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The story behind the Vikings’ 5-0 start: Between chemistry and scheme, it's just 'different'

17 October 2024

In April, Josh Metellus keyed into the Minnesota Vikings’ facility, snaked through the back hallway and climbed the steps up to the third floor. The building was mostly quiet. A couple of staffers were clicking through documents on their computers. Mostly, though, office doors were closed, and the calm that comes with an NFL offseason felt in full effect.

Metellus weaved through the third floor, turned left around the corner and found exactly what he’d hoped to find: defensive coordinator Brian Flores seated at his desk.

A year earlier, Metellus first met Flores in this same office. The safety/linebacker/slot corner/whatever else was blindsided initially not by Flores’ disposition but by the floor-to-ceiling whiteboard on the left side of the room. Black ink smeared in spots. Shapes and lines depicted formations. Player names were scattered everywhere.

“He had a list of everything that he thinks just thrown onto the wall,” Metellus said several months ago. “Like, everything he’d ever thought of what his defense could be.”

“I try to fight fire with fire. That’s just me.” – Brian Flores pic.twitter.com/Ikkw2Jr96I

— Minnesota Vikings (@Vikings) October 15, 2024

Once his eyes dislodged from the whiteboard, Metellus listened to Flores’ vision of him as a player. Flores pointed to the board. You could do that. He pointed to a different spot. And that. His finger moved again. And that.

Initially, Metellus thought he’d have to choose one. Then the 2023 season came, and Metellus realized Flores seriously thought he could play all of those spots — at once. After the season, he vowed to visit Flores again in 2024 to find out what was next in store.

This past spring, Metellus was ready to hear version 2.0. Again, Flores’ gigantic whiteboard mesmerized him. Different shapes and new names were scribbled all over the place. Metellus was essentially getting a sneak peek at the defensive portion of the rough draft for the team that has taken the NFL by storm in 2024.

The question both then and now was the same: How? How did the Vikings come up with this plan, and how has it worked so well through five games? The answers to those questions are part intentional composition and part spontaneous chemistry.

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Poetically, the beginnings of the Vikings’ 5-0 start in 2024 were birthed in the final hours of 2023.

Late into the night on Dec. 31 in the bowels of U.S. Bank Stadium, coach Kevin O’Connell gripped a lectern with both hands like he was squeezing two stress balls. His Vikings, sputtering to the finish without quarterback Kirk Cousins, had just been embarrassed 33-10 by the rival Packers. For a few brief seconds, he refrained from making eye contact with members of the media. His facial expression evoked the emotions of a person who had just experienced three hours of something he never wanted to experience again.

“Really not much to say other than we got outplayed,” O’Connell said.

His voice, typically tinged with energy and optimism, sounded raspy and flat. The night confirmed harsh truths unrelated to the Vikings’ abysmal quarterback situation. Mainly, Minnesota needed an offseason to rethink both what it prioritized and how it was going to achieve those priorities.

When the season ended, O’Connell and Flores met inside their third-floor offices, revisiting that night and allocating mental energy toward what was needed for the transformation. Beyond a need to re-emphasize turnover margin and playing more physically, they recognized that the team’s creative defensive approach — alternating between max pressure and max coverage — could not survive another season on its own.

Teams, beginning with the Bengals in Week 15, had been dicing up their secondary. Pre-snap, the opposition could expect the Vikings’ defensive alignment to look like a punt block. Post-snap, they knew they mostly needed answers for three distinct coverages: Cover 2 (two deep safeties), Cover 3 (three deep defenders) and Cover 0 (no deep defenders).

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Frankly, the evolution called for better defensive personnel. Playing more Cover 1 (one deep safety with man coverage across the board) or Quarters (four deep defenders with man coverage principles) or 2-man (two deep defenders with man coverage across the board) meant shifting more of the down-to-down pressure onto cornerbacks, a move Flores was unwilling to make with Akayleb Evans, Byron Murphy Jr. and Mekhi Blackmon as the primary starters.

Beyond that, the Vikings’ pass rush in 2023 ranked 27th in the league in pressure rate. Add cornerbacks but overlook the pass rush, and the cornerbacks would have to cover for too much time for the increased coverage options to matter. Improve the pass rush but stick with the same cornerbacks, and receivers like Tee Higgins would still make game-deciding grabs in coverage.

One Vikings coach described the intended year-over-year modification as a complete upgrade of technological software. Before free agency and the NFL Draft, they sifted through experienced cover corners, interior pass rushers, off-ball linebackers with enhanced coverage range and edge rushers who could both cover and rush the passer. The hope? To find players with these skills who were both smart enough to understand complex concepts and motivated enough to be pushed.

Some players who had previously played for Flores, like Andrew Van Ginkel and Kamu Grugier-Hill, made perfect sense. Others, like Jonathan Greenard, Shaq Griffin, Blake Cashman, Jerry Tillery and Jihad Ward, fit the exact specifications for the roles the Vikings staff envisioned. When discussing these players in meetings, the coaching staff even estimated players’ potential market value in their pitches.

“It was not just, ‘Here’s how we see this guy as a player,’” Vikings assistant head coach Mike Pettine said. “But it was, ‘Here’s how we plan to use this guy.’”

General manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, executive vice president Rob Brzezinski and senior manager of football administration Emily Badis secured many of the Vikings’ defensive targets in March once the free-agency period opened. O’Connell’s time may have been segmented — he was simultaneously directing Minnesota’s pre-draft quarterback evaluation process — but solidifying the other areas of the roster remained pivotal as well.

And because the Vikings had moved away from high-dollar veteran contracts in recent years, they had enough cap space to make more moves. First, they signed running back Aaron Jones. Then, they added quarterback Sam Darnold, punctuating what appears to have been a team-altering period.

Vikings linebacker Kamu Grugier-Hill (54) celebrates an interception against the Texans with teammate Cam Bynum. (Stephen Maturen / Getty Images)

Once the Vikings staff executed its vision, not long after Metellus visited Flores’ office, the facility hummed with an unmistakably different energy. The locker room vibrated with hip-hop music played by Greenard and Ward. On the practice field, as players finished workouts, Griffin, a veteran free-agent signing who played for the Texans and Panthers last season, often walked off the grass laughing with his younger teammates.

It gave off the impression of a group of school classmates, thrown together at random, that jelled in a way that they were having fun. They attended Timberwolves playoff games. They caravanned to play golf at Whistling Straits. They met at local country music concerts.

At one point during the summer, Griffin’s brother asked about his new team. How is it? What’s it like up there? A Pro Bowler in 2019, Griffin had already played in the NFL for seven years. He began his career with a Seahawks team that not only produced four straight winning seasons but also was known for being player-led and bubbly under coach Pete Carroll. Yet Griffin could not conjure the proper words to describe what the atmosphere in Minnesota had been like.

“It was a different feeling,” Griffin said. “I had never felt so many professional football players so ready to get back from each break.”

What he didn’t know was that his teammates were finding it similarly difficult to explain their feelings to their family members. “Different” was the same word Jones used in conversations with his mother.

Griffin has thought frequently about this feeling. He wonders if the Vikings staff threaded the needle perfectly on blending veterans and youth. He thinks O’Connell’s leadership style — choosing not to be overbearing — has something to do with it.

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But there’s also an unfortunate reality at play. Tragic circumstances force you to lean on the people you’re closest to and to come together with them in the hope of creating something greater.

In July, rookie cornerback Khyree Jackson died in a car crash. Still to this day, one of the first images you see when you enter Minnesota’s locker room is rookie Dallas Turner’s locker — and the nameplate positioned above his own: Khyree Jackson, 31. On a far less devastating scale, the locker room rattled with more news as weeks passed. Blackmon, a highly regarded cornerback, crumbled to the ground during a practice with a torn ACL. Budding quarterback J.J. McCarthy, who had been ascending during training camp, went from electrifying the home crowd on a Sunday to requiring surgery to repair a torn meniscus three days later.

Adversity was beginning to feel like a theme for the 2024 Vikings, but O’Connell continued onward. He downloaded Darnold’s route-concept preferences from daily practices. He added words and acronyms to exponentially increase the ways in which the Vikings could motion Justin Jefferson. He spoke defiantly in team meetings, and the players absorbed his message.

“You know the NFLPA report card?” right tackle Brian O’Neill said in August, referring to the player survey that identified the Vikings as one of the most highly regarded teams in the league in terms of working conditions and environment. “(O’Connell) is the report card. He sets the tone for the entire building.”

Further validating O’Connell’s persistent belief was one final roster move. In the back half of training camp, Flores implored the top brass to sign Stephon Gilmore. The veteran cornerback’s presence, paired with his man-to-man skills, would integrate the final code into the upgrade.

Gilmore arrived quietly and blended in seamlessly. Watching him weave his way through the locker room alongside rookies and veterans alike, you begin to forget that they have not been here developing this synergy for years.

Coach Kevin O’Connell “sets the tone for the entire building,” Vikings offensive lineman Brian O’Neill said. (Naomi Baker / Getty Images)

In New York, after the Vikings suffocated the Giants in Week 1, safety Harrison Smith laced up sneakers at his locker. He was satisfied with the team’s performance, raving about Darnold’s play and shaking his head about Van Ginkel making one of those diabolical, formation-reading, split-second reaction interceptions that only Van Ginkel makes.

“Honestly, on defense, we didn’t even show that much,” he said.

Smith tends to be so understated that you never really know what he’s thinking. But in the coming weeks, as the Vikings forced Kyle Shanahan, C.J. Stroud, Jordan Love and Aaron Rodgers into feelings similar to those O’Connell had in the final hours of 2023, Smith’s comment made sense.

Hidden on Flores’ whiteboard was a plan to layer an entirely different type of deception atop the max-pressure and max-coverage approaches. The Vikings are now playing Quarters coverage (remember, four deep defenders with man coverage principles) at the highest rate in the NFL.

But, because this is Flores, there is a twist. There is a cousin of Quarters coverage called “Palms,” which, for simplicity’s sake, is a way to counteract how offenses attack Quarters. And here is the ultimate kicker: Identifying Quarters or Palms would be easy if the Vikings’ corners and safeties stood still before the snap — but in this defense, they never do. The opposing quarterback not only has to have an answer for an all-out blitz and potential drop-eight coverage, but he also has to identify intricacies after the snap that sometimes differ depending on how the receivers’ routes disperse. Furthermore, these coverages are being disguised by players like Smith whose level of experience helps him predict what a QB is probably thinking.

If this is difficult to understand as a reader, imagine what it’s like as a quarterback — in 3 … 2 … 1 … hike.

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For good measure, there is also the possibility the Vikings do what they did in Week 5 against Rodgers. After playing three snaps of 2-man in Flores’ first 21 games as defensive coordinator, the Vikings played eight snaps in that coverage against the Jets, according to TruMedia. One longtime NFL quarterback, who has not played Flores this season, summed up the challenge: “It’s hard to delineate the difference in anything they’re doing, which is just more half-ticks in a quarterback’s brain. And here comes the pass rush.”

The defense’s dominance in 2024 clouds other critical aspects of this start. How the Vikings’ special teams staff identified Will Reichard as the kicker in the draft with an ironclad mind. How luring Josh McCown as quarterbacks coach strengthened the most important position on the team. How first-year defensive line coach Marcus Dixon has upheld the run-stopping standard on early downs.

These are all of the secret ingredients in a simmering product unveiling itself in the form of safety Cam Bynum and Metellus mimicking the secret handshake in “The Parent Trap” on a patch of turf in London. Even Lindsay Lohan was impressed. She commented on Bynum’s social media post with the emoji buried beneath all of this early season success: heart.