Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - PFF's Sam Monson breaks down the greatness of Harrison Smith, Adrian Peterson and Randy Moss

Episode Date: June 1, 2020

The show opens with an analysis of Harrison Smith's versatility and what makes different safeties unique. What's the difference between a player who can play everywhere and a pure deep safety?  Adrian Peterson ranked 35th on PFF's list of the players of the 2010s despite having several of his top seasons  coming before the start of the decade. Was Peterson's one-dimensional nature overcome by his sheer excellence?  In the final quarter of the show, Monson talks about how Randy Moss's 1998 season was completely off the charts. What made him so much better than everyone else? How much did circumstance help elevate him to the No. 1 receiver in the NFL?  Make sure you subscribe to read Matthew Coller's written work at PurpleInsider.substack.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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with Drizzly or Instacart, Coors Brewing Company, Golden, Colorado, and as always, celebrate. Hey everybody, welcome into another episode of Purple Insider. Matthew Collar with you. And I want to remind you to go to purpleinsider.com. That's where you can subscribe to all of my written work covering the Minnesota Vikings. And if you could rate and review this podcast, that would be a major, major help. It allows other Vikings fans to find this podcast when they go searching and type in Vikings in whatever podcast app they're using. If you rate and review, this will be the first one that comes up.

So it is greatly appreciated. Okay, now we welcome into the show from pro football focus sam monson and uh in the background of the zoom video that we're talking on a jared allen jersey what's going on sam hey how's it going signed jared allen jersey if you please that's a friend of mine gave me that years ago a guy called rona murphy from home gave me that as a present yeah signed j signed Jared Allen. Yeah, how about that? I wish that the Vikings had been a little better during Jared Allen's time. I mean, in 09, of course, they were great, and he was one of those dominant players. But I feel like we sort of just moved past Jared Allen being an all-time great Minnesota Viking,

and maybe we don't celebrate that enough. Yeah, he's also a really interesting sort of case study in team building, right? Because in theory, you're supposed to do all this through the draft. You're supposed to, you know, get the young, cheap guys. But at some point, the Vikings just got sick of swinging and missing on edge rushers in the draft, like endless first-round picks. Erasmus James, Kenechi Udeze, no end to these guys. And eventually they just went, you know what, screw it.

We can't find one. We're just going to trade for this guy who is a proven dominant edge rusher, and we don't care that it's going to cost a lot to do it because that will finally solve this problem. There's something to be said for that, right? At some point recognize the fact that you're not able to get this done the way you're supposed to do it and go to plan B. It's kind of like the New England Patriots with drafting wide receivers. Like when they did it with Nikhil Harry's, like, did you guys ever learn that every first round draft pick

wide receiver you guys get goes bust? And instead you can bring in your Randy Mosses, which we'll talk about a little later. And your Jabbar Gaffneys, like those guys, picking up somebody else's older wide receiver, bringing him in, having him play with Tom Brady is probably a better play than wasting your first-round pick. Now, it's funny because the Vikings' current team couldn't be more different. They could let Everson Griffin go because they always believed that they can develop the next guy. They hardly ever needed to spend high draft picks on their defensive line in the Zimmer era. And sometimes I think it's very position specific, like teams just cannot find a certain

spot or they just, for whatever reason, they just hit the bad end of those, you know, the variation and they've gone, you know, three straight picks trying to solve a certain spot and it just doesn't work. But depending on, you know on how good the rest of your roster is or where you are to compete, you might be better off sometimes just saying, look, forget it. We're going to take the next first round pick we have that we're going to have to spend on this again

and instead trade that along with some other stuff for a proven commodity. I think there is value that is probably always a little bit underrated in the NFL to certainty, to just answering a question that you cannot get answered the way it's supposed to be done. And I think there's value of that across the board, whether it's this specific scenario or whether it's valuing positions in the draft where there's certainty to how good Chase Young is going to be or how good Quentin Nelson is going to be.

The value to that certainty is worth something above and beyond the fact that their position is theoretically less valuable than a cornerback or a wide receiver or whatever. It also makes me think of some of the things that you guys at Pro Football Focus have found in your studies this offseason. One of the things looking at just how big of an impact is it to have a bad player at a certain position? You know, if you have a terrible offensive lineman, which Vikings fans would know a lot

about, or if you have one cornerback, Xavier Rhodes, who is completely sinking your pass coverage, that it's almost like you're only as good as your weakest link at some of the key positions in the league. So if you are, instead of, say, spending a third round pick on a corner, if you traded that third round pick for a proven corner, of course, cap space pending, even if that proven corner is just average, it probably can at least shore up your biggest issue and will have a huge increase. I almost think of it as like if you're in baseball and you have someone who's a 190 hitter and then you trade for someone who's a 250 hitter, that that's as big of a jump as from going from average to elite is going from terrible to average.

I think in some positions it's a way bigger leap. To go from terrible to average is a far bigger leap than to go from average to, like, Hall of Famer because of the nature of that position. I think you're right. And, you know, we've been doing on our podcast, we did the sort of the all-average team, right, or the all-Thomas Jones team. Years ago, we had this thing that Thomas Jones, you know, running back for the Bears, he would get you exactly what was blocked for you. No more. No more. He was like a calibration tool for how good your blocking was.

And that became like this sort of running joke. Who's the Thomas Jones of receivers or the Thomas Jones of whatever? So that was kind of what this team was. But then today we did an all underrated team. And there were a couple of guys that actually showed up on both teams because you can be both entirely rank average and still underrated because there's value to just being average.

And one of those players, I think, is Prince of Mookamara, right? Who was every single year of his career is just a solid average starter. You know, number two, solid number two. And then every year just gets booted out by that team because everyone wants better than that. Right. But if you know, like you've got to be five deep in the secondary now to be good.

And if you know that this guy will come in and give you at least a solid number two, that's massively valuable. And I don't think teams have yet got to the point where they correctly value that they're, they're going to get rid of the guy that's only rank average and try and find I don't think teams have yet got to the point where they correctly value that. They're going to get rid of the guy that's only rank average and try and find two guys that are really good, whereas you should probably accept that that's really hard to do, and you're better off taking a guy that you know will give you a solid player and figure out the rest. You know, the example that comes to mind for me this year with the Vikings is Mackenzie Alexander,

who was probably an average nickel corner, and if you replace him with a nickel corner who has no idea what he's doing, say, I mean, we'll see about Mike Hughes. He's had some training there, but if he flops or they put a rookie in there and all of a sudden the middle of the field becomes very easy to throw against, that's going to be a big problem for them. They're going to miss Mackenzie Alexander a lot more than you ever thought that you would miss Mackenzie Alexander a lot more than you ever thought that you would miss Mackenzie Alexander. And I think the same thing could be really said for Trey Waynes too, that along Trey Waynes' history, if you look at your PFF rankings,

there will be 80 corners who play regularly, and he'll be 40th. Almost every single year in a league where cornerback play can vary quite a bit, he was decidedly average year in and year out. And if you go to a rookie, let's say they throw in or maybe Holton Hill, who doesn't have a lot of experience, and he struggles, you're going to notice that a ton as opposed to the, you know, once every once in a while, Trey Wayne's getting beat deep. And some of it is like a perception problem, right? If you're Trey Wayne's and you're the 11th overall pick or whatever he was, it's seen as a massive disappointment that he's only average. But again, if you look at it league-wide and you assess what is the value

of actually just being a rank-average cornerback, it's pretty valuable. Like it's not something you should just dismiss or throw away because, you know, because you're disappointed that he didn't turn out to be great. It is a valuable thing in and of itself. And it sort of reminds me a little bit of back when quarterbacks were less abundant than they are now. The threat of being worse than an Alex Smith was so terrifying because if you didn't have an Alex Smith, you could end up with like Brody Croyle starting for you. And that was just game over.

Like you were sunk. So Alex Smiths of the world had to get 100 million dollar contracts even though at his best he's like an average average starting quarterback because the prospect of how much worse it could get was so terrifying I think it's the same deal but with lesser sort of consequences like going from you know Trey Waynes to the worst quarterback in the NFL is not going to make as big a difference as going from Alex Smith to Brody Croyle. But it's the same fear. Like if you don't get, if you toss away the guy that's rank average, you can still get a hell of a lot worse and that will have a big impact on you.

Poor Brody Croyle, just taking some shrapnel here for no reason you could have thrown out tyler thigpen former viking tyler thigpen he would have worked for this he's functional when they change the offense to that spread system uh croyle there was no offense you would save him with maybe a brock heward brock heward was somebody who you just you were not winning anything with brockard. There was a bunch of them. Like, you don't have to go back very far when there was a lot of teams that had just disastrous quarterback situations that had no shot of ever succeeding.

I think now we almost forget how good a situation the league is right now for quarterbacks. Like, Jameis Winston, Andy Dalton, Marcus Mariota, these are backups. Cam Newton doesn't have a job yet. This is a great time for quarterback play. Yeah, I remember if you go even farther back in the 90s where there were eight great quarterbacks and then everyone else was awful, it would be like Craig Erickson is starting for someone.

There was no question that some place was going to give Craig Erickson a job or Steve Walsh a job, and those guys would be starting every year, and that was as good as some teams could do. Yeah, you're right about that. Every team either has a feeling that their guy can be the guy, like a New York Jets Sam Darnold or Cleveland with Baker Mayfield, or they're sure that they at least have someone who's average. It's funny that we're talking about with the Cousins, with the Dak Prescott, like are they really good enough when both of those guys are exceptional quarterbacks? It just becomes about the money. So the reason I brought you on, Sam, is that I wanted to talk about the PFF all-decade top 101 team, because the rankings

of a couple of Minnesota Vikings really stuck out to me. Harrison Smith at 22nd, coincidentally, with his number, I thought was extremely appropriate to have Harrison Smith as a top 25 player of the decade. And I know that Vikings fans do not underrate Harrison Smith, but when it comes to the outside world, they do. And there's actually proof of this. There are proof of the haters. Usually when someone thinks they're underrated, it's like, yeah, okay, sure. But in 2017, he made a case for defensive MVP and did not make the initial Pro Bowl roster. So that's how much that Harrison Smith flies under the radar.

I'd love you to explain the thinking on that ranking, because I think you got that one exactly right. Yeah, on our all underrated team, though, Steve tried to make that case for Mitchell Schwartz. I was pointing out that while he's been not making these Pro Bowls, he's been making all Pro teams, though. So I think that might be a bigger indictment of just the Pro Bowl system than it is of the general analysis of how he's rated by everybody. But, yeah, look, I think – so Harrison Smith, he touched on this before, that secondary generally is really hard

to grade consistently or to be consistent because you're reliant so much on the opposing passing game, right? More than I think almost any other position, the secondary is reliant on the other side of the ball or the people you're going up against.

The old adage of the perfect pass beats the perfect coverage every single time, like that still holds true. So if you just get unlucky and you go on a run of guys essentially overachieving what you would expect given what they were throwing your way, you'll end up with really crappy grades, and it wasn't really your fault. You didn't play that much worse. Darius Slay is a really good example of this last year. Like his grade took a big nosedive last season but even if you just pull up his low light reel it's all absurd catches with him being draped all over the guy like he was

still covering at a really high level he just lost out at the catch point a lot so his grade suffered but the point is that despite all of this fluctuation and this noise and the variance you expect in the secondary, Harrison Smith's grade almost never went down. Like he was always among the top safeties in the NFL. And like even his, you know, down years were so good. Like he never had just a really bad year where he got lit up and, you know, wasn't the same player that everybody expected him to be.

He was just consistently good year on year on year. And, like, that's really hard to do. And him and Eric Weddle are the two players for whom that's true. Like, basically every single season of Harrison Smith's career, he graded above 75. And that's insane. Like, that's not easy to do. Got to tell you about a new sponsor for

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Code PURPLEINS purple insider for free shipping. How much value is there in Harrison Smith playing everywhere? Because he is a good pass rusher. If you ask him to rush off the edge, he is a box player. He's a deep safety and gets interceptions and makes plays on the ball brilliantly. I think there are a few players in a league that wants more of these guys and is desperate for more hybrid players who can line up anywhere. I remember doing an article in 2017 using your guys' snap data and just making a chart of, like, it's incredible that he lines up, you know, a third of the time here, a third of the time here,

a third of the time here. He's spending time in the slot. He even plays a little bit of outside corner in certain coverages. I mean, it's truly incredible, and I think maybe the most valuable thing you can have now is someone who can play all over the field. Yeah, I kind of go back and forth on this a little bit. I think secondary players generally are, again, they're really scheme-specific as well.

You know, you think of this, the draft is a perfect example of this. Like we all just analyze corners in a vacuum, you know, or safeties when you come to the draft. Like, well, this guy is the third best corner in the draft. But depending on the team you're talking about, he'll be the first best corner in the draft. He'll be top of their board because he fits what they want to do. And another team might not even have him on their board at all

because he's just not a fit, doesn't work at all. So we sort of compare all these guys as if they're, they're all playing in the same system. And it's nonsense. They don't, that's not true at all. And the same thing is kind of true for safety play. So how do you compare a guy like Earl Thomas, who was like the prototype, single high free safety, who arguably was the one player that made the legion of boom function and he's been the reason that nobody else has been able to replicate that defense even no matter how many seahawks assistants travel throughout the league and bring it with them nobody's able to get the same level of defense because nobody has an earl thomas and he was the guy that had the range to make that function he had the speed to be able to use that

range but closer to the line of scrimmage so he could still impact plays whereas a lot of free safeties have to sort of cheat with depth which opens up that hole between the safety and the linebacker and suddenly what you gain from you know the single high deep safety taking away the deep play you lose by giving up 15 yard digs every, you know, how do you compare a guy like him with a guy like Harrison Smith who equally makes his defense function but through a different methodology? Like Harrison Smith made his defense function, or still does, because he can do anything they want to do, right? So Zimmer can cycle through cover two, cover four, cover six, man coverage,

knowing that he's got one guy that can move wherever he needs him to make everything else fit together. So I think you can make the case that both those guys are essentially fundamental keystone building blocks to their secondaries, but in a completely different way. Like Harrison Smith, because he can fit the role of any aspect of that defense and enable everybody else to move around to where they're best, and Earl Thomas, because the entire scheme just doesn't function without him there. So it's a really interesting debate,

and I think, I don't know that there's a wrong answer on that. I think both guys are sort of fundamentally important to the schemes they're in, and that is hugely valuable whichever way you go. It always resonated with me as the Ed Reed and Troy Palamalu, that they were very, very different. Troy Palamalu jumping over the line of scrimmage to tackle a running back in the backfield where Ed Reed is playing 30 yards away from the ball, but he's deceiving quarterbacks with his movements, and he's reading plays and reading route combinations

and making plays on the ball, two very different things. But I also think that's what Anthony Harris does for the Vikings that makes him work so well alongside Harrison Smith is that he can be that deep guy. So they found a combination that really works. Now on Adrian Peterson, he is 35th on your top 101 of the decade. Now, of course, he was drafted before the 2010s started. But Adrian Peterson offers another really interesting conversation about just how valuable Adrian Peterson really was. Because when you do the all-highlight real players of all time, Adrian Peterson ends up in that conversation. If you were

going to have, say, Barry Sanders, Randy Moss, Deion Sanders, you wouldn't find Adrian Peterson too far behind in the all-highlight reel, and his average yards per carry was really excellent, but we do get to a point now where we're looking at the value of running backs, how easy they are to replace, how scheme-dependent they are, but the thing for me, Sam, is that even though Peterson was a one-dimensional player, and even though we know these things about running backs, that guy is impossible to stop, though. I mean, if you're a defense, you go into a game, he is the number one most terrifying thing that you're ever going to face. And if they had even had halfway decent quarterback play for some of those years, I think that his value would have shown through even a little bit more.

Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing is, like you say, it's an all-decade team, so some players get screwed by the fact that we miss certain years off their career. And there are some players who are really screwed. You get guys whose career almost perfectly crosses two decades. So you've got like four or five awesome years on one side, four or five awesome years in the next. And you might have like one of the best players in the last 15 years not make the list because only five of them were in the decade you're looking at. So Adrian Peterson, you do miss out on a few of his best seasons. And a little bit like Randy Moss, who we'll get to later, I honestly think

the best Adrian Peterson was like right out of the box Adrian Peterson. Like rookie Adrian Peterson and like rookie Randy Moss was already the best version. I've said this before that I know Randy Moss scored 23 touchdowns as a Patriot and we think he was as good there. Randy Moss was never as good in New England as he was in Minnesota. So if all you know is that version of Randy Moss, you never even saw him at his best. And I think the same thing is true with Peterson. Like if you didn't see those first couple of seasons, you didn't see the best Adrian Peterson.

Even if you're looking at that MVP caliber year, it wasn't as good, I don't think. So that hurts him. And then you're right. You know, a lot of PFF sort of shtick at the moment is railing against running backs in the Valley and all that kind of stuff. We didn't really, you know, focus on that too much at this. Sort of deliberately tried to exclude it from this and generally do for these 101 lists. In theory, they're created position agnostic.

It doesn't matter if you're a quarterback, a guard, a running back, a lineman, whatever. You can make it up at the top of this list. Now, in practicality, it skews a little bit like a fullback is never making this list, at least not in the way they're currently deployed.

Kickers. No. Sorry. There's limits to how much we care, right? If you're a kicker, a special teamer, punters may be people too, but they're not players that are appearing on the 101 lists. And it's always going to skew quarterbacks a little bit just because they're still the most important players of the game, even if you want to reduce the impact of that.

So with Peterson saying it really wasn't, you know, the fact that running backs have a lower value, it's just that the longer things go, the harder a time I have with this idea that he was so one-dimensional. And it was a problem during the time, but he was so good at the other dimension that you sort of ignored it. But at some point, it's like a problem that this was the best player on this team. I mean, he was so bad in one area of the game that they wouldn't have him on the field during the most important parts of the game.

Two-minute drills, comeback attempts, you know, late in the game. The time you need your best players on offense, your most explosive playmakers, the Vikings were so convinced that he was useless as a passing threat or receiving threat or a pass blocker that he wouldn't be on the field in those situations. And that has to count against you at some point or to some degree. Shout out Chester Taylor, though. I mean, Chester Taylor, there's your all underrated team. He was a good player.

So how do you, I guess, balance then with Peterson's boom, boom, bust, kind of, or bust, bust, boom style of running? I mean, that was another thing with Peterson in terms of the criticisms. The fumbling criticism was probably fair early in his career, but not so much later. He kind of resolved that. Fumbling in big moments was certainly a problem, but I don't really put that in a thing that I take a major ding off of because his fumble rate isn't really any different than anybody else is at that position. But I always wonder about the context of what happens in a game. Like, I think there are some quarterbacks, for example, who do not put up the greatest box score stats, but they always seem to win a lot because maybe they don't turn the ball over. This would be even

Tom Brady at certain points in his career, does not turn the ball over very much and allows his defense to do their job, keeps games close, then wins it at the end. Well, with Peterson, the organization of the yards has always been interesting to me because, you know, maybe a Thomas Jones gets four yards and then six yards and then four yards and then six yards. But where it's Adrian, it's 70 yards or it's minus three, minus three, minus three. Right.

I wonder what you guys find with that, if that is sort of because there's explosive plays, if that's really valuable still, even if you take the negative or if the negatives outweigh the positives in some ways. Well, this is where we come back to the idea of how much running backs are a product of the environment around them, right? And where this starts to fall back in is everyone uses those kind of numbers or that kind of breakdown as like an indication of a running back style. It's like, well, look, this guy's either boom or bust.

And that's the way he plays the game. Like, okay, that also is a pretty good indicator that that means the blocking in front of him sucked. And most of the time, he was getting buried. No running back loses three yards because he's a bad running back. A running back loses three yards because there was really bad blocking in front of him, and he got met four yards deep in the backfield. So a lot of the time, it's an indication that the blocking is terrible, and then every now and again, he's able to overcome that

and break off a 60-yard run by making four guys miss. So I think overall, a lot of the time, the blocking in front of Adrian Peterson was not good. And the offense further complicated that by having a sort of run-heavy style a lot of the time, right? Like they didn't play with 11 personnel. They played with two receivers in passing patterns and these sort of heavy run, heavy systems and, you know, deep play action, all this kind of stuff, which is fine. Only you're telling people the key on

the run, right? So you're just making his life harder. And then again, every now and again, he's going to bust that loose. And, you know, when you get eight guys in the box, one of the dangers of eight guys in the box is most of the time you're going to stop the run, but when he gets through the first wave, there's nothing in front of him anymore. So when you do get beat, you're going to get beat big. So I think most of those sort of things that we put down as stylistic knocks on Adrian Peterson's game are more just an indicator that the team around him was actually not that good. And his ability to overcome that as much as he did is a real thing in his favor. Like generally running backs do not overcome the quality of the blocking around him.

They're able to do it for short periods of time, but to do it for any extended run is pretty crazy. And Adrian Peterson's ability to do that I think was pretty remarkable. All right, before we continue the discussion I have to tell you about bet online there is no shortage of action going on right now in our exclusive partner bet online NASCAR is back and bet online has hundreds of other games events and sports to get in on you can still bet on simulated NFL, NBA, UFC events 24-7, or you can participate in a $10,000 Madden Bracket Challenge, a March Madness-style NFL simulation tournament that you can enter for free.

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And, you know, you look at the offensive line, even late in his career, 2015, the offensive line is nothing short of an abomination. And he's still averaging four and a half yards a carry by making enough plays. And that's with defenses keying in on them. It's with Norv Turner running the offense who wants to hand off to Adrian Peterson first. I mean, so a lot of things working against him. And then, you know, one time Adrian Peterson said I was at a press conference with him and he said he wanted to play Peterson first. I mean, so a lot of things working against him. And then, you know, one time Adrian Peterson said, I was at a press conference with him and he said he wanted to play until 40. And look, he's on track. So this guy has always been just on a completely different level

of physical gifts from other people. And speaking of that, you are working on a project on Randy Moss's rookie 1998 season, which is one of the all-time great wide receiver seasons. What inspired you to do the project, and what have you found so far, and what can people look for? Yeah, I mean, it's going to be broader than just Randy Moss, but Randy Moss is going to be sort of episode one. We wanted to create this sort of podcast series for the offseason, firstly because we had no idea how long the offseason was going to last. So we could have been, we could have had a lot of time to kill and could still, I guess. But basically just an oral history of, you know, whatever interesting NFL topic from

back in history you want to go to. And, you know, some of the topics we're sort of thinking about or kicking around was Steve Young versus Joe Montana. You know, what's it like having two Hall of Fame quarterbacks essentially in an open competition for the job for multiple years back then? That's crazy. Randy Moss's rookie year, 98, he comes in, he's the best receiver in the NFL from day one.

That's crazy. Eric Eager is working on one on one about those sort of busted spring football leagues the af the xfl even going back as far as the usfl because what i didn't know until he told me about it was the boss chris collinsworth apparently almost signed for the usfl um so he's he's working on some of those ones i I think Steve is tackling the 2000 Baltimore Ravens, known as the best defense ever, but also Trent Dilfer being the sort of punchline for you can win a quarterback with, or you can win a Super Bowl, rather, with a terrible quarterback,

known as the worst quarterback to ever win one. But Randy Moss became the starting point for all this. So we talked to a few different guys. We've got Robert Smith. We've got Pete Bursich. We've taken a whole bunch of sort of snippets from the footage. I have the entire 98 season on DVD somewhere. So we're pulling out all those games and sort of going through all the

snippets of commentary. And it's great because it's like a who's who of commentators as well. You've got Al Michaels on broadcast. You've still got madden and summer all doing doing games um you've got i think so so many of these great guys and they're all saying the same thing right you don't have to get very far before they're all calling randy moss like the best receiver in the nfl so it's basically just a journey through that season and how crazy it was for a guy to come along, you know, drop to number 21 in the draft and then hit the ground running that way. And then it's all sort of pulled together by, you know, me and Steve, our podcast, sort of talking

you through the framework of it all and generally structuring it out. But, you know, we've had, we've been working on this for a while now. Our guy, Tyler Sovchak, has done some amazing stuff with it. There's a part in the episode where we start talking about that Thanksgiving game, the Dallas game, and the moment where he sort of weaves in us talking about it with the actual footage of him breaking off that bubble screen for 60-plus yards and a touchdown, like that's artwork. That guy is way too talented to be working for us anyway but uh i'm really excited about the the end result of this and then hopefully that the subsequent episodes it'll follow well that's really cool and we'll play the trailer for it

here in just a second but uh on the randy moss season mean, how do you put it in context? We've been talking about with Justin Jefferson, hey, don't get your expectations too high. First round wide receivers, they'll always step in right away. Last year, I don't think anybody cleared 60 catches for rookie wide receivers. I mean, if they do anything, if Terry McLaurin or DK Metcalf shows a little, we're like, oh, look at this guy. He could be really great. That transition is so hard. And for someone to come in right away and just instantly become the best receiver in the NFL, I mean, it's legendary. Yeah, it's nuts.

We've never seen anything like it before or since. And, you know, now, yeah, Terry McLaurin and A.J. Brown were incredible rookie seasons, and they were not even in the same conversation as Randy Moss. That guy had 17 touchdowns as a rookie. Only four guys, I think, have surpassed that ever in the history of the NFL, and one of them was him. One of them was his 23-yard, or 23-touchdown season,

and he's got another 17-touchdown season in there as well. To do that as a rookie when you only had 60-something receptions is ludicrous. At some point during the year, he had more 40-plus yard touchdowns than whole teams. He was breaking the league. They had never seen anything like that. You only need to look at the immediate impact that it had. Forget what it did year one, but the next draft bay went defensive back one two three and drafted a fourth one later on as well like they he and he sent teams back to their board and this was like

this wasn't a garbage green bay team like this was the class of the nfc at that point until they met the vikings that year in the space of two games against randy moss immediately like junked their entire team building strategy and drafted defensive banks, three consecutive picks in the, in the top of the draft. Like I don't, not only have we never seen anybody have the kind of impact that he had just from a sort of statistical,

you know, dominant standpoint, but I don't think we've seen anybody change the game as immediately as he did as well. Like from what green Bay did to literally changing the way teams covered, like he effectively changed the way teams were playing coverage as well. I just, you know, the episode kind of concludes with, you know, are we ever going to see anything like that again?

And everybody sort of says, well, look, you can't say never because nobody ever saw that coming either. But it's really hard to envisage the next Randy Moss coming along and having that kind of impact yeah that's right for somebody to just run by people at that height it also changed the way teams looked at wide receivers but in a bad way because they kept looking for the next Randy Moss let's find the guy who's 6'4 and runs really fast I'm sure he'll be like Moss. But they did not have the ability to go up and get it like he did.

And I saw somebody point out something really interesting about Moss, about how he never seemed to have to slow himself down when he was adjusting to the ball, that there was no, like, turning his body all the way back to find it. He could just kind of peek over his shoulder and then reach out and grab it at any point. So it's not just like catch radius, but the ball tracking was on a completely different level all time too.

Yeah, he had this incredible ability to run by you and then throttle down and just back you up as he stacked you and you're desperately trying to catch up when he knows the ball is going to be under, or is under thrown or is going to be under thrown. And'll just sort of slow it down back you up create this kind of you know stock car pile up behind him and at the last second extend back out again and be able to catch the ball in front of them there's there's not many players that just have a ever developed the ability to do that and b just have that innate understanding of how to do that from the outset

there's a really interesting part somewhere through the season where John Madden is talking about how, you know, he's always been able to just run straight by people. And then at some point they developed this like change up where it was like, look, if I'm level with him, throw it over his head, I'll run and go get it. It doesn't matter how far you throw it. I got it.

He's like, if he stays on top of me and just will not let me by, just throw it up in the air and I'll just stop and hang up and go and I jump him. And they were like, as soon as they developed that, like it was game over. There was literally no way of stopping him because he'll beat you to the jump ball if you honor the fact that if you stop him from running past you. And if you don't do that, you can't run with him. So he's going to run by you as well. On that point, he became basically uncoverable. And then the other part of it too that I've heard from being around that I didn't know before I moved to Minnesota

was just how hard Randy worked at the craft, that he was sort of thought of as being aloof and play what I want to play and all those types of things, but behind the scenes, that was his public image, but behind the scenes, he was a tireless worker who was dedicated to the route running element, understanding defenses. And Bill Belichick in the all, what was it, the 100 players in 100 years, Bill Belichick called him the player that challenged him the most when it came to the X's and O's

and things like that. And I don't think people really understood when he was playing about that with Randy Moss. It was, well, here's his physical gifts are unbelievable, and he just runs by people and that's it. But his dedication to the technique, it grew and grew after that 98 season for him to continue to stay that dominant. Yeah, I mean, it was two things. In addition to all the freaky physical skills,

he was also one of the smartest players that's ever played the position. And, you know, at least as hard a worker as anybody else out there. And it would be really interesting to know how much Chris Carter affected certainly the second part, the work ethic thing, because one of the first things the Vikings did, a huge amount of dealing with these guys that slide in the draft, whether it's for character concerns, whether it's for work ethic issues, whatever, any kind of red flag is at least acknowledging it and having a plan to deal with it.

And the Vikings, from the very outset, understood that, look, we have Chris Carter. This guy's dealt with his own problems, you know, run out of Philadelphia, resuscitated his career here, rededicated himself to his craft. We're going to send Moss straight down to Florida to work out with Chris Carter, and that's going to be like his first intro. And Carter takes him and runs him through like this gauntlet of conditioning drills. It's like this, you want to be the best in the NFL, this is what it looks like.

And you have to think that that must have had a huge impact on him really early on to say, look, this guy is on track for the Hall of Fame. This is one of the best receivers in the NFL. And he says, this is how it's got to be. Like if he didn't get that baptism of fire by Chris Carter, it's interesting to know whether he would have still had that crazy work ethic that he seems to have had throughout his career. I think about this all the time, the things that have to come together for someone to make the NFL alone, for someone to be good in the NFL, and then to be all-time great. Like, okay, if you're not 6'4", then you're not Randy Moss.

If you don't run a 4'2", something, you're not Randy Moss. If you aren't highly, highly intelligent, highly driven, and even I wonder about some of the things that happened in Randy Moss' past that he had this extra drive to want to constantly shove it in everybody's face where he was drafted. If he's drafted a little bit higher, is he a little more entitled? If he doesn't have Chris Carter, is it a little different? If he doesn't have Denny Green decide he wants to take a risk on him? And even there's some element of having quarterback like Randall Cunningham with the arm to launch it deep to him, right? If Brad Johnson is healthy and he plays the whole season,

what's that look like? Probably not the same because very few people in the world have ever had Randall Cunningham's arm strength. That's the one really interesting thing. Like, you know, Randall Cunningham starts that season as a backup, and week two, Brad Johnson goes down. And, yeah, what does it look like if Brad Johnson is the quarterback instead of Randall Cunningham all season long?

What are Moss' numbers at the end of the year in that scenario? It's probably not 17 touchdowns. We saw it for a week and a bit that he was getting he paints such a good picture. He's so wide open deep that even Brad Johnson was getting a little bit aggressive and hurling some deep shots at him. The coming out party in week one, he scores a touchdown. But just before that, Brad Johnson missed him on a deep shot that could have been another huge play as well.

Like he was getting aggressive play out of a Brad Johnson. So I still think we'd have seen a lot of it. But you're right, the combination of Randall Cunningham and Randy Moss was what kicked it to the next level. And the same thing happened later in his career with Culpepper. You know, everyone sort of goes, well, Moss made Culpepper. Culpepper might have had the best deep ball in the NFL for the entirety of his starting time there. Like, his deep ball was phenomenal.

That's a huge factor in Moss's numbers. And then Tom Brady. Like, Tom Brady didn't love to throw the deep ball when he didn't have Randy Moss, but when Moss got there, he was plenty prepared to just heave it into triple coverage and let Moss do the rest. So to get three of those quarterbacks who are happy to just start heaving the ball in your direction and trust you'll come down with it, that's a significant thing.

If you don't have that guy and you've got Alex Smith for six years instead things don't look the same like that guy's just not going to give you the opportunity to show what you can do as much it's certainly another podcast to talk about the all time most fun Vikings to watch and Culpepper is up there how many quarterbacks have amazing deep accuracy but also linebackers are afraid to tackle them when they're coming at full speed. See, I mean, that guy's career is such a sort of sad story of being ended too early. You know, we've reached a point now where medical technology is at such a degree that there are very few genuine career-ending injuries anymore. Like, most people can come back, even if it takes you a while,

and you're eventually the same player. You look at, you know, Teddy Bridgewater, to come back from what he was able to come back from. There are all those kind of guys. But Culpepper was just never the same person again once his knee got obliterated. And you've got to think that the size played a part of that. Like, when you're 260 and suddenly your knee is a question mark, that's different than when you're only 220.

You know, you don't have to worry about it as much. And then the other thing about Culpepper is his 2004 season is one of the best quarterback seasons in NFL history. It's just that it happened at the same time as one of the better ones. So nobody even remembers it. Like Peyton Manning was better in 2004 and had literally one of the best seasons of all time. So Culpepper's season is almost completely forgotten about,

even though it was a phenomenal year. Except by Madden players. Madden players will always remember Dante Culpepper on the cover. So Sam Monson, this has been lots of fun, man, just talking about great Vikings players. And I really appreciate your time and also appreciate yours and Pro Football Focus's support of what I've been doing at Purple Insider. I can't thank you enough.

Anytime. Like I said, I'm endorsing this whole methodology of journalism, of doing what you do. So I like it anyway, but I'm glad to see you giving a guy like you an opportunity when you lose your gig in such unfortunate circumstances. Well, I really appreciate it, and we will catch up again soon, sir. Thank you. Yes, sir. Hey, this is Megan Rapinoe. And I'm Sue Bird.

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