If nothing else, it was a far more entertaining game than anyone expected. Percy Harvin had a career day, Kyle Rudolph had a highlight reel catch for a touchdown, and Devin Aromashodu stepped up and had a great day receiving. Christian Ponder set a new Vikings record for passing yards by a rookie quarterback, but also threw the game-sealing interception in the final minutes.
Aside from two bad decisions, Ponder played well enough to win and the Vikings could have won the game if the secondary had played even slightly better. Missing three of their top four cornerbacks, and two of their top three safeties, the secondary is cover-your-eyes awful. It’s hard to express just how wide-open Denver’s receivers were during the game. Tebow didn’t have to throw anything difficult, because the Vikings weren’t covering his receivers.
On Sunday, the Broncos won despite managing only 48 yards and one first down in the first half. They triumphed even after their usually reliable defense was shredded by the Vikings for 489 yards.
If you like twists and abrupt turns and fireworks shows, then Sunday’s game was all sorts of stimulating with five turnovers, 10 second-half scores and plenty of fourth-quarter drama.
If you were a Vikings coach, however, every positive development seemed to be negated by a costly mistake.
As good as Harvin was, making eight catches for a career-best 156 yards with two touchdowns, Demaryius Thomas also wanted his time in the highlight package. Denver’s young receiver had 144 receiving yards and twice broke through busted coverage for second-half touchdowns.
Ponder? He played brilliantly at times, amassing 381 passing yards and bouncing back from a rough start. But all told, his three turnovers cost the Vikings 13 points.
Ponder’s final throw was simply a poor choice, a failed attempt to lure Goodman down to cover Stephen Burton on a shorter route.
“I got a little too greedy,” Ponder said.
It was also Ponder’s ninth turnover in six starts, rookie growing pains that seem to be growing sharper.
However, Christopher Gates thinks the “kids are alright”:
We have to start with Christian Ponder. For the majority of the game, Ponder played a pretty damn good game of football. After all, the Vikings dropped him back to pass 50 times (47 pass attempts and three times that he got sacked). That’s an insane amount of passes for a rookie, and Ponder spent a good portion of the first half getting slammed. . .so much so that during one of the Broncos’ offensive possessions, he put on extra padding on the sidelines. He clearly wasn’t 100%, and despite all of that, he stood in there and he kept firing and kept firing.
Did he throw a couple of terrible passes? Yeah, he most certainly did. But again, that’s going to happen with a rookie quarterback. I think some of us have forgotten what it’s like to have a young signal caller behind center. The last young quarterback that this team started was Daunte Culpepper, and in his first season as a starter (after a full year of sitting on the bench, mind you), he still threw 16 interceptions. . .and he was throwing to Randy Moss and Cris Carter (among others) and playing behind an outstanding offensive line. Rookie quarterbacks are going to make bad throws, folks, there’s no way around that. Two ill-timed throws from Christian Ponder shouldn’t completely negate the fact that he, by and large, played an outstanding game.
[. . .]
But that’s not to say that there isn’t going to be talent developing around him, because clearly there will be. I’m running out of superlatives to describe Percy Harvin. Honestly, if he’s not the most dangerous open field runner in the league, he’s on the short list. But we expect that from Harvin. You know what we don’t expect?
We don’t expect six catches and 90 yards from Devin Aromashodu. We don’t expect 21 carries for 91 yards from Toby Gerhart. We don’t expect Stephen Burton, a seventh-round pick up from the practice squad that was supposed to be a project, to be making big catches on third downs and moving the chains.
And Kyle Rudolph? Seriously, what the heck else do I have to say about this guy other than “Why on earth is he only being targeted a few times a game?”
Of course, for all the concerns about Ponder throwing that last INT, if the secondary had been able to manage even a mediocre game, it never would have come down to the final series. Tom Pelissero was at the press conference after the game for Leslie Frazier’s statement:
Leslie Frazier was as mad at the podium as he’s been all season.
He ripped the Minnesota Vikings’ patchwork secondary and suggested some players may lose their jobs for letting Tim Tebow wind up (and wind up some more) and rack up chunk after chunk through the air in the second half of the Denver Broncos’ 35-32 win on Sunday at the Metrodome.
“Can’t make any excuses about it,” Frazier said. “Just a poor job, and we’ve got to identify somebody who can come back there and make a play for us when the ball’s in the air.”
In the first half, Tebow threw for 29 yards on 4-of-6 passing and took two sacks, looking every bit like the young quarterback with a round-the-world delivery who might be in over his head as an NFL passer.
In the second half, Tebow was 6-of-9 for 173 yards and two touchdowns, repeatedly exploiting the caverns that opened in the Vikings’ Cover-2 zones as the Broncos scored five times in their last seven possessions.
“We were just playing a basic coverage with a lead,” Frazier said. “To not be able to execute that is a bad thing, because it means you can’t play any coverage. …
“The fact that we’ve got new guys and we’re rotating guys because we’ve had some injuries — that happens. But when you’re out there as a professional athlete, you have to find a way to do your job, and we did not find a way to do our job.”
