday and see their position group working out on the field for their replacements, right?

They're just trying to survive. And so there's the other piece of that of, are we sending a message to this team that's the right message, which is we're rebuilding or we're still being competitive. So whoever wins that debate between those two, get on board and then deliver that message to the team

of like, listen, we're not rolling over, right? You're never going to tell your team, we're tanking, right message to the team of like listen we're not rolling over right you're never going to tell your team we're tanking right that's not a thing we're not rolling over but we're being realistic and we are building this team to be a super bowl contender and that might mean taking some l's now and understanding that this is the program and the organization in which i run and i put my stamp on and everyone just has to get on board and understand that but there's not a player on that team that thinks they're a Superbowl contender. I've been in locker rooms where we know we're like, Hey, we're a good team or we're a bad team or we're middle of the road team, but you know, if you're a contender or not, and no one on that team is dumb enough. I think to think like we're making a run, we're going to the Superbowl with the personnel that we

have. Here's, here's when you're a Superbowl contender, when Debo Samuel and Christian McCaffrey are both unclear for the next game. And I think Trent Williams banged up too. And you're six and a half point favorites on the road. That's when you'll know that you're a Superbowl contender as the San Francisco 49ers are. But so I'm not just to be clear, I'm not reporting that. I know there's some headbutting or anything. What I'm saying is we've seen this. I just want to be clear. So nobody thinks I'm saying like, oh, yeah, there's this dissent in the what I'm not saying.

I'm saying that this is the type of situation where you really do have to be very strongly connected. But also, Kevin O'Connell has to have a message for the locker room as they send out potentially one of their best players. Everyone's going to know the deal. If Daniil goes, I mean, if you take away Daniil sacks this year, they go from eighth to 28th in where they rank in total team sacks. Everybody knows, especially without Davenport, this train is going into tank land. If they don't have him on defense and they won't be able to pressure anybody. And that's going to be hard for those players, especially inexperienced players, to keep D'Affo Mensah and Kevin O'Connell. And I want to see how it plays out. And if there is not a trade of the Neil Hunter, because they're three and five, I'm going to ask how you're different because that's what the last

group would have done. And so that means either the ownership is the ownership and there's nothing that will ever change as long as they're going to do this way or that the coaching staff won out and that you know then i guess we're going to know who runs the team so this is this is going to be very telling i think um what do you think they could get back for daniel by the way like from another team yeah i think a second i think a second round pick and probably another player right like whatever you deem maybe a rotational edge rusher or maybe a linebacker you know something along those lines is he's worth that I don't think you get a first out of him based off his age you know it's hard to get a first round pick for a guy like that just that's older has some injury history but I think you can

get a second out of him and another role player type of guy and again you want to get that role player that's a young player on a rookie contract most likely that's cheap but has potential upside to be a contributor even this year you know but I think as you as you were talking about the the Daniil thing about going 8th to 28th that in itself is a message to the locker room of are we willing to hang the fact that we can even be remotely competitive on defense on the fact that this guy doesn't get hurt, right? Are we willing to say that as long as he is healthy, we know we can contribute, and then what happens when he gets hurt and we're standing here with our, you know what, in our hand going, man, we should have made a move.

And I think everyone can understand that. And also, there's probably a lot of guys that have respect for Daniil that are like, man, you're getting a little older. Let's go let you make a run. Like the J.J. Watt effect in Houston was like, we release you. Go be free. But I think there's a way that you can do it in a respectful way of saying like, we understand the caliber player. Daniil is, we wished him,

we wish he could stay on our team, but we can't hang our hat on the fact that he's going to be our only contributor. We have to start building for the future. And we got a second round pick out of him. We got a role player that we're going to be able to put in and fit in this year. Now the rest of you,

it's time to step up and see if you're going to be a contributor for us. We're going to have tryouts the rest of the year, right? Like here we go. Who's going to be with us. Who's going to step up and see if you're going to be a contributor for us, we're going to have tryouts the rest of the year, right? Like, here we go. Who's going to be with us? Who's going to step up and show us we can fill Daniil's shoes and we can be a dependable guy for us next year. But it's going to be hard either way, you know, because if you keep him, the questions

aren't going to stop. You get rid of them. The questions aren't going to stop. And I have no idea which way either one of these teams, which way this organization is leaning right now. I don't think anyone does. Folks, if you've been listening to the show, then you know how much fun we have been having with prize picks this year.

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and then he gets banged up the next week and you passed up a potential second round draft pick for a week of daniel hunter you're gonna look like a total fool i mean really unless your defense turns into an elite group over the season not likely and you become a super bowl contender at some point the bar for making that move right by keeping him is extremely high it means that you need to make the playoffs you probably need to make a playoff game because the bet is right now, according to the DVOA stats, they have about a 15% chance of making the playoffs. Like to me, that's not a good bet to make that you're, that you're going to get there. If they beat San Francisco and green Bay, maybe it's a different discussion. Probably is. If they beat those two teams, we're kind of assuming baked into this conversation that they

will not beat San Francisco. And I want to get to that, but I also want to get your reaction to Jason Lock on four is the latest of three NFL insider writers who have said and hinted at maybe the Vikings won't move on from Kirk Cousins after this season. And I've noticed during the Adafo Mensah and O'Connell era, the insiders have been on the outside a lot more often, just in terms of how accurate their prognostications have been about what moves are going to be made and so forth but at least notable why do we think that this is coming out there because somebody is telling them that that's possible you know i think the biggest thing and i actually saw i saw a couple of things articles and some stories on that this weekend and the one thing i did agree with is i heard someone saying that they're afraid they can't find something better and that's the biggest fear of getting rid of any quarterback that is consistent in the NFL is it is a dice roll.

You see it year in and year out in the draft. The guy that you think is going to be the guy goes up in flames and you just bought him for four years. Trey Lance is an example. Right. And so I think that there's this idea that we can win with Kirk. It's been proven we can win with Kirk. It's been proven. We can win with Kirk. If we just,

again, it goes back to the idea that was 2019, 2020. If we just build around Kirk cousins, then we can, we can make this work. But what everyone forgets is the teams that make runs, the teams that are going to the super bowl and the playoffs year in and

year out are guys on rookie deals. Initially, when you can build the team around them, around young players on rookie deals at the quarterback position, and then you have to pay the quarterback, and then you've got about a two-, three-year window there to really go win the whole thing. And right now, if you want to keep Kirk Cousins,

you've got to keep paying him big-time money. That's just the nature of where he's at in his career and what he's earned to be paid the way he's paid. But I think it all just comes back to a fear factor of if we move on from Kirk and we miss in a draft or we miss in a free agent or whatever it may be everyone's going to be asking why we left Kirk Cousins here and that's just nature of the NFL that's just the nature of the beast of you have to make the hard decision if you're going to do a full reset and let your franchise

quarterback of the last five six years go you can't miss you physically you just can't do it or you're going to slip into a decade of mediocrity and i think that's the biggest fear piece of why you're starting to hear some rumblings of well maybe we do just keep eight back there for another year or two and see what happens i also wondered if kirk wants to stay and he is hearing he'll say that he's not but even if he wasn't we told him about trade rumors and suddenly he gets asked in a press conference about trade rumors and then we get three insiders saying oh no actually they might keep him like that sounds like a k Kirk told you or a Kirk agent. I mean, clearly Kirk enjoys being in Minnesota. He's got the best receiver on earth. It's got

the best facilities on earth. It's got the best stadium on earth. And he's got a coach that is in his corner way more than the last guy and probably way more than anyone he's had since he was with Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVay in the early days in Washington. And it's a very comfortable situation for Kirk cousins. So I don't blame him. I live here too. I like it. I'm going to stay. But when you've gone through all this and you've talked yourself into that very same thing, I remember the previous regime saying, how are we going to find a better quarterback and getting fired that's what happened to the previous regime and yeah yeah you know what here's the reality if they pick the wrong

quarterback in this next year's draft they will be fired because everyone who picks the wrong quarterback gets fired unless unless you you know fall backwards into like some veteran quarterback comes and bails you out right but other than that you're usually or you find brock purdy you find brock purdy with the last pick or like dac prescott in the fourth right there are instances like that but yeah when you draft a quarterback you're not just saying oh i'm betting on this guy you're betting the gm's family you're betting your family like you're going all in that this is going to work because it's no secret. If this doesn't happen, they're going to start over and we're going to be out of a job.

And I think that is a definite fear factor that plays into GMs and head coaches' minds a lot, especially young head coaches and young GMs that are early in their career. Think of it as if there's roads here to follow and the stick with Kirk road takes you to being fairly competitive, but never really competing for a super bowl. And also, is he going to get better at age 36 and 37? I don't know that that's possible. So that probably leads you to never meeting expectations. The road of

drafting a bad quarterback leads you to absolute firing the road to drafting the right quarterback or even right enough to be, to be a Brock Purdy or to be, I don't know, a tool like right enough that leads you to you're a genius, right? That leads you to you look great as a coach. You look super. And the thing that I just can't get over is when I watched each week back, Christian Derrissaw is unbelievable. And Justin Jefferson is unbelievable. And so they've got this foundation of the two most valuable positions in the sport

to hand the next guy. And to me, I'm rolling the dice. And even if the guy's not perfect, he's going to be cheap and you can rebuild the defense. I think Brian Flores is going to be here a little while and he's making a lot of chicken salad out of, you know what? So, like, I like that bet. And if they don't make that bet, then I i just got i got nothing i don't know how we i don't this this might be overdramatic i don't know how we carry on i don't know what to tell anyone anymore i i just don't like i don't know what i'm supposed to say to the audience about

hey maybe if this goes this way and that way and also it will tell me why did you hire quesia dafomensa as general manager when you could have just kept rick spielman and kept doing the rick spielman things to me tearing the team apart last off season was the anti-spielman thing that i liked the most so i think that the insiders have been on the outside the whole time i think it's kirk's side who wants to stay here and i don't blame them and i'm not criticizing that but if they if go down that path, I will have no explanation for it whatsoever. Do you think, again, you live there, I live there too, I feel like the whole fan base, the whole media,

would give a lot more grace to KOC and to Kwezi if they did just start over. I think there'd be a lot more grace of like okay let's see if you can build this team with the new quarterback and through the draft and through free agency now that we don't have a quarterback that's just got us by the balls on the cap right let's see if you guys are worth your salt versus you keep Kirk Cousins the pressure is going to only in my opinion get dialed up would you do you with that? Or do you think I'm kind of off base there? If they keep Kirk cousins next year, if they come any short of the NFC championship, they don't deserve to have their jobs. Like that's how, to me, that's

how, how important that is. Like the bar right for this year was competitive rebuild whatever but if you stick with him and he's 37 36 then you absolutely have to win i don't want to hear about fumbles or missed field goals or any of that nonsense like you absolutely have to win but also we're going to be going on year seven of not winning like look at the teams look at the teams that bailed and what happened to the quarterbacks before that and this doesn't count the Lions because they intentionally were tanking and rebuilding. And they also got a darn good quarterback back for Matt Stafford. That's like the Diggs Jefferson trade. Like that worked out for everybody.

But Derek Carr, not looking good in New Orleans. Russell Wilson, we went like, oh, Seattle's really tanking and bailing on Russell Wilson. Well, they kind of knew what the deal was, and they knew they needed to rebuild that thing. And I think that, I mean, even, gosh, even the New England Patriots moving on from Brady, Brady could still play and win the Super Bowl, but he wasn't going to do it there with that team. He was not the same quarterback when he went to Tampa Bay. Like, knowing when to let that guy go is quite a skill because if you hang on too long, you get like Matt Ryan in Atlanta where you just get wasted season after

wasted season. So I would say that the bar goes way up to every week is an indictment on that decision that you made. And instead on the other side of that, like you said, I would be very willing to give them like two full years to see how it plays out, see where it stands with their quarterback draft pick and and be much more reasonable toward like this is the long term plan to try to aim for a Super Bowl, as opposed to just pushing the chips to the middle of the table with a quarterback who's never gotten you there. The hard part for me is this team is too talented to think that they're going to be the bills of 2018 or the bangles of 2020, where they're going to pick one or two overall. Right. Where you're going to truly feel like you're going to get that difference maker. Right.

I don't know how many quarterbacks drafted in the middle part of the first round. I've been like the difference maker, the guy guy because this team has got so many pieces of Jefferson like you said Jefferson and Derisaw where you can bring in if you if you picked up Caleb Williams Drake May and threw them in this system I think they're going to have immediate success the problem is I don't know if those guys are there based off of how good this team can be now it could spiral out of control really quickly, and we could be picking top five, top ten. I think that is probably the path that no one wants in the front office

but secretly goes to bed at night praying for. It's one of those things of like, God, I hope we win, but I really like Caleb Williams. It goes back and forth, but I think this team is really a young quarterback away because you see what happened to Cincinnati, San Diego, Buffalo. When they bring in this new quarterback, you kind of get new life into the team. There's a rejuvenation of everyone on board that really starts thinking future. Future.

What is this guy going to be? Let's rally around him and give him every tool imaginable give him everything he needs to make him as great as he can be understand we're going to have rookie lumps along the way but I think that's got to be the play that's got to be the play it's got to be what you do because you can't go sign a veteran quarterback off the street there's not a big veteran free agent quarterback this year there isn't there's not one that you're like that guy right there is the one we're going to target and pay 150 million to there isn't one of those on the street you got to build it through the draft

and you got to build it through the future so I'm all on board for for drafting a first guy and moving on from Kirk Cousins but there will be that factor of you better hit you better hit and this is going to be what you will be judged for for the next decade in the NFL for the guy that either got it right or got it wrong. So I made a list in a Friday mailbag the other day, which, by the way, sign up for the newsletter. Purple insider dot sub stack dot com to a to a win. Fifth, Herbert sixth hurts. Fifty third. Alan's seventh.

Lamar Jackson. Thirty second. Mahomes tenth. And the once great Deshaun Watson 12th so just over the last few years of obviously I threw out the guys who drafted number one who've turned out to be good like Burrow and Trevor Lawrence there's still a lot of good quarterbacks there I think if you're drafting one 20th like Kenny Pickett who's years old. Maybe that's not the best play, but if the guy is a top 10 talent, I think your odds are just as good as a, as probably a coin flip and whatever

side that coin lands on is going to determine your fate. And it's really, really hard to tell as we're seeing from Bryce young, it wasn't just the Panthers who thought he was the best quarterback. It was every draft analyst as well. C.J. Stroud, Anthony Richardson, sometimes it's the second guy taken. Sometimes it's the fifth guy taken who turns out to be the best. It's very hard to say. And I think that that's the terror. That's what they go to bed at night knowing is if we do that, that's what happens.

But to me, the odds are shifted in your favor by circumstance, and nobody shows that better than Brock Purdy. And nobody showed it better in 2017 than Case Keenum. I mean, this happens all the time. So it's a very interesting discussion that it's popping up now, and I kind of wondered why. But anyway, what do you give them for a chance to beat the 49ers? Not high.

I mean, I think even with that team missing a few of their key pieces, coming off a bad loss to the Cleveland Browns, you saw the Eagles and the Niners lost this week. If I was a betting man, I'd bet my house on both those teams to have big bounce-back games. They're too talented. They're too good. They have too much at stake.

They both know they have too much at stake they both know they have too much at stake and you know i think the niners probably come out and roll just based off of a their defense is still incredible and b their offense is not going to be held down like that two weeks in a row so 10 chance i don't think it's that high i i don't yeah i mean if justin jefferson is playing the ball bounces our way. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. The San Francisco 49ers set a record for fumbles inside of a dome on Sunday,

19 fumbles and the Vikings one by three. Yeah. So it's, I agree with you that the team strength, it's two teams that are playing in completely different universes. The point differential is like 97 or something plus 97 for the 49ers and minus six for the Vikings. It's a, it's a huge disadvantage. You get them at home, but we haven't seen a whole lot of home field advantage since I'm not really

sure when, um, because I think that you talk about the fans and moving on from the quarterback. I mean, I think the fans every week, you see this where they start out the game and they're like, all right, football, let's go. And then as soon as something goes wrong, they're just like, ah, there it happens again. And it is not the same atmosphere. And I think you need something to breathe some new life into that. O'Connell did last year, but we've kind of returned to that. I don't know. Very quick. Love to see it, hate to see it. I sat in a hotel room in Chicago the other day and watched college football for the entire day. And I just loved it. I mean, I just love to see it.

Michael Penix, I love watching him play football. I'm not a scout. I don't know if he'll be good, but man, is he a lot of fun. Just great games all day long. This college football slate where it doesn't feel like one team is just a lock dead. They're going to kill everybody and win the national championship. It's been so interesting and fun this year, despite the players making some money. Gosh, who would have thought?

I'm going to start with I hate to see it. I hate to see all the pregamegame fight bs like I don't I don't really understand it like there's no reason for it like wait 20 more minutes and go smack the crap out of him when it's legal and you're in between this fighting thing that's gotten kind of like almost every week now you're seeing a pre-game skirmish or a pre-game scuffle or whatever it might be I'm just sick of it. I don't think there's a place for it in our game. I don't think it does good for the young players watching. I don't think it does good for the players on the field. All you're doing is giving away money.

You're putting an opportunity to get yourself hurt. I just don't like it. I think that the NFL needs to come out and basically be like, you do that pregame, you're out. You're ejected. Gone. See it. If you want to start something pregame at the 50 yard line for no reason and punches are being thrown and Trent Williams is coming in and body slamming a DB like there's just no place for that and I really don't like that that's becoming something as a storyline in the NFL right now I hate to see it in both uh games, referees just in general. I mean, the, the end of the game, basically daring the refs, you won't call it twice. And they didn't. And the giants lost because of that.

Buffalo should have been ashamed of themselves for the overall performance anyway, but that should have been a hold or an interference or whatever you wanted to call it. And everybody's right when they say that, well, they wouldn't do it two times in a row, not in Buffalo. And they didn't and credit to the corner for thinking, no, I'm just gonna grab this guy and we'll make them call that. And then, you know, I felt the same way last night where it was just like flag, flag, flag, please, please. If it, it just, it slows down the game so much. I mean, sometimes you can just kind of have to be a little more discerning. So I, the, the referees for the first time this year really got on my nerves.

Yeah. My quick love to see it is, is Justin Pugh for the giants. You know, the dude is, knows exactly what he is. He knows exactly what he's doing. He has a, he has a moment of Sunday night football straight from the couch right and then to go out there start at left guard have the plan to be 25 snaps and just kind of get you back in the swing of things and then be like hey by the way I know Leonard Floyd and Von Miller out there on the road in Buffalo go play left tackle and to

go out there and play fairly well I'm gonna give his offense I going to give him as an offensive lineman some kudos. He hung in there. He played well. Probably played himself into finding another home for at least one more year, one more credited season stamped on the books. Shout out to that guy for really coming out and just figuring it out on a really tough environment.

Along the very same lines, to end the show, good for you, Brian Hoyer. Go get him, my guy, like the Brian Hoyers of the world are so incredible to me. There's no reason talent wise, why they're still here for, for the most part, but these guys have grinded out. They've accepted their role. They bounced a bunch of different cities. They moved their families around. They fought for these careers as hard as anybody can. And then to come in and beat his old team and beat his old coach. That is very cool.

Good for you, Brian Hoyer. And that is where we will end the show. But we'll see how it goes. We'll see what kind of film we're talking about next week, Vikings and 49ers. And, hey, change my mind. Change my mind, Vikings. You beat the 49ers, you can change my mind. And we'll feel uh pretty differently on

well tuesday actually when we you know break it down so thanks as always jeremiah and uh thanks everybody for watching slash listening and we'll see y'all soon later