MVN - Most Valuable Network

Vikings Lose in Humiliating Fashion

As I type this, there’s 9:29 remaining in the third quarter. There’s no point in waiting until the end of the game to start writing this…today’s game was over long ago.

This is one of those games where I’m not really sure where to start. So many things went horribly wrong.

I might as well start with Bollinger. He had six passing yards in the first half. That’s right, six. Spergon Wynn would have been an upgrade at quarterback, today.

Bollinger’s timing was completely off. He was embarrassingly inaccurate on a number of throws. Most of the passes he did complete were meager checkdowns to AD and Tony Richardson.

“Painful” is the best way to describe our passing game. “Nonexistent” would also be a good word.

What an incredible blunder it was to not sign a quarterback. Hindsight is 20/20, but this season could have been a much different story if we actually had a legitimate starting quarterback. Our quarterback situation is an embarrassment. Childress, Spielman, and everyone else in this organization should be ashamed that we went into this season with these quarterbacks.

The playcalling certainly didn’t help matters, today. They tried to go to Adrian with some frequency, but they need to start using him in a greater variety of ways. Draws, play action, screens, tosses…don’t just send him up the middle on each down. But for Adrian to have success, we also need to get something out of the passing game…because as it is, this offense is one-dimensional and predictable.

The defense played an all-around terrible game. To the Packers credit, they did a great job of not letting the Vikings’ defensive linemen get off their blocks. And Favre, who had some accuracy problems in the first quarter, was on-target for the remainder of the game. But Frazier and Chilly are culpable for some of the defense’s problems.

We rushed three too many times during the game…I would’ve liked to see the Vikes put more pressure on Favre.

I’ve heard quite a few people say that it’s pointless to pressure Favre…after all, he’s an extremely difficult guy to sack. But the Vikings don’t have the personnel in the secondary to stop #4 when they’re dropping eight guys back into coverage…and Favre ended up picking us apart. If we’d have pressured him, we might have at least forced him into rushing some passes and throwing on the run.

The Vikings’ zone coverage was a mere annoyance for Favre. He had an easy day.

Surprisingly, the Packers’ running game had huge success…Ryan Grant usually had quite a bit of running room on the outside, and he even had a few nice runs when running at the Williams brothers. Again, great blocking from the Packers o-line and an incredibly uninspired performance from our run defense cumulated in a big day for Grant. Our guys didn’t come to play, and it showed.

True, the defense was on the field for way too long…and the clueless performance from the offense is partly to blame for that. But our D can also point the finger at themselves…the Pack went 11-17 on third down, and 2-2 on fourth down. You want to get off the field? Then stop them on third and fourth down.

Looking for positives? Adrian’s injury appears to be minor. But that’s the only thing to feel good about.

Let’s look at the bigger picture. This team was completely and utterly uninspired…I’ve been seeing a lot of Vikings rubes saying that this team quit on Chilly, and they’re absolutely right. From start to finish, this team was flat…rarely did I see them display anything even resembling an effort (EJ Henderson is the exception to this).

The gameplan was horrible. We didn’t go downfield until the game was in the books, we could’ve done more to stop Favre from picking us apart, and the offensive playcalling was vanilla and predictable. Worst of all, Chilly failed to motivate his squad. But the players simply didn’t execute, either. All parties deserve blame after this debacle.

I can’t help but think that this season could get even uglier. The players don’t seem to be buying into whatever Chilly’s saying in the locker room…so we have a very volatile situation. This is a lost season- now, I think it’s just a question of how long Chilly can hang onto this locker room.

Feel free to vent in the comments section. It’s cheaper than therapy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 11th, 2007 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Green Bay Packers, Kevin Williams, Brett Favre, Pat Williams, Brad Childress, Minnesota Vikings, Brooks Bollinger, Adrian Peterson, NFL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.