It was a great win for the Vikings on Sunday. Anytime you step into the Georgia Dome and beat Matt Ryan and Julio Jones, you know you’ve done something right. Moving to 8-3, the Vikes are back on top of the NFC North and control their own destiny going forward.
The defense stopped the Falcons at will, putting pressure on Ryan and bottling up Jones with Xavier Rhodes shadowing him the entire game where they didn’t ever give the Falcons a sniff of momentum. It was a simple game plan by the Vikings – put the ball in Adrian’s hands and let the defense do its thing. Certainly not rocket science.
So despite that wonderful news, there was one thing about the game plan that stuck out, and even though it won’t go away anytime soon, the Vikings best be careful to not let hit it shoot themselves in the foot down the road. The Vikings need to stop employing a pacifier strategy when dealing with the maturation process of Teddy Bridgewater.
Third and five and deep in the red zone and they hand it off to Matt Asiata, who could probably get you 1 or 2 yards in that scenario, but not 5 and not 5 against what was supposedly one of the best rush defenses in the league. Why not give it Adrian Peterson in that situation? You need 7 points against a pretty good Falcons offense, not 3.
Or why not put the ball in Teddy’s hands? If, as you’ve said publicly that he is not a game manager, then that’s his ball on that down and at that yard line. I’ve seen the Twitter posts and I’ve read the national blogs and what-not, but it doesn’t make sense at this stage in Teddy’s very early career. This is where the grooming should start and it starts with placing trust on whatever down and at whatever yard line in your young quarterback to make the plays you need.
Now, unless the Vikings think they have the greatest chance to win the rest of their games en route to their first Super Bowl win ever by staying with this strategy – then by all means keep doing what works. And perhaps that is exactly what they are thinking. However, your best team in the next 5 years, if you can keep all of your young talent on defense, isn’t going to be the 2015 Vikings or maybe even the 2016 Vikings. No, it’s going to be one of the teams in either 2017, ’18 or ’19. And at that time, you can’t have this same strategy of game management at the QB position. Sorry, it won’t work.
To build for the future, you need to mold your guys now. Anthony Barr is taking giant leaps this season. They are letting him do pretty much anything on the field and it’s paying big-item dividends for what I think is the top defense in the league. Same can be said for Harrison Smith. So why not let Teddy get that same trust? Mold him into a consistent play maker – where he knows what his limits are from his own play, not what his limits are for the type of play that is called upstairs depending on the down and yard line.
It’s not just called game experience – it’s called rich game experience. Every great quarterback was provided a very open playbook pretty much right out of the gate – despite the lack of success his team experienced during those early years of growing pains.
If this doesn’t happen within the next year and Teddy continues an excessive coddling as a result of Adrian Peterson visiting the Fountain of Youth again in the off-season, then in 2017 and beyond, you will be stuck with a veteran QB who is still trying to find himself and looking over his shoulder for Ponce de Leon in the backfield. Let him find himself now and maybe, just maybe, he might help you find a Super Bowl ring down the road after an accelerated maturation process has been vetted on the field rather than through conservative play calling in a booth.
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