Hit the reset button

Blow it up, fire the coach, gut the front office, its time.

It should surprise no one that Vikings are in the spot they are now. The Carolina Panthers destroyed the defense and completely shut down the offense. I am confident the offense can be fixed, but the defense needs serious work.

The offense isn’t great, but they have some pieces in place. They have a good group of receivers and when you have Adrian Peterson, your offense always has a chance to be great. The Vikings rank 11^th in scoring and 19^th in overall offense. Numbers that aren’t spectacular, but numbers that aren’t terrible either.

Through 5 games this season, the Vikings have given up 189 points. That amounts to about 31 points a game. They have the 28^th ranked pass defense, are 17^th against the run, and are ranked second to last in overall defense. For a team led by a “defensive minded” coach, the Vikings don’t play much defense.

Since Rick Spielman has been with the Vikings, the team’s pass defense has only been ranked in the top 10 once and no better than 15^th overall any other year. What’s worse is that since Leslie Frazier has been the head coach (I’m not counting his interim coaching in 2010) the pass defense has ranked no better than 24^th.

They tried to bolster the pass defense by drafting Harrison Smith in the 1^st round and Josh Robinson in the 3^rd round of the 2012 draft. Smith is a great young player and should be a starter for a long time while Robinson has been thrust into a starting role, which he clearly is not suited for. They also added Xavier Rhodes in the 1^st round this year but it is too early to tell how good of a player he will be. In addition to these issues, the team has continually neglected the strong safety position. Jamarca Sanford, Mistral Raymond, and Andrew Sendejo are not starting NFL safeties but the team has made no effort to find a suitable player to replace them.

If the front office doesn’t know how to stop the pass and the coach doesn’t know how to stop, so how will the players?

It doesn’t matter if you can stop the run, which the Vikings have shown they can do (currently 17^th), if you can’t stop the pass. For the team to start winning consistently they need to change who signs the players, who drafts the players, and who coaches the players. Their deficiencies on defense, particularly in the secondary, are a far greater detriment to the team than the guy throwing passes.

It’s time to rebuild, it’s time to let go, and it’s time to fire the people who got the Vikings into this mess.