In the Star Tribune, Jim Souhan reminds us all that up to the bye week, last year’s version of the Minnesota Vikings looked like a potential Super Bowl contender, until the wheels all came off at once:
As of Oct. 23, they had beaten three teams that would make the NFL playoffs, and another that had won the conference championship the year before. They had won twice on the road and had opened U.S. Bank Stadium with a thrilling victory over They Who Shall Not Be Named.
Only a missed 23-yard field goal had kept them from advancing in the playoffs the previous season. They had the look of a budding power.
Then they collapsed, losing eight of their last 11 games, playing like invertebrates in a home loss to the Colts in December and eliciting predictable responses from fans who believe that early-season success is more tease than prelude.
So are the 2017 Vikings charged with banishing all memories of 2016, or with reviving the feeling the team had in mid-October? Was 5-0 a mirage?
For all of the latent pessimism surrounding the franchise, the makeup of the current roster and the nature of the NFL indicates that the 2016 team simply was destroyed by injuries. Even without a healthy offensive line, star running back and starting quarterback, the Vikings were in position to make the playoffs. Two excruciating losses to Detroit made the difference between 10-6 and 8-8.
The Vikings built a quality roster that was waylaid by an offensive line that couldn’t create a running game or give Sam Bradford enough time to look downfield.
The defense, tasked with carrying the team, wore down over the final 11 weeks. A competent offense would have prevented that from happening.
[…]
Zimmer’s first team went 7-9, and his second finished 11-5. With decent luck and health, there is little reason to doubt that this team should win 10 or 11 games and return to the playoffs.
With no worse than an NFL-average distribution of injuries, the Vikings roster is certainly capable of a 10-6 season and a wild card berth. Now that Adrian Peterson has moved on, the team no longer has to cripple game plans to ensure that AP got his touches, and the running backs are all starting-quality players even if no one of them is a drop-in replacement for Peterson (who was, beyond question, one of the greatest running threats in NFL history, but a liability in blocking and barely acceptable catching passes). Latavius Murray, Dalvin Cook, and Jerick McKinnon will be a better-balanced offensive threat as a group than Peterson was by himself … that can only help the team in the long run.
