Minnesota hosted the Arizona Cardinals for a barely watchable game yesterday, finishing with a 21-14 score. Neither team could muster much in the way of a cohesive air campaign, although both teams had a 100-yard rusher on the day: Adrian Peterson tied Robert Smith’s team record of 29 100-yard rushing games, while Arizona’s “Hyphen” (LaRod Stephens-Howling) got his career first 100-yarder.
Arizona gave up sacks to Brian Robison (3), Jared Allen (2), Kevin Williams (1) and Antoine Winfield (1), and Harrison Smith got his first career interception which he ran back 31 yards for a defensive touchdown in one of the few highlights of the game. The defence saved the game, but it wasn’t a great team effort even on that side of the ball: sloppy tackling and missed assignments were far too common.
The Vikings’ special teams unit managed just enough to stay competitive, but a bone-headed block-in-the-back negated a Percy Harvin return for a TD at the beginning of the game (to be fair, at regular speed it looked like the Cardinal who was blocked might have been able to get his hands on Harvin).
At The Viking Age, Dan Zinski wraps up the details:
This is a good time to whip out the old “an ugly win is still a win” line. Obviously the Vikings will take it. But at the same time they surely realize they have a lot to work on especially on the offensive side of the ball. The passing game today was just unspeakably bad. Some of it was pass protection, some of it was playcalling, and a lot of it was Christian Ponder. This was by far Ponder’s worst performance of the 2012 season. He made terrible decisions at times, and when he tried making the right throw, he wasn’t particularly accurate. Sometimes stats are deceiving but on this day, the passing stats tell the true story of how it went. Ponder was 8/17 for 58 yards, 1 touchdown and 2 picks.
1500ESPN‘s Tom Pelissero and Judd Zulgad:
