It Got Worse

The Vikings lost in embarrassing fashion after being forced to play their third-string quarterback, an undrafted rookie from the University of Minnesota. Surprising some, but not many, it was awful.

After the Vikings' 0-26 loss to the Seattle Seahawks, they now have the 11th pick in the NFL draft, according to Tankathon. Our latest mock draft suggests that this is well out of range to draft a quarterback, if that matters to you.

The Vikings have been mathematically eliminated from winning the division, but, somehow, not from making the playoffs — if they win out and the Green Bay Packers lose out, then the Vikings are in the dance. This isn’t a particular concern to Vikings fans who know that the odds are minuscule at best.

Instead, we’re left to deal with the dregs of whatever this performance against the Seattle Seahawks was. The Vikings were forced by injury to start a third-string player, this time a rookie undrafted free agent, local pickup and former Minnesota Golden Gopher, Max Brosmer.

The result was a deadening massacre. The Vikings lost without scoring a point for the first time in 18 years and with it, they lost any enthusiasm they could engender among their fanbase.

It was the worst quarterback performance of the season for a Vikings quarterback in a season full of mind-bogglingly bad performances. It is a natural instinct to produce reams of data and visualizations to demonstrate quite how bad it was. At some point, it becomes overwhelming. Nevertheless, I did the work, so you get to see it.

In fact, this might be the worst quarterback production we’ve seen from a Vikings quarterback since the turn of the century.

And this metric doesn’t account for the fact that the final pick didn’t get tagged as an enormously negative play; it was logged as a mere minus-0.13 expected points value because Jalen Nailor forced a fumble on Riq Woolen’s runback.

In the circumstance that Brosmer was penalized for the pick and the return, the Vikings would have generated minus-4.84 expected points on that play, moving Brosmer from minus-0.89 expected points per play to minus-1.00 expected points per play.

The only competing game would be a 2006 affair against the Chicago Bears in Week 13, where quarterback Brad Johnson threw four picks on 21 attempts, taking a sack in the process and throwing for 2.8 yards per passing attempt. He earned minus-1.03 expected points per play.

Stunningly, the Vikings scored 13 points in that game. Here, they scored nothing.

For a quarterback whose strength was supposed to be “processing” heading into the game, there wasn’t much post-snap reading of the defense. The Vikings had Brosmer throw behind the line of scrimmage on over a third of his dropbacks, the sixth-highest rate of any Vikings game we have data for, going back to 2016.

His success rate on passes thrown past the line of scrimmage was 21.1 percent, the lowest of any Vikings quarterback since 2007. Three of his four picks were thrown past the line of scrimmage. His anticipation and processing meant nothing; another example of how preseason play can trick us.

Brosmer played up to some elements of his scouting report of course; he got rid of the ball quickly and threw at the top of his drop. He threw with more touch and timing than most quarterbacks. And he was awful.