To Rage Against the Dying Light

In Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey’s character, Joseph Cooper, is confronted with scenes from the past that he must watch from behind an obstruction, a bookcase. He has to relive what he sees as a mistake in his history that he can only observe but not change. It’s a deep, touching torture.

Being a fan of an almost-great sports team is like that.

The Vikings have championship aspirations and an obvious problem. Sometimes a problem this serious can still result in a Super Bowl ring — the 2015 Denver Broncos are the go-to examples for Vikings observers looking for hope, but there are others.

In addition to that Broncos team is the 2002 Buccaneers as well as a near-miss in the 2008 Ravens squad. It might also be worth seeing what happens when we flip the axes and look at teams similarly lopsided toward the offense.

So there are a couple more winners, notably the 2006 Colts and 2022 Chiefs. But it's worth noting that the offensive version of this profile has almost universally done better — more Super Bowl participants, Conference Championship participants, Divisional Round participants and Wild Card participants, with fewer such teams missing the playoffs.

It could be that, by the end of the year, defense wins championships. But an elite defense halfway through the year doesn’t portend high-level performance as much as an elite offense does partway through the year.

Indeed, we see more winners of all types if we look at season-end results in EPA per play.

The defensive profile’s performance is better, but it’s still not quite as good as the offense’s.

In the offensive version, there are fewer Super Bowl winners, but outside of that particularly narrow slice, there are the same number of Super Bowl participants and more participants through nearly every level of the playoffs — with fewer playoff misses.

Scoring points is more reliable than preventing points from being scored, but we can ignore that for now. In either case, if we combined the samples, 55 percent of teams with profiles like the Vikings through seven games fail to make it to the Divisional Round, with another 23 percent falling short once they get there.

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This hardly feels like the team the Vikings were hoping for when they constructed it at the beginning of the season. A historic defense falling short feels more like a waste than it does a good effort.

Were the Vikings merely “pretty good” on defense instead of marching along at a historic pace, it would be easier to stomach the idea of letting the season lie fallow. There is something agonizing about finding a season so full of potential wither away like crops in a dust storm.

And though there are some concerns about the running game, the Vikings demonstrated that their defense does in fact hold up against high-level offenses.

The Lions entered the game averaging 2.96 points per drive and managed only 1.90 points per drive against Minnesota. They had to innovate new plays in the running and passing game just to eke out some points.

Detroit was held to its second-worst EPA per play of the year and its worst point total. The Vikings run defense could get better — every element of the defense could theoretically get better — but these are dial-tweaks more than anything. The run defense is not a major concern despite some of the big runs the Vikings gave up in the fourth quarter.

While they should certainly tackle better in those moments, the fact remains: the Vikings were a dominant defense against Detroit. The issue is the offense. But focusing on the defense feels a bit more achievable, so we find ourselves spending more time talking about it than perhaps we should.

We know the problem.

The Athletic’s lead story after the game argued that something needed to change. A Star Tribune piece shortly after the game surveyed national attitudes about the Vikings, all of which focused on the possibility of a quarterback change. The Pioneer Press’ lead column is about a changing of the guard at the position.

What is there to do about it? What is there for the Vikings to do?

In Interstellar, Cooper has a bare simulacra of communication with the past. After putting forth all of his effort, he can knock some books off of some shelves — enough for him to spell out, in Morse code, one word.

The message gets through, in a sense. But globally, it is not received in any way that matters.

Should the Vikings trade for a quarterback? If they should, would they? If we could identify that option, would that mean anything for us?

There are moves Minnesota could make, but they seem off in the horizon, a distant wish more than a real effort. It is possible that the Raiders could trade Kirk Cousins — but why? He’s playing well, and he’s the reason that they’re 4-4 and in the playoff race.

A 1-7 Raiders or a 2-6 team in a top-heavy AFC West could have been convinced to let go of Cousins, but they’re ninth in the playoff standings, and the team they’re beating on a tiebreaker just put their starting quarterback on injured reserve with a thumb injury.

There are other options, of course, but they all feel like flailing. They could bench Murray for Wentz — the quarterback who started off the season third on the depth chart but whose production has been inarguably better in his limited time without practice reps than Murray’s full-fledged efforts.

Wentz might improve the offense, but that improvement has a ceiling. He’s not a good quarterback, and he’s not a “good enough” quarterback. But he might be closer to “good enough” than any other option.

Is that enough to win in the playoffs?

Could they try to tempt Marcus Mariota away from Washington despite his clear role in an offense fielding an injury-prone quarterback? Would signing Jimmy Garoppolo or Derek Carr off the street do something?

It’s hard to imagine they would do worse than Murray has so far, but if the issue with the offense is that it can be overwhelming for a quarterback to feel comfortable, what the hell would a new quarterback do?

Perhaps Garoppolo, with his experience quarterbacking for Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan, could provide a quicker lift, but ultimately we are debating between backup quarterbacks and street free agents on the off chance they provide a substantial upgrade.

Offenses like the Vikings — performing a standard deviation or worse (say, around 28th) below median in points per drive, EPA per play and success rate — since 1999 have historically had difficulty turning things around.

That’s not a shock. Bad offenses stay bad.

But more specifically, there have been about 42 offenses that have existed where the Vikings are now. About 38 percent of them (16 in total) produced an offense just barely below average (22nd in the league or so, or half a standard deviation below the league median).

Some, like the 2006 Cardinals, experienced a meteoric turnaround. Over the second half of the season, Arizona ranked 5th in EPA per play. In the first half? 28th. What did Arizona do? Well, they benched Kurt Warner for Matt Leinart.

That wasn’t told backwards — Warner was playing poorly enough through six games that they had had enough, and started Leinart instead.

The 2017 Detroit Lions were just as dramatic. They stayed the course at quarterback, with Stafford’s Lions finishing the second half of the season ranked 8th in EPA per play after starting out 29th.

Of the 16 offenses that turned things around, only five made a change at quarterback.

Switching the quarterback up was not a foreign decision to the other teams. Out of all 42 teams in the sample set, 17 of them made a significant quarterback change. As you know, only five of them achieved anything from it.

None of this is to say the Vikings would be wrong to make a change. It’s more that a lot of offenses have been here and decided not to. And when they did, it didn’t necessarily help.

Indeed, the Vikings may genuinely find that Carson Wentz is a better steward of the offense if Kyler Murray’s hamstring is bothersome enough to have Wentz start against Buffalo this week.

It is important, however, to contrast the demand for change with the expectations that come with it. The offense may get better. More often than not, the “better” is not that meaningful.