Aaron Rodgers Got Eaten By a Purple Amoeba in London, England
"That Was Cool" - Week 5
October, 2024. London, England. Week 5. New York Jets vs. Minnesota Vikings. Sam Darnold is an MVP candidate. Aaron Rodgers is seeing ghosts. Robert Saleh is out. The Vikings are 5-0. What is going on?
It’s alive! Defensive Coordinator Brian Flores has created a monster. Football is better when the Minnesota Vikings have a great defense. You know exactly what I’m talking about— it’s just one of those teams. The Purple People Eaters have returned in the form of a vengeful brain-eating amoeba.
Here’s how the Minnesota Vikings defense ranks in the NFL (according to Pro Football Reference):
4th in points allowed
4th in yards per play
2nd in takeaways
1st in percentage of drives ending in an offensive score
2nd in sacks
1st in total QB knockdowns and 5th in QB knockdown percentage
1st in total hurries and 3rd in hurry percentage
1st in total pressures (more than 20 ahead of the next best team) and 2nd in pressure percentage
1st in passes deflected
2nd in rushing yards per attempt and rushing yards per game
4th in tackles for loss
And more (NFL Next Gen Stats):
1st in expected points added per play
1st in expected points added per rush
4th in expected points added per pass
To figure out why the Vikings defense has been so frustrating for quarterbacks to play against, I looked at all Vikings pressures that resulted in an unsuccessful passing attempt in Week 5. The sample of pressured passing attempts comes from NFL Next Gen Stats. This sample does not directly include Andrew Van Ginkel’s pick six in the first quarter of the game, because it wasn’t counted as a pressured drop back, but I believe Rodgers was anticipating pressure and that’s why he made the throw, so to understand how the interception happened, I wanted to look at how the Vikings defense is achieving pressure. This sample of pressures that resulted in an unsuccessful passing attempt includes 8 incompletions, 3 sacks, and 2 short check-downs. This represents 13 of Rodgers’ 19 pressured drop backs. The other 6 throws included a RedZone TD that salvaged his overall rating and expected points added, but Rodgers’ 3.1 yards per attempt and 42.9% completion rate under pressure were both 7th lowest among QBs in Week 5. The threat of Minnesota’s pressure strategy made Rodgers equally inefficient against no pressure: 5.0 yards per attempt (6th lowest), 57.5 cmp. % (5th lowest), -.36 EPA per drop back (3rd lowest), -15.3% completion percentage over expectation (2nd lowest).
The Vikings made Aaron Rodgers pat the ball and eat dirt by blending pressure attacks with zone coverages. I charted Vikings pressures that resulted in an unsuccessful passing attempt in Week 5, drew up the schemes to my best ability, and tried to find answers to my question: what is going on?
