Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - PFF's Kevin Cole explains how strange the 2022 NFL season has been and what it means for the Vikings

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

PFF data scientist Kevin Cole, host of the "Unexpected Points" podcast, analyzes the weirdest year in recent memory and how that impacts the Minnesota Vikings' chances. Kevin's numbers aren't screaming Super Bowl for the Vikings but most teams outside of the AFC are sputtering. Where can the Vikings improve? How can increased aggressiveness unlock the answers? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Purple Insider presented by Liquid Death. Go to liquiddeath.com slash insider and learn about the Tallboy can, which actually has water. Find out where you can get it near you at liquiddeath.com slash insider. Hello, welcome to another episode of Purple Insider, and we welcome a returning guest, Kevin Cole, Pro Football Focus, a data scientist, and the Unexpected Points podcast, which remains my favorite name of any podcast, which says something

about you and how nerdy you are and me and how nerdy I am. But I think it's very clever and you're doing a great job, Kevin. What is up, my friend? Well, I appreciate the kind words. I appreciate that you and my nine, 10, sometimes 12 listeners all appreciate the name of that podcast. We're fighting, we're fighting against, you know, big football, basically it's us, it's us against them. And there are dozens of us. There are dozens, literally dozens. So, but no, one of the things that you've been talking about a lot on your show is really captivated me which is you will tweet this out from time to time and the whole world will lose its mind at you including vikings fans when you tweet what you would have expected the score to be based on the way two teams played

and the vikings don't have many wins by that metric because like we've been watching they have been outplayed in some of the games that they've won and sometimes against not very good opponents like the Detroit lions. For example, uh, I would love you to explain that though, how you're looking at these games from a statistical perspective that isn't just on what the score actually was, which can be affected by randomness of which the Vikings have benefited from. But what this metric is supposed to tell us. Sure, sure. So that's the basic gist of it, right?

Is to say, what are the most random things that are happening in NFL games? What are the things where how good you've been at them in the past has the least predictive power on how good you will be at them in the future. And then try to downweight how important those are. It's not getting rid of them. We're not just tossing them out, but try to downweight how important that is. And then also make some adjustments based upon special PFF metrics that we have, like dropped interceptions or vice versa, dropped passes, which are very random. I know you could say, well, the player didn't make the catch. So therefore you are what your score, you are your record.

Bill Parcells is like, you know, it's owning nerds over the generations still. I'm sure he enjoys that by saying that, because that can always be the comeback to everything. But all I was trying to do is get a little bit better idea. And I think it matches most people's intuition on how things were, but yet it's interpreted in some way as if I'm compiling a dossier to break into the league offices and change everyone's records after the fact and take away, you know, playoff bids and rearrange everything. And I admit it's dunkable content. So, but part of that is

actually getting me more exposure to the fact that people can talk about, you know, who's going to be the adjusted champion, who's going to be the adjusted playoffs, here are the adjusted this, the adjusted that. So I get all that, but it's really just trying to get an idea of how well were the internal kind of stable metrics of this team,

how many points you would expected versus how many points they actually scored and then do that for both teams. And then you have a score at the end of the game that doesn't necessarily match perfectly what the actual score was. So here's my question by these numbers, the Vikings are a lot more questionable than their five one and one record would suggest. However, when you look at the landscape of the entire league, who is not questionable? There's like three or four teams.

I'm not even sure there's a fourth, maybe Cincinnati. I've kind of been starting to buy in a little bit to them. But aside from that, I mean, most teams have some major, major problems. And where the Vikings stand at this moment, it's like one of the consistent things I've said on the show is who's going to stop them from continuing to do this. And the answer on their schedule is there's only a couple of teams. I mean, even just the disasters that have happened to in the last few days, the Matt Ryan benching, the Elijah Vera Tucker and Brees Hall injuries, like all these things are going

wrong to future Vikings opponents. And it feels like if there's ever been a year where you can play like not that great, not Buffalo bills, great, not 1994 49ers grade, and still make a pretty strong case for yourself. This would be the year. Oh yeah. This would be the year. And the NFC would be the conference in this year also because if we're talking about the nfc you have the eagles and then you're just like okay what else we got going on over here um i mean i think one of the things for the vikings were maybe like my power rankings which are derived

off of some preseason expectations and then also what's happened this season maybe i do have them lower than some other teams because you know for the for the Cowboys, you might be able to say, OK, I'm pretty confident like they have like a top five ish sort of defense in the NFL or the Bucs, even though they haven't done well. It's like, well, maybe they'll get healthy. We've seen this sort of level for them. I think for the Vikings, I still think the upside is probably a team that you could call like a top 12 NFL team as an upside sort of thing. So for that reason, maybe I view them as being a bit lower. But as far as the adjusted scores are concerned, you know, they haven't won games by a lot of points either other than the Packers game. So it just really shows the volatility

in these one score games, where if you win by three points versus you lose by three points, it doesn't really mean that you solved everything and your coaches outwitted them all and you had the grit in the end and the, and the stability, it just means, you know, you flipped a coin and you did well to an, to a, to a point, obviously there's more to it than that, but there's a large degree

of variance that we don't know what to do with as football fans. So normally we either put that on some sort of like toughness sort of thing. And even more so we put on the coach because the, cause we don't know what the hell the coach is doing. Most of the time we, we know the fourth down decisions. We know how they talk. We can see some of the stuff on the field, but we don't know like 90% of what they're doing. So if the team is outperforming or underperforming,

we're like, oh man, that coach is great or as bad. And that's why we get these coach of the year awards that come out. And it's normally the coach who outperforms in these one score games more than anyone else. Yeah, that's right.

Instead of the team that goes 14 and three than anyone else. Yeah, that's right. Instead of the team that goes 14 and three or something, it's, it's usually, it's usually just the guy who we thought was going to stink and then turned out to be better than that, uh, that gets it, which Kevin O'Connell certainly could be in that ballpark. Although I think that the expectations for the Vikings were that they reached the playoffs. I think their Vegas over under started at like eight and then ended up going before the beginning of the season at maybe nine and a half. So your expectations were fairly high that this would be who you're going to be. I guess my question is this, how much do we think these teams and the landscape can change in the coming weeks? Because one of the problems with the NFL is after one week is done,

we think we've got it all figured out. We know all the answers. We know who's good and who's bad. And then the bears beat the hell out of the Patriots. And we go, oh my gosh, we have no idea what's going on. Still. The sample size is growing after six games for the Vikings, seven for some other in the NFL. But I also feel like there's a long way to go here. There's more than half a season left to go. And I think what the Vikings have an opportunity to do is be better than they've been. And I think they actually have to be much better than they've been in some areas if they're going to be a legitimate contender. Yeah. I mean, I think the important part though, when it comes to the Vikings, when it comes to maybe the giants, another team where it was like,

Oh, you hate us sort of situation when the nerds all hate them, even the jets to a certain degree, maybe a little bit less of a degree there is you say, Hey, we don't think you're necessarily a good team, but we recognize you have actual wins and those wins affect greatly your probability of making the playoffs. If we believe you are a, you know, let's say an average NFL team, it does not mean that you are on, you're on the bubble of making the playoffs. If you start off five and two or six and one, no, that means you're in really good position to make the playoffs because you've already put yourself there. And even if you go 500 the rest of the season,

you've already banked these wins the rest of the way. That puts you at a very big advantage to anyone else. And then once we get into the playoffs, and I think this is the important part here with the, you know, the parody outside of maybe the Bills and the Chiefs and to a lesser degree, the Eagles. If we're the Vikings right now and we say you're the 12th best team, 11th best team in the NFL, you're upset about that, Vikings fans.

But I also say you have a 90% chance to make the playoffs. So you're going to make the playoffs and your probability of being able to get through and to get to the Super Bowl, once you've made the playoffs, everyone has a chance there. The Bengals were not the best team in the AFC last year, and they made it to the championship. I don't even think the Rams were necessarily the best team in the NFC, and they made it to the championship. It's about getting to the playoffs first. So a lot of these teams, whether what we learn about them or not is going to be interesting, but they've already helped themselves or hurt themselves greatly for getting to the playoffs. So with this year in particular, and you were tweeting a little bit about this today, just how strange it's been and how difficult it even is to figure out who is good

and who's not good based on some of their metrics. I was thinking about this because I've been interested in what the bar is to be considered a Super Bowl caliber team, like what your point differential has to be, how many wins you generally need by looking just at history, a very straightforward type of thing. And 75% of the teams to make the Super Bowl since they started having a Super Bowl have had at least plus 100. But weirdly in recent years, there's been some teams that have been a little bit under that, that more than any other era. And there's also been some teams that have been a little bit under that, that more than any other era. And there's also been some teams that are like plus 300 that don't win like

the Patriots who had the biggest point differential of all time. Also, I think the threshold for wins has generally been like 12, but now it's a 17 game season. So maybe that's higher or maybe because things are weird, that's not as high matchups might determine it. Home field advantage, higher or maybe because things are weird, that's not as high. Matchups might determine it, home field advantage, injuries, all these things. I think that it's going to be a more random situation this year, even in the playoffs than anything, because I think we're

saying there's only really one strong team in Philadelphia. And if they lose, then it's like, who's, you know, who's up for grabs here. Right. I mean, for the, for the entire thing, which I think sort of ties into like that, even if the Vikings did some questionable things this off season with their overall direction, starting five and one gives them an opportunity here to be everything they thought they were going to be with Kirk cousins, even if Kirkins doesn't have his best year or even a good year. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, everything you said. And then another wrinkle on there is, you know, we are still relatively new.

It was a year three of the only one team gets a buy also. So that also gives more kind of a level playing field outside of that one team, but two teams having to buy two elite teams, having to buy really entrenched them even further in the past. So when I was looking at this, and this is kind of the general nerd way of gauging the strength of a team when you're trying to like a relatable type of way. So the relatable nerd way here is just to say, let's look at how good, how much do we expect this team to win by by to be favored by? So if they played a thousand times or whatever,

versus a league average team on a neutral field, like how many points better. So I looked at those numbers from this season versus those numbers from last season. And the highs and the lows are basically the same. The bills are nine points better. And then on the low end, the Carolina Panthers about eight points worse than

any team. So that's about the same, but it's really that at the higher end of high. So let's say the second tier, the third tier sorts of teams, they're just not as many there. You have the chiefs we have at seven points, and then it drops down to Philly at five and a half points. Normally you'd have a couple of teams in that seven, eight sort of range that just aren't there. And then we have a couple of teams in the five sort of range. Normally you'd have a couple of teams in that seven, eight sort of range that just aren't there. And then we have a couple of teams in the five sort of range. Normally you'd have one or two more teams in that sort of range too. And instead you just have all these teams squeezed into this bucket where it's like a plus two or negative two, which means anyone can beat anyone on any given day.

So that going into the playoffs, I think it will start to define itself a little bit more. I think teams will start to figure out the defense a little bit more. But we have had bad quarterback play generally, which has held things down. And some of that is sustainable. Like some of that is we don't know about Rodgers, Brady, Ryan, old guys, whether they're going to come back or not. The new blood of the 2021 class doesn't look like it's really going to be that great so far. So all those sorts of things, I think there is some sustainability to this,

but teams will get a little bit better on the high end and start to define themselves. It really feels like the nineties or early two thousands when there were several quarterbacks who rose so far ahead. And then we saw a lot of journeymen or guys who are just okay. End up like Trent Dilfering or Matt Hasselbecking or Rex Grossman-ing their way to Super Bowl appearances. And I got to tell you the truth, man.

I never thought we would see this world again. I thought, look at all these great quarterbacks who are coming in. I mean, who would have thought Trevor Lawrence, Justin Fields, Trey Lance? Look at the athleticism on these guys, the arm strength strength that they would not quickly emerge as great quarterbacks. And I think Trevor Lawrence still isn't there yet. I don't really know what to think of Justin Fields because his team is generally not put a lot around him, but I have not been. He played well.

He played well in an Island game. So you have to think that he's great now. Right. And he, well, he also played well in front of me in in Minnesota so they're like well wait is it but I still oh yeah that was one other good game I forgot about that yeah but I still like have a lot of skepticism about Justin Fields in general maybe if he's got a better line and he develops and so forth but the draft class is blowing up has really thrown the league kind of into disarray here, combined with the old guys moving out.

And this is exactly what happened at the end of the 90s, where you had like Marino and Elway and Kelly and all those guys retiring. And before there was fully Manning, Brady and Roethlisberger, et cetera, there was kind of this like weird dead period. And we ended up with a lot of really random results and i feel like that's back yeah i mean i mentioned some of the aging quarterbacks but it's not just the guys who are aging out now it is even if you look at a little bit longer time frame um it's not just last year that this happened but it it it sets up a fragile kind of vulnerability to the

quarterback position. If we look at the top 10 quarterbacks of all time, let's say, by whatever sort of valuation metric that you wanted to use, Brady's going to be in there, right? And he is, you know, whatever, he's like 70 now or whatever, and he's starting to age out of it. Rodgers is going to be in there. Drew Brees is probably, I would have him like on the fringe as being in there. But value-wise, I mean, geez, he put up a lot of numbers throughout his entire career. You know, Peyton Manning is still not that far away from what we've seen in the past from him. So he's kind of on the fringe in that sort of area.

I mean, these are guys that we've seen recently. And then when you get out to like 15 to 20, you know, you're Philip Rivers of the world. You're Matt Ryan's of the world. You're Russell Wilson's of the world. You're Ben Roethlisberger's of the world. All these guys are in there as being like legit, you know, Hall of Famers. Maybe Ryan's a little questionable, but on that sort of line, how many Hall of Famers are just going to start rapidly coming into the NFL to replace these guys? I thought that the answer would be a lot because, well, I mean, there's a reason to think that.

I thought quarterback position was going to be good this year. I thought there was a high floor to the position because you looked around the league and you didn't see too many of these like Trubisky starting situations across the league. But I was, I mean, I was wrong. Folks, I'm seeing that liquid death is starting to catch on. Some of you have even sent me tweets of displays in the store. But for those of you who do not understand why there are tall boy cans in the water aisle, allow me to introduce you to Liquid Death Water. It's a new brand of mountain water, and they also have sparkling water options as well. You guys would not think that anything could knock me off my diet soda at the top,

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at the Halloween party or something. Go get Liquid Death at your local Target, Walmart, 7-Eleven, or find a Liquid Death retailer near you with their store locator tool at liquiddeath.com slash insider. That's liquiddeath.com slash insider. That's liquid death dot com slash insider. Oh yeah. I mean, I thought the same thing too. I thought how many teams really don't have an answer here for this year. And yet, and that's what I was going to ask you. Like, why do we think it is that the quarterback position suddenly appears super hard to play? I mean when all those quarterbacks are putting up those huge numbers I think the general thing that we said was all these guys are great

no question that you know Phillip Rivers and Breeze and Ryan like these are great players but they are helped by favorable circumstances i.e. amazing wide receivers that have emerged I think there's more of them than ever and And the rules are helping the quarterbacks, you know, with just, you can't hit them as hard and the receivers, you can't grab them and so forth. And now all of a sudden, just this year, we've just hit this crazy wall where the rookie quarterbacks have not played well.

And there's been a lot of busts or guys who have needed longer development. Is it harder all of a sudden to play quarterback in the nfl yeah i think it is i mean i think it's part of this um like innovate and then react sort of cycle between offense and defense and you know we've had periods of where it's been kind of down. It was down-ish from, I don't know, probably is like 2009 till 2015-ish. It was pretty down. 2017 wasn't so hot with guys getting injured and not a lot of high-end play there. And then things picked back up as offense got this injection of talent, as a lot of teams adopted these play action um crossing routes you know take advantage

of the the cover three type of systems that were proliferating around the nfl and now defenses have caught up it's not only the two high sort of stuff i also think they're doing a lot of things with changing pre-snap and post-snap and you know doing these kind of simulated pressures and there's just a lot of stuff when a quarterback turns his back, who turns his back to the defense, that he doesn't know what he's going to see when he turns around and he's confused on what he's going to see. So I don't know, maybe we'll see more teams start to adjust like we're seeing the Bengals adjusting now and just saying,

you know what, we're just going to put Joe Burrow back in the shotgun and let him see everything that's going on on the back end rather than just assuming that the defense is going to react and bite on this play action which will open something up for us which was kind of an easy button that was there that's gone away for a lot of teams no i think that's right and we've even seen it with the vikings where they're like you said easy button was gary kubiak kevin stefanski run the boots outside zone and then all of a sudden teams started sending their defensive ends upfield. And so they would see that bootleg coming and they just said,

you know what defensive end, it's been your lifetime role to follow down the line of scrimmage. Now I want you to come up field to just blow that up in the backfield. And the bootlegs have not been as effective for the Vikings because of this, because the DNs are suddenly in Kirk Cousins' face and he can't make a play. I think that's a major part of it. I think playing the too high stuff is a real conversation.

Like, is this made everything harder, especially for these young quarterbacks, because they have to read a lot with too high safeties and they have to throw into tight windows with too high safeties. And basically, teams have gone so far away from just being run first that they're not punishing it with the running game the way that maybe they did in the 90s. It felt like in the 90s, everyone played two deep safeties,

and there wasn't the safety in the box all the time. And what teams did was they handed off to Barry Sanders and Emmitt Smith and Thurman Thomas and said, like, we dare you to stop us. We're just going to hand off to these guys and Emmitt Smith and Thurman Thomas and said, like, we dare you to stop us. We're just going to hand off to these guys 328 times. And that's how we're going to win. And now there's like not a lot of teams that can really do that with their running game. So they're just kind of continuing to rest on their passing game. I wonder what the adjustment is going to be or if we're even going to see an adjustment this year. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if we're going to

see it this year. I mean, I have some ideas. It's funny because I'm going to probably record a podcast later today where we're going to try to like fix the passing game. I know some people out there, defensive people, you know, they probably love this sort of stuff. I don't know who these people are, but they exist. They exist on Twitter, at least. Love what they're saying.

So we're going to try to try to fix things. I do think running efficiency has been better than ever this season. Now, part of that is more quarterback scrambles slash design runs. And I think that is one of the things that I would really lean on, maybe even more than we're going to run the ball a lot, is, again, continue. We saw it with Justin Fields last night, and it's like, I think quarterbacks don't want to do it. I think coaches, maybe I'll bail them out a little bit from the fact that I bet Justin Fields,

this is pure speculation, of course, but my guess would be if you went to Justin Fields as the, you know, top quarterback prospect, he's got the incredible arm. He can just put it anywhere he wants to put it on the football field. And you send them, you know, what we're going to do, we're going to have you run the ball 10 times a game. It gets smushed by linebackers. He's like, no, like, I'm not going to do that. And you have to like get them to buy into it. We've seen with Daniel Jones's, we're seeing with, again, with Fields and others. I think that can be an important part of punishing these defenses, because not only

do you have the one less guy there because the safety is out, but then when you have the quarterback running, you have an additional number advantage because you don't have the quarterback just going back and being uninvolved in the play in some of these areas too. So, yeah, I think that could be something, but that requires like a turnover of personnel or it requires a willingness of quarterbacks to do it. I mean, Matt Jones last night had a couple of scrambles earlier where he was picking up guards. Like quarterbacks just need to be willing to do that more often because you don't have to be the most athletic person in the world

also to pick up those yards. And to your point, I was looking at this yesterday, that Daniel Jones and Kirk Cousins have pretty similar efficiency, and by I mean inefficiency, with the average, I think, both of them 6.5 yards per attempt, or maybe Kirk's at 6.6, which again is like the most 1993 stuff I've ever seen. But Daniel Jones has run for 29 first downs and Kirk Cousins three. Now Kirk Cousins is not going to start running, nor should he at any time, but that extra little element of having a quarterback

who can run for 29 first downs is a big deal for your offense i also think that it's really going to test who's good at adjusting sorry cliff kingsbury this might not be for you but i mean who is good like because what i've seen from the from the Vikings is they have not really figured out who they need to be yet as an offense. There's a lot of times where they're running Justin Jefferson right into double teams, just like run a double move. And there's two dudes on him. Kirk's never going to throw that ball.

And so they've had to adjust sometimes even within games to start throwing short stuff to Justin Jefferson. And that might be a little bit of what Kansas City was able to do. Let's get some possession receivers and get them some eight-yard passes and seven-yard passes where Mahomes doesn't have to try to launch it down the field all the time. That might be the ebb and flow of this is who can complete the short, quick passing game, the Brady of a certain era right where he made his bones kind of a lot on those check downs and short passes because you have the safeties playing so far back yeah I think that's that's a good point um I do want to test the idea now this is more like a

theory than an actuality sort of situation but we have over time seen depth of target and like interception rates get pretty low. There probably is a point that, you know, you don't want, you know, you know, you always make these arguments and then you have someone to be like, Oh, you're throwing more interceptions. That's a great idea. Like that's, that's what, that's what the nerds want from us now. So it's not throwing more interceptions, taking more risks, which will lead to interceptions along with upside. I do wonder about like throwing into some of these deep safety sometimes with the right

receiver and other things too. It's just, I don't know, like maybe you can get some, maybe there is some value to be found there where teams are just so allergic to interceptions at this point that like if you, if you throw a safety on top of some great contested catch or fast receiver like maybe just throwing the ball anyway sometimes depending upon the down and distance situation i like the season i'm experimenting with that too and not just closing down your offense because you got some random safety playing over the top yeah and there are supposed to be uh lots of ways to beat too high situations and yet it seems like maybe the quarterbacks of this year,

and there are a lot of quarterback injuries and a lot of quarterbacks who are aging. I mean, this is part of the thing with cousins. We've talked about a little is I don't see the same quite juice on the fastball as, as cousins has normally had when he really winds up and lets it go. And that could be a product of just age. And I think that for him, he's been even more conservative than ever with the football. I think his average depth of target is second lowest in the NFL.

I think he knows like if I float these balls out there, even if Justin Jefferson is there, there's a good chance it's going to be get picked. And a lot of these quarterbacks for their entire lives now have come up being told hey don't get picked don't make the big mistake hey if we lose that's when you get benched that's when you get benched right especially if you're like uh uh you know a fourth round quarterback or whatever cousins was yeah i think that's always been part of his mentality and how he was able to make it is be that game manager type guy so i don't know if there's any easy button to say let let it loose.

But I do think Justin Jefferson could beat two defenders on a regular basis. And that's something that like, how do you convince your quarterback to just heave the ball up? Case Keenum tried it in 2017 and it worked, but that was because he had nothing to lose, right? Like Cousins knows there's another contract extension down the road. I think this is going to be a hard thing for the Vikings to convince their quarterback to do, but it also might be the reason Gino Smith is winning.

It seems like he's throwing up a lot of those balls, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, okay. So we want to really get into like the nerd talk here. So, you know, like the expected points added where I do appreciate football fans. They're willing to take a stat. They have no idea what it means. If it says their team looks good, they're like, we have the highest EPA per play. They don't know what they're talking about. But so in a really easy way to think about it is like you're expecting to score a certain number of points based upon the down distance and everything before the play

starts. The play happens, you move to a new field position, a new down, a new distance, and then how many points do you expect then? So when you're, when you're measuring the value of plays, like let's say the negative value of an interception built into that is, you know, how much value the other team has now that they have the ball. Well, if other offenses aren't as good as they used to be, that, that value is lower. Like you're actually giving up less. And if your expectation for how much you're going to score is not as good because your offense is not as good, then that starting value is lower. So the interception in itself, the valuation is less.

It's less negative to throw an interception because you're expecting less and because you're giving up less to the other team for their expectation now to score. The possession in and of itself is less valuable than it has been in the past. Now, again, I'm not advocating turnovers, but I am advocating thinking about how do you adjust for that risk reward is now the risk, the cost of the risk has actually gone down. So how do we adjust for that? Well, first I want to say this Purple Insider audience has been trained to understand how to use EPA. There have been enough of Kevin Cole and Eric Eger appearances on this show that we get

it. But another thing is that is interesting, and I love how you use this stat in the context of the current situation, because too often with data, we just sort of say like, this is what it is. And that's what it is for every situation here. It says punt. So they're wrong if they didn't punt or what, you know what I mean? Like where everything has context coaches have correctly long made that point, but they've incorrectly used it to justify bad decisions sometimes. So trying to contextualize what that means is a, is a very interesting point. I guess I, I wonder in this, in this landscape, like how, how can the Vikings

find some space here to carve out for themselves to be at the end of the day, a team that matches up with the statistical meters that we need from them that are changed from this year, because I'll tell you how I've used EPA in the past and where I'm kind of going with this. In the past, I've noticed that every team that makes the Superbowl has a top five passing EPA that since 2015,

that might not be the case again this year. And maybe the Rams were a little outside of it, or maybe the Bengals were a little outside of it last year, but just in general, I guess I wonder, do the Vikings need to be that good? How can they get that good? Like, what do they need to do to be there? Because this is the year where it's laid out for them to beat it. Yeah, that's a good question. I'm just looking at Kirk's numbers here and it looks like, yeah, as EPA per play versus the last three seasons, it's roughly cut in half. Although I don't know if you can necessarily think about it in those sorts of terms, but it's lower. Like it's significantly lower than what we had seen in the past. And I'm just looking at the different meters that play into it.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting to see that because maybe interceptions have actually been a little bit worse this year, but he's been better at sacks. So I do notice that's something he's probably been a little bit better at. Yeah, I guess what I would say is, which it may be tougher to do now, again, because you have the record that you have but i don't know i i don't think kind of staying the course right now because of the 90 probability to make the playoffs like i would be i would be a little bit adverse to taking on necessarily too much too much risk at this point i think i would try to test out things as far as pushing the ball down the field a little bit more whether or not it can be done as far as working things maybe out of the field a little bit more, whether or not it can be done as far as working things, maybe out of the gun a little bit more to see how that should,

should sort of work going forward. But I don't know. It's just hard mid season to say, we're going to make some sort of major change without making a major personnel change. So on the defensive side, if anything, I think what you can use this for,

if you were a risk taker is to say, we have this very, very high chance of making the playoffs. Can we experiment in season rather than treating every single game like it's do or die and the end of the world? Now, one out of every 10 times you do that, you could be costing yourself going to the playoffs. So that's the downside there. But nine out of 10 times, you might be gaining some sort of meaningful information or ideas or strategy to use going forward. So I don't know if I can say specifically what it is, but at least I would think about that is to say, maybe we could lower our week by week. Everything must be one this week mentality and think a little bit more long-term now that we've put ourselves into this position.

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but if you had used your approach this year, you might actually be right. And what I mean is your offensive line is better run blocking than they are past blocking by kind of a wide margin this year. Your running back is still good. He's not as good as he was by expected yards over what he's gotten. He's been basically an average running back by expected or rushing yards over expected in Delvin Cook. But you've got other talent in the backfield as well. You got some fat guys at receiver or at tight end. You got a fullback.

No one else has this. Play 90s football. Wildcat are we going wildcat we're not wildcat but we're going we're going run run and run a lot and you also have maybe the best or one of the top punters in the entire league like play playing to run the ball and forcing teams to get out of their too deep that they want to be in and then hitting deep shots it might have to be the way that they play even though everybody wanted them to play wide open three wide receivers run everybody everywhere but that's just not really working with the way that opponents are facing them yeah okay so here's my here's my thing about forcing teams out of the too high and And, you know, like even Peyton Manning.

You'll hear Peyton Manning on the Manning cast. Like, this guy loves running the ball sometimes. And I'm always a little shocked by how much he's like, E, E, we got to run. You got to run it. We got to run it on this play. You know, call the check to the run, check to the run. Will teams get out of too high if you do this?

Or will they just be like high-fiving each other that you're, you know, you're running the ball and they won't get out of too high if you do this? Or will they just be like high-fiving each other that you're, you know, you're running the ball and they won't get out of too high. That's always my question about these sort of things. Like, are we assuming a reaction that might not happen necessarily? Maybe it does happen. I don't know. Like what is it? And we always think about these things in these binary sort of metrics where

we're like teams run too high now and they didn't run. And then, you know, then now they used to run cover three. Now they run they run too high and if we run it then they'll get out of too high well you know too high percentage doesn't go from a zero to a hundred to zero it goes from like from like you know 30 to 37 down to whatever i just need to know like how big of an impact is this really going to have on defenses but i agree it is something you could experiment with as part of my experimentation policy well you don't shame me no no kink shaming here if you could experiment yeah offensive no offensive kink shaming there's a different uh podcast you're looking for there uh but no i mean i yes i think that what i'm saying is maybe a tad extreme but i also think that kirk cousins has has sort of like 95 Neil O'Donnell vibes

here where he's not, he's not putting up these big numbers or anything. He's, he's having to game manage and he is playing like a big time game manager. And I think that the two approaches are lean into the game managing Kirk or lean into the, try to air it out Kirk, but that's really what they've tried to do over the first few weeks. And he just won't throw it downfield. And when you look at the tape, there have been some opportunities, but maybe if you had a really strong arm quarterback to do that, to throw into the double coverage or to find the small gaps and things like that. But there's also been a lot of times where you just look and they have three receivers out. All of them are running 10 to 15 yard routes.

And Cousins is sort of standing there being like, who do I like check it down to or throw underneath to? And there's no option. I kind of think that they almost have to play it that way. Or like you said, kind of experiment and try some of it. But I also think that with their run blocking being as good as it is, if you start to, there's nothing teams hate more than being run over, right? If you start to run over teams, they will have to react because they hate that, even if they shouldn't react. Yeah, I just don't know. Like, you're playing a new team every week, so it depends.

Like a seven-game series or something like that i could see like there will be uh like a counter to a counter to a counter to a counter to a counter uh in a one game thing maybe maybe okay i got another you talk about a bad idea i got a really bad idea for you so you say you want kirk to throw the ball down the field anymore i'm all about incentives like you can talk to him how about you you put an incentive in guys contracts to throw interceptions what do you think about, you put an incentive in guys' contracts to throw interceptions. What do you think about that? So it's like, they don't want to throw interceptions. They're not going to be like, you know what? I want another million dollars. I'm going to throw five interceptions or whatever, whatever it ends up costing them. What do you think about that? Like putting incentives for them to do things that they're

allergic to that maybe aren't as bad as they think they are, but there'll be so much like scorn heaped upon them for doing it that they're not just going to go out there and try to like make a whole bunch of money doing it. Let's now check in with James Winston, who is thrilled. Oh yeah. He's like, oh yeah. He's like, there's Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and James Winston are the richest men in America. and we institute this policy so yeah maybe not okay i'm already taking that back but see no but you gotta think outside the box i mean what about this now not there has to be some way though to nudge him to throw downfield a little bit more but i don't know what it is because no one's ever really mastered that i mean even going back to his time

in washington the big complaint was he wouldn't throw it down the field when maybe some shots were there or it looked like they were covered. And that's why I'm saying that now that they've tried, because I always wondered, what would it look like if they really leaned into cousins? Now, Adam Thielen not being in his prime anymore has kind of changed the formula of this as well. If you have two possession receivers along with Jefferson and a tight end who who's not stretching the field, like he was supposed to running backs, who can sort of catch out of the backfield, but aren't special. You might have to go short game with everything and try to run the ball, hold onto the ball and then play field position. They are at the top of the league in field position on both ends, I think starting and

opposing. And that's been one of the reasons they've won i mean if they weren't there i think that they would have allowed more points so they might have to kind of do that and dial back some of the things that kevin o'connell always spent his whole life dreaming of when he was a little kid drawn up little plays in the dirt in the backyard i'll just have jefferson run a double move those double moves aren't getting open and your quarterback's not throwing it. So I think that might be what they have to do. Let's say though, let's just say they're mostly the same version of themselves for the rest of the year. What would your expectation be for how many games they can win? How far they can go if they are mostly kind of who they are right now?

Okay. So again, this is kind of like build. I'll just, I'll just go ahead and look at my numbers for this. So how far they can go on the upside. I mean, I have them averaging about 11 wins, so that's not bad. It's a pretty easy schedule. 21st hardest schedule going forward. So I think that could go as high as I mean, I mean, it goes as high as like 14 and 15 in some different scenarios, but it's not going to happen. Let's say like 13 wins, probably on the high side. It's possible you could, especially in this conference, like this is like the real outside chance. So maybe maybe I'm wrong about my experimentation here is like you could, you could get the bye. Like, it's possible. It's possible. And that's like a huge advantage for going forward. I don't know.

This is, I think, at best, a team where we're talking about a 5% to 10% chance of winning the Super Bowl, probably. But, you know, whenever we tend to times, a team with a 10% chance to win the Super Bowl does. So, not bad. So, Vikings Super Bowl champions. That's what you're saying. We're going to pull that clip. Vikings have a great chance to win the super bowl does so uh not bad so you viking super bowl champions what you're saying we're gonna pull that clip vikings have a great chance to win the super bowl then you extend kirk of course for a lifetime contract and you know you you're set that would be the most

unenthusiastic fan base like ever for a super bowl they're like are you sure we won like i don't maybe i have a very different section of vikings fans that i guess i'm associated with is like self-loathing vikings fans are kind of the the most thing most of the thing here so they can't even enjoy the victories i would say 90 of the questions i get are are they gonna fall apart from five and one are they gonna do that because i feel like they going to do that? Cause I feel like they're going to do that. Address that part though. What are the chances that because the expected points that they should have scored on your metrics for a lot of these games against bad teams have not been very good.

That some of this turns around and smacks them in the mouth. They play Arizona. They play Washington. Those are teams you can beat, but those aren't automatic victories. And then you have Buffalo Dallas. Like if if if you let your guard down here, it can go from five and one to five and four or five and five pretty fast. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, roughly a 10 to 20 percent chance of not making the playoffs. So one in five times things are going to fall apart and make the playoffs.

So if you adjust that to Vikings odds, that's like a 50, 50 chance. I think is what we're saying. Oh man. Always super interesting to have this discussion. You're a great follow on Twitter, unexpected points, a great podcast. One of my favorite guests to have on, Kevin. And we had fun, as always, even if our ideas were terrible. Yeah, they were terrible.

But the best ideas, what are we mocked first or laughed at? I don't know what the progression is, but I think being called terrible is part of a great idea. Oh, yeah, right, right, right. The guy who invented the light bulb, someone said like, what we've got candles. Exactly. Although here's me saying that they should go back to candle times by

running Delvin. What are we going to do with all this, this, this whale blubber and oil? What's going on here? If there was any year to throw back in time, it is this year. So it will be interesting to continue to watch and we will check in with you.

Certainly again, as we go along the way, Kevin, thanks so much for coming on, man. Always great to talk with you. All right. Thanks for having me.