Every Interception Of The Brian Flores Vikings, Explained

In 2024, the Vikings led the league in interceptions with 24. That’s not only the top number of that season, it is the best mark of any season during the entire tenure of Brian Flores as Vikings defensive coordinator.

That’s also more than the Vikings generated in 2023 and 2025 combined. Interceptions are a famously unstable stat, so much so that PFF invented a different way to chart quarterback mistakes. So it’s not too surprising that things fluctuate this much.

Defensively, turnovers are mostly agreed to be a luck-based statistic. As such, it would have been foolish to expect the Vikings to match their 24 interception season with a repeat performance.

But their regression to the mean blasted way past the mean. In 2025, the Vikings ranked 25th in interceptions with just 8. Of the 96-season sample from the last three years, that ranks 76th. Could there be some signal in such a dramatic ping-pong?

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The same luck factors that make for a historically high interception total can also cause it to go low. Tipped passes bounce your way one day, then their way the next. Defenders drop passes seemingly at random. 

That’s not to say a defense has no control over their ability to intercept a pass. Pressure is sustainable, for example. A player like Harrison Smith can force the issue and generate turnover opportunities, as I explored in this three-part series.

So which is it? Did the Vikings get particularly lucky in 2024, then unlucky in 2025? Or did something fundamentally change in 2024 that the Vikings haven’t been able to replicate? 

In general, this is not the best way to evaluate Brian Flores’ Vikings defense. It’s not like there was some massive regression. The 2025 defense outperformed the 2024 defense by points per drive, 3rd down conversion rate, and yards per attempt.

The defense still performed at a high level, it just took a different shape. Vikings opponents punted more often in 2025 and took the same number of sacks (49) despite substantially fewer passing attempts (709 dropbacks in 2024 against 525 in 2025). The Vikings trailed a lot more in 2025, so it tracks that teams would be passing less often.

Still, that’s interesting in its own right. Were quarterbacks trying to be more aggressive? Was the pass rush just better? Was the coverage worse, but hidden by the pass rush?

We can learn a lot by examining all 43 interceptions the Vikings have notched since Brian Flores took over in 2023. That’s what we’re going to do today. 

To break this up, I categorized interceptions into some generalized buckets. There are plays from zone coverage situations, plays from man coverage situations, chaotic tips and overthrows, and a couple of Van Ginkel Specials. 

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The man and zone coverage buckets are self-explanatory, though the pattern-match philosophy of modern defense can sometimes blur the lines. Man-to-man coverage happens in quarters and sometimes other “zone” coverages. It’s cleaner to separate by technique rather than coverage. Is the defender covering the man, or watching the quarterback and breaking on the ball?

As for the tips and overthrows, these are plays I figured were more about luck than anyone making a particularly good play. I also separated classic acts of Van Ginkel screen robbery into their own category.

All three main categories peaked in 2024, then fell back down in 2025. The luck-based tips and overthrows fell particularly harshly. For 2026, that doesn’t mean you should assume that the Vikings will get some medium amount of lucky bounces, but rather, that any outcome is possible.

But even removing tips & overthrows, you still see the same peak in 2024. That leaves 12 interceptions we’ll call “earned” in 2024 and just 6 in 2025. It is likely that we can find something informative beyond blind luck if we watch these all down.

So let’s do it. We’ll watch every single Vikings interception from the last three years in this piece. If you prefer a video, here’s a collection of all 43 interceptions, broken down one at a time. Otherwise, strap in for the journey.

First, let’s sort through all the plays we can deem “lucky”. That’s possibly unfair - after all, many of these plays are caused by pressure. If the blitz gets home, quarterbacks make bad, rushed decisions. Or, they just miss the throw entirely. That’s not luck; it’s baked into the defensive philosophy.

String these plays together, and you find a wonderful compilation of chaos, panic and bad decisions. 

Interestingly, there are no plays from 2025 in this subcategory. Not once, throughout the entire season, did the Vikings force an interception by hitting the quarterback as he threw or blitzing him into a blind panic.

The 2025 Vikings did a better job of converting pressures to sacks - taking down the quarterback every 11th dropback, while the 2024 Vikings did so every 14th. Perhaps that, plus a general reduction in volume, helps explain the decrease in this category.

Still, it doesn’t always require pressure for a ball to sail on a quarterback. Sometimes you do genuinely get a lucky miss that lands right in the defender’s lap. Still have to catch it.

Crucially, you also have to be in position. When I complained about Theo Jackson getting too much depth in his coverage, part of the cost is missing out on possible interception opportunities like this gift from Aaron Rodgers.

With both routes breaking inside, Cam Bynum can break inside as well, putting himself in close enough proximity to snag an errant pass. It’s also important that Byron Murphy was in good enough position to make the throw difficult. Rodgers has to attempt a difficult layered throw, and misses.

Every single one of these will be debatable as to how much credit goes to the defense, or how much blame to the offense. For the most part, there is more to the latter. They’re just bad throws.

Again, nothing from 2025 here. That compilation is in chronological order, and the last one is from the final regular season game of 2024.

In this way, the Vikings of 2024 got a little lucky, and the luck dried up. If you see these plays as unearned turnovers (which is debatable!) you can chalk it up to the whims of the football gods.

It’s not always the quarterback. Sometimes a receiver’s drop lobs it up like a volleyball set, landing gently in your defender’s arms. Finally, 2025 makes an appearance.

How do you factor in luck when evaluating a tipped pass? On those two plays, there was an open receiver ready for a completion. The coverage, definitionally, did not do its job. But it turns into a massive swing the other way. I’d argue these are the luckiest of the bunch.

But how can we separate those from tips that feel more earned? Take a play like this one. Harrison Phillips got his hand on the ball and sent it awry.

On the other hand, it bounces pretty luckily to Kamu Grugier-Hill. Do we still deem it lucky and set it aside? If it fell into a Texan’s lap, would we say the defense failed or call it a stroke of bad luck?

Is it lucky if it’s something you can practice? Here’s a video from West Virginia’s program practicing this exact situation.

On a play like this one, it’s difficult to dismiss the skills on display. Blake Cashman makes a great break on the ball, gets his hand on it for at least a PBU, and sends it up for a textbook tip drill. It took Metellus, then Bynum, then Metellus again to actually bring this thing in.

The coolest play in this whole section came from a tip. It’s a total team effort. Pressure flushes Jake Browning out, Harrison Smith makes an incredible play to get the ball in the air, and Isaiah Rodgers takes it to the house.

It’s up to you how much credit you want to assign, and more importantly, how much you feel you can expect these sorts of plays in the future. 

When you think of an interception, you probably think of a player lurking, sussing out the play, and jumping the pass, to the quarterback's surprise. It’s never that simple, but it’s not far off when it comes to zone coverage.

Per PFF, the Vikings run zone coverage 76% of the time, so it shouldn’t surprise you to see this as the next-most-popular category. In fact, because I separated these plays into zone and man techniques rather than coverages, even more interceptions would fall into the zone category as PFF charts them.

Instead, dividing by technique allows us to sort these into more detailed categories to seek a common thread. For example, the most common subcategory across this whole exercise comes with interceptions out of hook zones - broadly, the underneath zone in the middle of the field on a given coverage

Linebackers (or often enough, Joshua Metellus) practice an inexact art when it comes to hook zone drops. You need enough width to limit the offense’s space to that side, but not so much that you give up a second window over the middle. You need enough depth to discourage intermediate throws, but not so much that you give up a productive completion in front of you.

To handle this, linebackers will respond to routes, tape study, and the quarterback’s eyes. But even that can lead you astray. Route concepts are designed to influence linebackers, and in the NFL, quarterbacks constantly look off linebackers.

It’s a deeply difficult assignment, and one the Vikings struggled with a lot during the Flores years. But when done properly, it’s a thing of beauty.

Let’s start with the game-clincher from rookie Ivan Pace in that 3-0 snoozer in Las Vegas from 2023. It’s Tampa 2 this time, and Pace widens out to his hook zone. 

Because Harrison Smith is blitzing, Pace has to work all the way from the other side to get to his zone. Also, notice that it’s 3x1. Davante Adams is the only threat to the left side, and he’s lined up outside the numbers. There’s a lot of distance to clear.

You’ll see Pace work all the way over to Adams’ route, then flow back inside when Adams breaks. He’s playing to routes, but he’s not playing true man coverage. His eyes are on Aidan O’Connell the whole time, and when the ball comes, he’s in position to pick it.