Photo By Brian Curski
Written By Tom Schreier
Alright, it was a good win yesterday. I never, ever want to take for granted a win, I know how hard it is to get wins in this league, but I am trying to develop a mentality here of a championship football team, and I want our performances to be good and strong each and every week, and so that was really my frustration after the ballgame.
— Mike Zimmer, 12/8/14, a day after the Vikings beat the Jets 30-24 in overtime
In early December, after Mike Zimmer’s Minnesota Vikings beat the New York Jets on a screen pass to Jarius Wright in overtime — one in which he ran so hard for so long that he threw up in the locker room afterwards — Zimmer sounded like his team had just lost. “Honestly it was a pretty sloppy game today in my opinion,” he said. “We didn’t play near as well as I hoped we’d play, but there were some good things that happened in the game as well.”
In truth, it was an honest assessment: The team had won, sure, but it came against an awful Jets team that outrushed them by more than 50 yards, and the Vikings committed six penalties for 70 yards and lost a fumble. What Zimmer was saying was what any die-hard Vikings fan would be telling their buddies at that time: Wow, Minnesota almost blew that! He was more articulate, perhaps more fair, and he was doing it on a bigger platform, but it was refreshing break from the usual coach speak most reporters have to digest after a victory — good team win, credit the Jets for keeping it close, we have to be more disciplined, et cetera. “That’s not the kind of performance that I want to have,” he quipped. “Quite honestly I think we should have won that game handily. I expected us to win it that way.”
The key in deciding whether or not a fan thinks the Vikings will make the postseason is, first and foremost, whether they believe in Zimmer. Is this the guy to get the Vikings back to the playoffs?
He’s given Minnesota plenty of reasons to believe they can, beginning with his desire, and his expectation, to win. “I want them to understand that it’s not okay to lose,” he said of his players after the Vikings 17-3 loss to the Detroit Lions in mid-October. “That’s what I want them to understand. I want them to understand that it’s not okay to lose, that we have to change the mentality and the mindset of this. I can remember telling the defense the same thing in Cincinnati a long, long time ago that we have to develop this mindset that it’s not okay to lose, it’s not business as usual.
“I’m not very accepting of these kinds of things.”
He was standing at a podium in makeshift press conference room in the Vikings field house at their suburban practice facility when he said that. As he uttered those words, a chill passed through the room. Everyone went silent. The absence of sound hung in the air for a painful 10 seconds, as even the most garrulous media personalities couldn’t bring it upon themselves to open their mouths in response. A man in sweatpants and a matching hoodie had just instilled fear into a room full of people in button-downs and leather shoes wielding recorders and cameras — tools of the omnipresent media that often can overwhelm a first-year head coach.
Safe to say he got his message across to his players as well. “There was a situation earlier this year that we got beat and there was some joking going on afterwards, and I put a stop to it pretty quickly,” he said a month later, referencing the incident after a loss to the Chicago Bears after the bye week. “Part of it is learning what I expect and what I want to do and where I want to go from here. They’re taking the losses hard.”
His message got through.
It was consistent with how Zimmer has been all year. Zimmer eats, breathes and lives football. He lives and dies with each win and loss. From Day 1 of the regular season he looked as though he wasn’t sleeping regularly, and he honestly couldn’t remember what happened in a previous game once Wednesday rolled around because he had already moved on to the next opponent. After the game on Sunday he’d give his instant recap, on Monday he’d say what he saw on film, on Tuesday he and the team had the day off and by Wednesday he couldn’t recall specific details from the previous game. This, again, could be a coach’s cliche — we take it one game at a time — but honestly it seemed like he couldn’t remember, as though his personal RAM was already filled with data from the next week’s opponent. Zimmer is that serious about winning the next game.
Even in a season where his star running back was suspended 15 games for hitting his four-year-old child with a switch, his special teams coach was suspended for two weeks for using a gay slur, one of his players was shot, another was let go because he violated his parole, two of his star rookies couldn’t finish the season due to injury, his offensive line imploded, his star receiver got benched and a plethora of other things, he still believed his team could win on any given Sunday. His team didn’t finish with a winning record, of course, but the Vikings were projected to be 4-12 team at the beginning of the season by many sources, including Sports Illustrated — and that was assuming the team had Adrian Peterson all year. So Minnesota’s 7-9 record speaks more to Zimmer’s will to win despite all the adversity he faced in his first season, and his ability to infuse that on his team, than it does anything else.
Zimmer has also struck a balance between the importance of winning and the process. “Well, the wins and losses are way more important than the process, but I do think that teams can get a false sense of security if you’re winning,” he admitted, “but you’re not doing things correctly, so it’s important to me that I keep stressing the things that are important to be a good football team, to win games.” It’s rare to see someone who values winning so much to take a step back and admit that sometimes winning can produce externalities, but he’s been able to do that, and in doing so will help his team understand what they can do to win more frequently moving forward.
In addition to instilling a winning mentality upon his players, Zimmer learned a lot about winning this season, too. He learned how to handle the ups and downs of a rookie quarterback who was frustratingly inconsistent, and highly criticized, throughout the season. He learned that sometimes it’s smart to call a timeout on defense even if you ultimately want the clock to run out and the opponent is facing 4th and long. He learned that sometimes unexpected things happen to a head coach like a media frenzy when a star player is involved in a domestic incident or the clock’s going out in an opponent’s stadium.
That’s all important to know, but ultimately it comes down to wins and losses, and the Vikings will be expected to have more wins than losses next year. In fact, they’ll probably be expected, at least locally, to make the postseason because of the progress they made this year. For sure, by the time Taj Ma Zygi opens, this team will need to be competing for an NFC North title.
Zimmer knows this. He’s probably sitting on his living room couch watching the NFL playoffs, just like the rest of us, upset that his team isn’t still playing right now. Say what you want about Zimmer — he’s hard-headed, he’s gruff, he didn’t manage the clock well at times, whatever — the one thing that he leaves no doubt about is that he wants to win football games more than anything else in the world.
“I mean, that’s really why you play, is to go to the playoffs and have a chance to win the Super Bowl,” he said in his exit interview at the end of December. “We’re not a playoff team right now, and as I said, things are going to change so much in these next six months, the teams that we play will be different, their personnel will be different. Right now, our number one goal is to how can we improve this football team to get to where we want to get to, the kind of football team that we want to have, the kind of players that we want to represent the Minnesota Vikings?”
The Vikings have major personnel issues to address: Do they keep beloved veterans like Jerome Felton and Chad Greenway? Will they get Adrian Peterson back? If they don’t, how do they supplement Jerick McKinnon and Matt Asiata? Do they keep Greg Jennings? Will they be tempted to try and get Minnesota native Larry Fitzgerald? What about the secondary? And the offensive line? On and on. Those questions have yet to be answered, but one thing is for certain, this team is gonna bring in winners, because Zimmer will have nothing less. “Maybe guys don’t want to be here with how I am,” he admitted before the Week 17 game against Chicago. “I don’t know.”
It was a nice way of saying that whoever is on his team must match his desire to win or get the hell out. And if he can find 53 men with his desire to win, big things are in store for the Minnesota Vikings in the near future.