Vikings Mount Near-Comeback in Loss to Philadelphia Eagles That Never Felt Close at All

The Minnesota Vikings found themselves in another "one-score" game, losing 28-22 to the Philadelphia Eagles. They looked good on paper. It never felt that close.

Photo by Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images

The Minnesota Vikings outpaced the Philadelphia Eagles in total offensive yards, total first downs, third-down conversion rate, fourth-down conversion rate, penalty yardage and time of possession.

At no point did it seem like the Vikings were in control of the game. Losing 28-22 felt, in some ways, like a mercy.

The Vikings Offense

Carson Wentz and the Vikings offense, in the first half, were atrocious. Wentz was completing just 57.9 percent of his throws, and that somehow seems a generous proxy for his accuracy given how bad his misses were.

In one drive, his inability to place the ball to Jordan Addison wiped out a potential touchdown three different times — most notably on the actual completion, where an egregious underthrow on a blown coverage meant that the defense could catch up to Addison and prevent the score.

Despite the separation Vikings receivers produced in the first half, the passing game couldn’t produce a complete performance; while the Vikings averaged 8.53 yards per passing attempt, they only managed a success rate of 46.7 percent on passing plays. It was built around explosives, and they couldn’t turn their big explosives into consistent scoring.

Instead, the explosives went the other way — a deep, unnecessary interception to Andrew Mukuba and a pick-six to Jalyx Hunt defined the day more than any outstanding play by Wentz.

Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

While Wentz improved in the second half, these moments of inaccuracy still showed up in big ways.

In the fourth quarter, as the Vikings were preparing to mount a comeback, Wentz had three deep shots to Jefferson. The first one, with 5:21 left in the game, Jefferson had a step on his receiver and then some on his go route, with Reed Blankenship rotating over a bit late. A well-placed ball would have put the Vikings in the red zone.

With 4:35 left in the game, Jefferson had even more space than on the previous route, a corner route from the slot with a shot into the end zone. The pass fell three yards away from him and, again, was underthrown.

With 3:49 remaining, Jefferson won off the release on his go route, and Wentz threw to the pylon while Jefferson was expecting a throw into the bucket just over the top because Mukuba was lurking. They were not on the same page.

A throw to the end zone following that, to T.J. Hockenson, fell incomplete after initially being ruled a touchdown. While Hockenson may have been partially to blame for not holding on to the ball, it really seems like much more blame should be accorded to Wentz, whose inaccurate throw forced Hockenson to attempt a circus catch.

Also relevant was Wentz’s habit of holding on to the ball. The Vikings transitioned away from their quick-strike offense for this matchup against the Eagles, and it seemed to be a mistake, though Wentz still aggravated things by taking too long to make decisions.

In his prior three outings, he averaged between 7.20 and 7.83 yards downfield on his throws. In this game, he averaged 10.02. Some of that came from necessity because the Vikings were playing from behind, but that wasn’t most of it.

Instead, Wentz skipped over quick short reads — on two consecutive plays, analyst Greg Olsen decried Wentz’s decision to pass over C.J. Ham on short throws despite that being where he should have gone in the progression — and waited to get rid of the ball.

Against the Bengals, Steelers and Browns, Wentz got rid of the ball under 2.5 seconds 51.7 percent of the time, 45.3 percent of the time and 53.7 percent of the time. In this game, it was as low as 30.4 percent… which is still more often than McCarthy did in either of his games.

Next Gen Stats marked his average time to throw as 3.00 seconds, the slowest in a Vikings uniform, though not quite as slow as the 3.21-second and 3.53-second performances in the first two weeks.

His erratic play wasn’t just marked by inaccuracy, either. Turning down open receivers, performing outrageously slow pump fakes and throwing haphazardly on the run all contributed to his errors.

The Vikings have two of the top five receivers in receiving yards per game

Of course, it wasn’t just inaccuracy that hurt the Vikings; inconsistency doomed them as well. Despite good on-paper marks in some areas, critical failures in big moments cratered the team. As O’Connell said after the game, “[We] had no issues moving the football, that has not really been our problem... but a lot of self-inflicted [mistakes] showed up in that red zone that make it hard to put the ball in the end zone.”

Snapping over the quarterback’s head didn’t help. Though that wasn’t center Blake Brandel’s only problem.

Pass Protection

Wentz’s long time-to-throw doesn’t mean the offensive line played well in pass protection. 19.6 percent of his dropbacks featured a hurry appear within 2.5 seconds of the snap, the largest proportion of dropbacks the Vikings have allowed a fast hurry all year. Across the league, that’s an 11th percentile outcome, one of the worst pass protection performances we’ve seen all year.

These fast hurries comprise just under half of all the hurries a typical team will see in a year, but were 65 percent of the hurries the Vikings saw in this game.

Three of the hurries were produced in under two seconds — the quarterback hit up the center from Jalen Carter that produced the Hunt pick-six, another Jalen Carter pressure on 2nd and 14, and a Moro Ojomo sack up the middle in the fourth quarter.

That’s two on Brandel and one on Donovan Jackson. In fact, almost every quick pressure was on the interior offensive line, with Ojomo grabbing during the two-minute drill in the first half against Jackson, too. Jordan Davis got in on the action in the fourth quarter against Brandel as well. The miss to Jefferson with 4:35 remaining in the game occurred while Brandel rolled onto Wentz’s feet after getting pushed in the pocket by Carter.

Brian O’Neill, back with the team, only allowed two pressures; one was a seemingly late one that resulted in a Justin Jefferson catch-and-run for 40 yards. The other was the Joshua Uche sack near the end of the game. Christian Darrisaw, playing a whole game, only allowed two as well.

While the bookends could have played better against an edge rush unit that has been struggling all year, the interior offensive line was primarily to blame — especially Brandel, though Jackson didn’t play well either.

Running the Ball

The Vikings only ran the ball 19 times and didn’t block well on most of those attempts, with the exception of Brian O’Neill, who was consistent. After starting out as a zone-dominant running team in the first half, they couldn’t get much going. On designed runs, they only ran for 1.9 yards per carry and minus-0.30 EPA per carry, with a success rate of 25.0 percent.