Luke Braun's Film Room: The Dark Matters of Dagger

Luke Braun digs into kooky astronomers and their relationship to what has become the Achilles Heel of the Vikings defense: The Dagger Concept

Photo by Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images

Who would you say is the greatest innovator of the last century? Would you name a technological pioneer like Steve Jobs? What about John Hoboult, the lead aerospace engineer who drew up Apollo 11’s route to the moon? 

We may not know who that is until we have the benefit of hindsight. One hundred years ago, a Swiss astronomer named Fritz Zwicky was spouting crackpot theories and pissing everyone off. But with a century to look back, we can see that his ideas were not only ahead of their time, but foundational to modern astronomy.

Zwicky had all kinds of radical theories on astronomy that challenged conventional understanding at the time. Some proved to be correct, like his theory that larger stars blow up when they die. Others, like the idea that light could get tired, didn’t work out so well.

One day in 1933, Zwicky looked at the Coma galaxy cluster, a grouping of some 1,000 galaxies 321 million light years away. Something looked wrong. He calculated how much mass there should be in the cluster by looking at how fast the galaxies on the edge were traveling. Then, he calculated how much of that mass was accounted for by the light the galaxy gave off.

It wasn’t even close. There was ten times as much mass in that cluster than there was supposed to be. He found a similar effect in individual spiral galaxies. There had to be some kind of invisible matter — dunkle Materie — that we couldn’t see via light. 

Zwicky’s contemporaries dismissed the idea. At the time, we understood very little about the universe beyond our Solar System. We didn’t even understand that much beyond our own planet. How could we challenge the few assumptions we did have, namely that most of the matter in the universe consists of stars?

Forty years later, American astronomer Vera Rubin looked at velocities in spiral galaxies and found the same evidence of “dark matter.” Stars on the outer rings of those galaxies were moving so fast that they should be flung out beyond the galaxy’s influence. But they weren’t. Something was pulling those stars back in.

In modern astronomy, Zwicky and Rubin’s observations are undeniable. Dark matter’s existence is widely accepted, and the scientific community constantly works to uncover its nature. They are making progress — here’s one from this past August — that a kooky Swiss guy predicted almost an entire century ago.

The lesson of Fritz Zwicky is not to say that we have to listen to every crackpot theory that oozes out of academia. It’s that true innovation often comes with growing pains. The guys that figure out that there are Supernovae or Dark Matter also might write a paper about nuclear goblins.

Nothing showed up when I searched “Nuclear Goblins” in Getty Images, but Luke explained that Zwicky turned out to describing neutron stars and I shit you not, this image shows up in Getty when you search for neutron star

Rubin and her co-author William Ford built on Zwicky’s initial proposal. They could seriously investigate it and build a model. They walked a trail that Zwicky blazed, allowing them to build a successful body of work on the ashes of a ridiculed man’s reputation.

The Minnesota Vikings defense is in its Fritz Zwicky era. It’s new, it colors outside the lines, and yes, it has its growing pains. It challenges our assumptions — not of the makeup of the mass of the universe, but about what 5-man and 6-man coverages a team can survive in behind an exotic blitz. 

The Hypothesis

Flores’s defense is designed to blitz at a high volume. Most teams prefer man coverage when they blitz, and some like to use “Fire Zone”, which divides the field into thirds with all the classic pitfalls of Cover 3. 

To blitz, say, for 50% of a game, you’d have to run one of those two coverages for 50% of that game. Offenses will have no issue unraveling a defense with that little diversity. Flores needed more options. He turned to the college ranks for ideas.

The key idea was to run quarters zone coverage behind these blitzes. With only six players, you have to remove a zone. Flores’s compromise is to lose an underneath zone (and sometimes entrust another one to a pass rusher).

This leaves the flats wide open, which is a crucial part of the philosophy. Teams are highly discouraged from trying deep fades or other quick-developing shot plays. If you want quick game, you’re free to dump the ball to the flat or check into a perimeter screen. Call this at high volume and your passing game looks like this.

If you don’t want your offense to recede toward the line of scrimmage like Lebron James’s hairline, you’ll need to find a way to get deep on these blitz quarters coverages. One idea is to simply keep more blockers in, but that means fewer routes. Flores is happy to run a six-man coverage scheme if only two or three receivers will go downfield.

You need a concept that pushes the ball deep against quarters, develops quickly enough to counter an aggressive blitz, and that only needs two or three routes to find success.

You need Dagger.