The Minnesota Vikings and their Murderer's Row of Pass Rushers

The Minnesota Vikings have a schedule filled with elite pass rushers. Can their pass protection hold up?

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The Minnesota Vikings, without Christian Darrisaw, have had a pass protection issue. There’s ample reason to place a significant amount of the blame on J.J. McCarthy, something we’ve discussed already. Long story short: the Vikings rank second in the NFL in time to throw, per Next Gen Stats.

That will hopefully change with Carson Wentz in at quarterback and then presumably with whatever happens at quarterback once McCarthy returns to health following his high ankle sprain.

But it may not matter. This is only one aspect of the problem the Vikings face this year. They also, seemingly, have a murderer’s row of pass rushers on their schedule.

Last year, the top edge rushers by PFF pass rush grade were Aidan Hutchinson, Myles Garrett, Nick Herbig, Micah Parsons, Trey Hendrickson, T.J. Watt and Alex Highsmith — players whom the Vikings will face nine times this year, should everyone stay healthy. They will also, later in the season, play Khalil Mack.

The Green Bay Packers lead the league in pressures per game, as charted by PFF, produced by the interior defenders and edge rushers two weeks into the season and have 52 on the season, or 26 per game. By Next Gen Stats’ accounting, the Packers rank second.

This can be attributed to the Parsons trade in many ways, but players like Rashan Gary, Lukas Van Ness and Devonte Wyatt are producing even when Parsons isn’t on the field; Gary has a pressure rate, per Next Gen Stats, of 15.4 percent with Parsons on the sideline (ranked 26th of 97 edge rushers) while Van Ness’ pressure rate is 10.5 percent (69th) without Parsons’ help. Wyatt’s pressure rate of 11.1 percent ranks 21st of all interior defensive linemen.

Given how daunting this possibility has become — a big part of the reason that Jeff Hafley’s defense now ranks sixth in the NFL in EPA allowed per play — it’s important to understand how significant the pass rush schedule has become for Minnesota.

The Vikings Pass Rush Schedule

In addition to the new-look pass-rushing Packers and the list above, the Vikings also have games against the No. 12 edge rusher (Brian Burns) and the Nos. 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 11 (again) and 16 defensive interior lineman — Cameron Heyward, Moro Ojomo, Jalen Carter, Dexter Lawrence, Andrew Billings, Osa Odighizuwa, Alim McNeill and Keeanu Benton.

To get a good sense of what this pass-rush might look like, I grabbed the schedules for every team and their respective rosters of defensive linemen.

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Using Next Gen Stats pressure data over the past two years (and two weeks) and the snap count data we have for this year, I was able to create an expected pressure rate for a 17-game season for each team, assuming they dropped back to pass 30 times in each game. The pressure rates don’t assume any blitzing, because this is meant to quantify up-front talent for opponents.

Here, we assumed that players who are already injured — McNeill and Highsmith are good examples — are still on the schedule for their respective teams. Given that McNeill is expected to come back soon and that Highsmith’s injury seems less serious than initially expected (like with Mack’s), this shouldn’t distort the findings too much.