Vikings Win Ugly Against the Jaguars, With Hopefully More Under the Hood

After a three-interception performance, the Vikings eked out a one-score win against the lowly Jaguars. It's not so bad.

Photo by Rich Storry/Getty Images

For the second week in a row, the Minnesota Vikings pulled out an ugly win that invites questions about their ability to win at a level they’ve theoretically established with their play over the first few weeks of the season. Outsiders seemingly consider the Vikings to be a top-level NFC team, while those that follow it closely hew closer to judging it as one that is barely hanging on.

There are, however, legitimate reasons for optimism amidst this well of earned pessimism.

The Minnesota Vikings’ 12-7 win over the Jacksonville Jaguars does nothing to help establish their reputation as Super Bowl contenders. They are considered to be about the 7th-best team in the NFL by various statistical models and about the 5th-best team by other power rankings around the league.

Those same measures regard the Jaguars as a bottom-five team, one that likely would be regarded as worse after accounting for the injury to Trevor Lawrence that put Mac Jones into the game.

A one-score win doesn’t meet expectations (or at least fan expectations – the final spread was 5.5 points, perfectly in line with what happened), but it at least buys them some more time to turn around their performance without having to turn around their season.

The Defense

Junking the Jaguars

The Vikings defense was outstanding against the Jaguars. While, like last week, it’s important to acknowledge that they were playing against a bad offensive unit it should also be noted that this was the worst performance the Jaguars offense put up this year.

They managed minus-0.32 expected points per play, their worst performance of the season. By adjusted net yards per passing attempt, the Jaguars and Jones managed a mark of just minus-0.12 – also their worst of the season and the only negative number in that statistic all year. They also happened to put up their worst yards-per-carry all year at 3.1.

They scored just seven total points, the lowest total of the year so far for them. It also happened to be their lowest drive-scoring percentage (10 percent) and points per drive (0.70) for the year. That includes games against four other top-ten defenses – the Texans, Bears, Eagles and Packers. They also played the Browns, who might end up in that category by the end of the year.

Of course, Jacksonville was playing with a worse quarterback than they have had all year, but it’s notable that this was Jones’ sixth-worst performance in EPA per game and single-worst performance in adjusted net yards per attempt throughout his career.

The Vikings defense only looked out of sorts on one drive, which happened to be the lone scoring drive for the Jaguars. Early in the game, Minnesota moved away from its essential DNA and only blitzed on one of Jones’ first 11 dropbacks – a rate of 9.1 percent, by far the lowest the Flores defense has ever managed over a full game and mystifyingly low for a team that would consider 40 percent to be on the low end.

After those first 11 dropbacks, which were spread out entirely over the span of the Jaguars’ first two drives, the Vikings blitzed at a rate of 73.3 percent.

That seemed to be the trick; in Jones’ first two drives, he averaged 6.6 yards per passing attempt with a completion rate of 66.7 percent – with an added EPA per play of plus-0.064.

Outside of those two drives, Jones earned an EPA per play of minus-0.515, throwing for 6.3 yards per pass and minus-3.88 adjusted net yards per dropback with a completion rate of 61.5 percent. Most of his negative plays came against the blitz, where he averaged 4.7 yards per pass and -6.0 adjusted net yards per dropback. All three sacks and both picks came on blitzes.