Breaking Down the Vikings Offense, Position by Position

I used the bye week to rewatch a lot of the Vikings offense. Can it sustain its incredible performance or are there signs to watch for? Let's look at each position group on the offense to find out.

Photo by Mitchell Leff/Getty Images

The Minnesota Vikings are six weeks into their season and, by their record, look like the best team in the NFL. Of course, the nature of NFL play is that win-loss record can be deceptive; we saw this with previous iterations of the Vikings and teams like last year’s Philadelphia Eagles, whose 10-1 record heading into Week 13 was met with skepticism before they collapsed.

The underlying numbers giving us some sense of how good the Vikings are have been discussed before, both here at this Substack and at others. As Matthew Coller of Purple Insider sums up:

Simply put: The Vikings have the best defense in football. By Aaron Schatz’s DVOA metric, which attempts to parse out the yardage that matters and compare teams vs. competition, Brian Flores’s unit is the best in the NFL.

There are a bunch of other metrics to back that up.

To get it out of the way, we can look at how the Vikings rank relative to the rest of the league using the team tiers function at RBSDM and excluding garbage time — this time any plays that occur outside of the 96 percent win probability window.

Are the Vikings the best team in the league? Most genuine attempts at answering the question are probably “no,” but that’s not distressing. The advanced statistics — not just EPA per play, but success rate and DVOA — do favor the Vikings as the best team (or rather, the team that has performed the best so far).

However, composite power rankings heading into Week 7 place the Vikings fifth overall. NFL Elo, which takes into account team history and quarterback strength, places the Vikings fourth. Kevin Cole’s luck-adjusted statistical power rankings place the Vikings sixth while ESPN’s data-driven Football Power Index ranks them eighth. The implied betting market power rankings place the Vikings seventh.

Doing this while atop what looks like the best division in football is even more interesting, though it could mean the pressure to perform is higher now than otherwise. The Vikings are the NFL’s point differential leader (+61), with the Lions one point behind. The Bears are at +47 and the Packers are at +41.

Those four teams are also the four leaders across the NFL in point differential.

They also have three of the top five in net EPA per play and four of the top 12 teams by the same measure. The point is, it’s a great division and the Vikings are currently the best of a good bunch — with the only divisional team to have an in-division win so far.

Much has been written about the defense, both here and elsewhere but not as much has been written about the offense — one that ranks fifth in points scored per game. I took the bye week as an opportunity to rewatch the offense and gather notes on each position group. Let’s talk about it.

Offense

Quarterback

Sam Darnold has been a blessing to start the season. While there was good reason to be optimistic about Darnold given his previous two seasons in a limited sample — he ranked 11th in EPA per play among all quarterbacks with at least 150 plays over the last two years of play — it’s still surprising to see Darnold put together this kind of performance.

The former New York Jets quarterback finished September as the NFC Player of the Month, throwing 11 touchdowns to three picks. While Darnold’s statistics are probably helped a little bit by some good fortune — PFF logs him with seven turnover-worthy plays — he’s undeniably played high-level football.

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Unfortunately, it seems like Darnold is playing worse football every week. Against the Jets, it was just enough to secure a victory, and primarily because of the defense. Starting from the two-minute warning to the end of the game, the Vikings ended their drives with four punts, two field goals, an interception and two ends of halves. Excluding the end of the game drive, that’s six points over eight possessions.

A 0.75-point-per-drive offense would be the worst in the modern era.

All but one of those eight possessions were under three minutes and three of them were under one minute. That’s what put the Jets in the driver’s seat to score in the first place.

The previous game against the Packers featured a false comeback, but one that was nevertheless a bit too close for comfort. In those two games combined, Darnold logged five of his seven turnover-worthy plays.

Even with all of this in mind, he’s playing well above the expectation for a quarterback with his background, and that’s a credit to both him and the Vikings coaching staff. But it’s worth noting now in order to better understand the Vikings’ positioning.

Darnold’s aggressive playing style has been tempered, but not so much that he’s been neutered. He ranks fifth in average depth of target among quarterbacks and fourth in deep-ball attempt percentage. On those deep passes, he ranks sixth in drop-adjusted accuracy.

When adjusting for depth of target, defender distance, distance to sideline, pressure and a few other variables, Next Gen Stats found that Darnold’s completion rate over expected was seventh-best in the league.

By holistic production measures, he doesn’t rank near the top.  In adjusted net yards per attempt, he ranks ninth of all quarterbacks. Passer rating places him sixth and EPA per play ranks him 13th.

This does look better when eliminating garbage time; when using the garbage time split in the team tiers chart above (e.g. plays that occur when one team has under a 96 percent chance of winning), we see Darnold’s rank in EPA per play rises from 13th to 4th. When eliminating any plays that occurred while leading by at least two touchdowns, his adjusted net yards per attempt rank rises from ninth to fourth and his passer rating also climbs to fourth from sixth.

His rate of off-target throws also changes; according to FantasyPoints it changes from 15th-best to fourth-best when eliminating throws made while leading by 14 points or more. This approach gets rid of 44 throws in Darnold’s 137-throw resume, so it’s important to understand that this method eliminates a significant sample.

Besides, a quarterback who throws so poorly when the game is “decided” that the game comes back into contention needs to improve. 96 percent is not 100 percent and bringing those percentages down instead of up is a trait that cannot persist.

A big part of this is pressure. The Vikings offensive line has largely been playing well — more on that below — but Darnold has worked with a high pressure rate as a passer.

FantasyPoints pegs that rate at 40.0 percent, sixth-most in the league while PFF ranks it seventh-most at 38.8 percent. That matches NFL Pro’s seventh-overall ranking at 37.9 percent. SportRadar’s picture is even worse, ranking it third-worst (albeit at 30.0 percent).

A good chunk of that pressure is the responsibility of either Darnold or the offensive design. He’s holding on to the ball longer than at any other point in his career, which suggests that the offense he’s playing in plays a role in his time to throw; we have evidence pointing to that being a significant factor in his pressure numbers.

Darnold’s time to throw on pressured plays is the ninth-longest in the NFL according to PFF and eighth-longest according to NFL Pro. FantasyPoints places it with PFF at ninth-longest.

Time to pressure is not often available from consumer-facing statistics, but FP features it in their package and Darnold’s eighth-longest ranking in time to pressure clearly paints a picture of a quarterback or offense inducing pressure more than the offensive line does. FP also created a “pressure rate above expectation” based on time to throw, and Darnold has the eighth-lowest mark there.

That might be why his offensive line win rate — the rate at which they allow a defender to beat them within the first 2.5 seconds after the snap — is in the top third of the league at ninth overall, according to ESPN.

He’s been above average at preventing that from turning into sacks; all the organizations rank him outside of the top ten but above average in low pressure-to-sack ratio. But, it’s certainly a concern.

More concerning — his play from a clean pocket is not ideal. His rate of turnover-worthy plays without pressure is the second-highest in the NFL. It’s not without its benefits, of course; he ranks second in yards per attempt from a clean pocket and second in big-time throw rate in a clean pocket. But this kind of high-volatility play could hurt the Vikings going forward.

That’s kind of the bargain with Darnold and we may just be at the back end of a bad streak, a product of variance. He’s always going to do one or two things during a game that will infuriate fans. The question is whether or not he can he can benefit from luck or make other plays to make up for it. So far, he has.

Again, the Vikings are in a wonderful spot to be having this conversation. But now that we’ve reframed the terms from “let’s see if they can get to .500” to “let’s win some playoff games,” the standard has changed and Darnold needs to get better before he’s the reason they lose games.

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