Ground n Pound

[darthseinfeld]

Not going to happen this game. The Vikes are going to sell out to stop the run and force Rush to beat them. Our only chance is a lot of short passes and a very high YAC total. Throw a handfull of 5 yard passes to Pollard and Lamb in space and see what he can do with them. Those type of plays are our only shot unless Cousins gets injured early.

Ya Minnesota isnt going to let us run on them with Cooper Rush at QB. If we dont connect through the air, we arent moving the ball

 

[SSoup]

Minny is giving up around 5 YPC. I think we can roadgrade this team on the ground

I dunno, how often have the Vikings been super serious about stopping the run this year? We might be facing a much less soft front than most of their opponents faced this year.

I'm betting when they played the Seahawks and the Cardinals, they were giving very soft fronts (similar to the ones we faced after week 1 where teams were basically begging us to run instead of pass). Against the Bengals, with Burrows and 3 decent WR's, they couldn't focus on entirely on Joe Mixon that week either.

And in the Lions and Panthers games, they were facing mediocre backup-caliber RBs, so those were running games that didn't really demand serious attention either.

The Browns game, where the Browns have an elite running attack and not much else, that's probably the closest we'll get to film that is relevant to us if we're starting Rush and flipping a switch to go back into Jason Garrett Mode where the whole thing is imposing our will and planning on out-executing them with the run for the whole ballgame even with them knowing it's coming. The Vikes knew the running game was all they really had to worry about with Cleveland, and while they still gave up plenty of rushing yards (allowing both stud runners to have averages in the high 4's and combine for about 170 rushing yards), they only allowed 14 points. That's damn good.

14 points is the fewest they've allowed in a game all season, so it could be argued this was their defense's best showing/matchup. So copying the approach their opponent in that game used might not be great.

Of course, all this talk about the offense could be largely meaningless depending on what the defense does. The defense might let Dalvin Cook have a monster day, running for 150-200 yards and 3 or 4 scores. Might get torched by Jefferson and Thielan for several scores. If the defense's turnover luck runs out and we get smoked by their offense, even the best-case scenario of a buttoned-down, safe Cooper Rush offense is probably not enough. Rush having a nice day while he protects the ball and leads us to, say, a solid 24 points? A lot of good that does us if Minnesota runs wild for 40 or something crazy.

Eh, we'll see.

I'd like to see us be pretty aggressive. Assume we'll need to score points to win when the opponent hasthe kind of weapons Minnesota has. McCarthy had an unheralded 4th-year, 7th-rounder backup like Matt Flynn throw 6 TD passes (they called about 50 passing plays that day) in a single game during a start that Rodgers missed back in 2011. So he's no stranger to turning a backup QB loose and letting them cook with the real offense. With Lael Collins available again, this should be the best protection we've had all season long, giving us cleaner pockets and more time (for the QB and for the receivers) than we've had in, literally, years. If we don't trust Cooper Rush to do something with that, then we hadn't ought to have wasted a roster spot on him or neglected to bring in outside competition this summer. A lot of good it does to keep a mediocre backup on the basis that he "knows the whole offense" if you aren't even willing to let him operate that whole offense.