USA Today Ranks Dennis Allen Worst Head Coach in the League
In the one playoff game against us he was 19 of 31 for 226 and a whopping 1 TD, world beating numbers those.....Our HOF QB only had 208 with 1 TD and a pick......
We scored a whopping 10 points up until the 4th quarter.....anyone who comes away from either Vikings playoff loss thinking the D was the reason we lost is delusional......
šÆ
Brees had a very rough game and Cousins only threw for 34 more yards with a much worse completion % (61.2% to Breesā 78.8%). That isnāt even a good game, much less an āAll-Proā game. Dude got them blinders on. š
We lost that game because Sean Payton made a horribly foolish decision to start Andrus Peat freshly back from injury over Nick Easton who had been doing a very solid job in Peatās absence.
If youāll recall, Peat got injured against Atlanta in that insanely frustrating game where the Falcons ran inside stunts and Peat was a turnstile and allowed the middle to collapse in seconds. Drew got sacked 6 times and we got blown out.
Peat is out and then Easton comes in and the situation instantly improved.
Right before the Wild Card game - Payton decides to bench Easton in place of the returning Peat - and what do you know - the Vikings start running inside stunts and Peat canāt block it and the middle is a jail break. Drew was under duress the whole game.
Peat didnāt return against the Vikings in the playoffs, he started the Week 17 game against Carolina too which we won handedly, 42-10.
I always see those two games (the 2019 Wild Card vs. the Vikings and that 26-9 loss to the Falcons that same year) cited as Peat being the reason we lost those games but the tape simply doesn't agree. In both of those games, nearly the ENTIRE OL was dogwater at various points, it wasn't just one player.
Yes, Peat gave up 2 bad pressures early to Griffen. It's indisputable, but the Vikings had 9 total pressures (according to PFR's data from the game) and only Peat's is what gets mentioned about the OL play that game.
Everyone ignores that Ramczyk gave up 1.5 sacks (both to Hunter, one of which being a strip sack late with 4:26 left in the game and deep in Vikings territory while trailing 20-17). Armstead gave up 0.5 sack and a pressure (his sack was also on the play Ramczyk gave up his first sack because both got beat on the same play where Griffen and Hunter literally met at the QB and ended our first drive). Warford gave up a sack to Griffen and a pressure to Linval Joseph with the pressure coming on the same play the strip sack was on.
Hunter is credited with 3 pressures (which would be the 9th) but I don't have where it occured in the game offhand but considering Hunter almost exclusively rushed from the LDE position, it wouldn't surprise me if it was against Ramczyk again.
Looking back through when I looked at the All-22 and capped stuff, McCoy was the only one that didn't give up a sack or pressure, but there was one play I noticed watching the recap where McCoy was comboing a DT with Warford while a free blitzer at LB just ran right through the left A-gap as the ball is released.
As for the Atlanta game that Peat got injured in, 4 of those 6 sacks came AFTER Peat exited the game. Of the two sacks that happened while he was in the game, the first one was because the FB whiffed in pass protection. Only the other sack was on Peat (Clayborn stunts over and plows into him while heās still blocking Grady Jarrett).
The Saints interior OL at that time seemed to struggle with stunts as a whole, especially against elite pass rushers (which Jarrett, Griffen, and Hunter certainly qualified as). That's why the Falcons were able to continue the onslaught after he was out of the game, it wasn't "just Peat".
Then to make matters worse - once itās established that all we have is Taysom Hill playing out of his mind on offense - Payton decides to take the ball out of his hands and stop feeding the hot hand.
The bolded part of your post at the end I agree with tenfold though. That is the #1 reason why we lost that game: Taysom needed to be fed because he was EATING on that defense when he had the chance. Taysom played only 23 offensive snaps (41%) and only touched the ball 7 times. Of those 7 times he touched the ball, he accumulated 125 all-purpose yards (17.9 yards/touch!) and a TD (was 4 passing yards away from 2 TD's in 7 touches). Absolutely CRIMINAL the way Payton refused to use him this game. Watching the recap again, that is the thing that pisses me off the most about that game; way more than the OL play.
The other thing that stood out was Lattimore's seemingly inability to cover Thielen. Jackrabbit neutralized Diggs almost entirely, but Thielen was working Lattimore all game.