Awful coaching deprives Vikings of win on Monday Night Football

Leslie Frasier, head coach of the Minnesota Vikings (Photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images)

There has been plenty of good coaching to celebrate in the NFL this season. Andy Reid has used pressure defence and a conservative offence to take his Kansas City Chiefs to an unbeaten 7-0.

Sean Peyton and Rob Ryan have combined to lift New Orleans to the 4th best scoring defence and an almost guaranteed division title just one year removed from having the worst defence in the history of the game.

Having said that, there have also been an extensive number of bad coaching jobs. Gary Kubiak has been awful in Houston, drifting away from an effective run game and leaning instead on the unreliable arm of Matt Schaub. Mel Tucker has managed to make Chicago’s defence look very un-Chicago-like.

Recently, we’ve seen the Buc’s Greg Schiano push his players so hard that some have taken to calling the winless coach’s regime “like being in Cuba”. We’ve seen Brian Schottenheimer develop an offensive game plan that somehow saw star first round pick Tavon Austin play a grand total of 4 snaps on offence.

However, with their woeful coaching job on Monday night football, Leslie Frasier’s Vikings sunk beneath all those efforts to claim what is probably the worst coaching job of 2013 so far. The game itself, a 23-7 loss to the Giants, was one of the worst games of the season, if not the worst outright. That was in large part due to the play of the Vikings offence.

Despite playing against a team which has been conceding an average of over 30 points per game, the Vikings mustered a grand total of 7 points all evening. Not only that, but that single score didn’t even come on offence; it came on a long punt return by cornerback Marcus Sherels.

The offence itself failed to score a single point on what is the second most porous defence in the entire league. That is astounding, and it made for terrible viewing on Monday night.

The reason that the Vikings were so inadequate on offence was as simple as it was obvious; it was because the Vikings started Josh Freeman at quarterback.

Freeman, who was released by the winless Tampa Bay Buccaneers two weeks ago, is the new gunslinger in Minnesota. After a brief spell in free agency, he signed with the Vikings on 6th October as the replacement for out-of-favour incumbent quarterback Christian Ponder, who failed to win in all three of his starts this year.

EAST RUTHERFORD, NJ – OCTOBER 21: Quarterback Josh Freeman #12 of the Minnesota Vikings passes against the New York Giants during a game at MetLife Stadium on October 21, 2013 in East Rutherford, New Jersey. (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)

Fast forward ess than two weeks, and Freeman was named the starter by head coach Leslie Frasier and thrust into the spotlight on prime time against the Giants. He had only a handful of days to practice with the team with no real introduction to the Vikings system. And it showed.

The Giants, rightly, didn’t take Freeman seriously from the very first snap. They stuffed the box with 8 and sometimes 9 guys, leaving one on one coverage on the outside and daring Freeman to beat them. And he couldn’t.

He couldn’t beat them with his arm, and he couldn’t beat them with his mind. The former Buccaneer clearly didn’t have any grasp of Minnesota’s offense. He was sailing passes, missing receivers by yards, and was incapable of adjusting his offence on the field. It left isolated and vulnerable, like a fish in a barrel for the Giants defence.

Freeman’s numbers for the game are painful to read. He completed 20 of a staggering 53 pass attempts for 190 yards, zero touchdowns and one ugly red-zone interception. That equates to completing 37.7% of his passes for an average of 3.58 yards per attempt. In case you were wondering, those are historically bad numbers. It was one of the ugliest quarterback performances ever seen on national television, and possibly the worst offensive showing of any team in a single game this season.

Despite all that, Josh Freeman shouldn’t really take the brunt of the blame for this game. He didn’t play well, granted. He was missing receivers sometimes by a matter of yards, showing not just a lack of chemistry and timing with his new receivers but a lack of accuracy that will worry Vikings fans moving forward.

But this isn’t a declaration that Freeman isn’t the future in Minnesota. Freeman is a talented young quarterback who can really throw the ball well when he gets hot. He might be the answer for the Vikings eventually, but he definitely wasn’t the answer on Monday night. It is no slight on him to say that he just wasn’t ready for this game. No one would be.

So while Freeman did not have a good game, the real criticism for this loss should be reserved for the Minnesota coaching staff. They threw their quarterback to the wolves.

Most quarterbacks start learning their offensive playbooks before training camp starts, and it takes them months of reading it and practicing it to absorb the scheme fully. There is a massive amount of information to take in. The terminology alone can take weeks to get used to in a new system, especially for a veteran quarterback who is already comfortable with a completely different system and terminology to go with it.

Freeman arrived in Minnesota less than two weeks before Monday night’s kick-off. It became abundantly clear after about two series that he didn’t know the offence properly. He just didn’t have the time. The Vikings coaching staff must have known that. They would have seen the disconnect and confusion on the practice field in the few days Freeman had spent with them. They knew that he wasn’t ready.

And they went with him anyway.

It wasn’t like the Vikings had no option. Their starting quarterback out of camp, Christian Ponder, was once again healthy and suited up as the backup on Monday night. Although he is 0-3 as a starter in 2013, his offence had put 30 points on the Bears and 27 points on the Browns in back to back weeks before he suffered an injury. In Ponder’s absence in week 4, the Vikes beat the Steelers in London with their other quarterback, Matt Cassel, under centre.

LONDON, ENGLAND – SEPTEMBER 26: Quarterback Christian Ponder in action during a Minnesota Vikings training session at the Grove Hotel on September 26, 2013 in London, England. (Photo by Harry Engels/Getty Images)

The Vikings could undoubtedly have beaten this porous Giants defence with either Cassel or Ponder under centre. But they never stood a chance with Josh Freeman. And they went with him anyway.

Perhaps Coach Frasier would argue that they needed to see what they had in their new acquisition. But it is only week 7. There are 9 games left to see what Freeman has in his locker. Even if they were desperate to see what Freeman could do against the Giants, you cannot properly evaluate an underprepared quarterback who is put in that situation. The Vikings learned nothing from Monday night.

Whichever way you cut it, it was a baffling decision by Leslie Frasier and his coaching staff.

The puzzling decisions didn’t stop there. After selecting Freeman to start the game, the head coach then stubbornly refused to remove his new quarterback during the game despite it being so obvious to everyone that he was holding his offence back.

At half time, with the game still close at 10-7, Jon Gruden of ESPN said:

“It’s not fair to the Vikings to put Josh Freeman in this situation. If I’m Leslie Frasier I’m going to put Christian Ponder in…I’m going to try and win this game and get back in the race. Freeman can throw it, we know he has size and athleticism but they can’t shift, it doesn’t look like they can audible and they don’t have enough inventory of offence. [To win the game] you’re going to need a little bit more arsenal than Freeman’s ready for right now.”

Jon Gruden is a superbowl winning head coach. He knows what he’s talking about. But you don’t need to have a superbowl ring to see that keeping Freeman in the game on Monday night made no sense whatsoever. It was obvious nothing good could come of it. But with the prime time audience, superbowl winning coaches and Vikings fans everywhere screaming for Christian Ponder to come into the game, the backup was left Ponder-ing on the sideline.

Frasier wasn’t finished there though. Seemingly intent on proving beyond any doubt that he is the worst coach in the National Football League right now, the head coach had yet more bad decisions to make. Not only did he keep Freeman in, but he and offensive coordinator Bill Musgrave continued calling passing plays.

It was obvious that Freeman had no idea what he was doing out on the field. He had no chemistry with the receivers whatsoever and he was just not equipped to win the game. However, ignoring the fact that the best player in the NFL, Adrian Peterson, was standing next to Freeman in the backfield, they just kept putting the ball in Freeman’s hands.

Peterson had a grand total of 13 rushing attempts. The reigning league MVP had only 28 rushing yards while Freeman himself became only the second quarterback in history to attempt 50 passes, pass for fewer than 200 yards and fail to throw a single touchdown. With the game in the balance, who in their right mind would put the ball in Josh Freeman’s hand and not Adrian Peterson’s?

Despite Freeman’s play and the final score, this was a close game for the most part. In fact, it was a 3 point game with 5 minutes left in the 3rd quarter. They had a chance, if they had put Christian Ponder in and given the ball to Adrian Peterson, to come out with a win and be only 2 games behind in the NFC North. Coach Frasier and Coach Musgrave, in making mistake after mistake off the field, essentially deprived their team of any chance of winning that game, and any hope of making the playoffs with it.

That is an inexcusably poor offensive game plan. As Rich Eisen aptly put it in his podcast this week, “mismanagement has been rewritten by what happened on Monday night”. It was actually so bad that you have to wonder whether losing the game was part of the plan all along.

Perhaps the Vikings already know that Josh Freeman, only on a one year contract, is a rental. Perhaps they want to lose. Perhaps they want that shamefully coveted top 5 pick in the 2014 draft so they can correct the mistake of drafting Ponder and grab their shiny new quarterback of the future.

What other reason could Leslie Frasier and his staff possibly have? The lack of foresight in shoving Freeman out there when he quite clearly wasn’t ready to play is staggering, but understandable given the money they’ve paid him.

But then to leave him in when he was playing so poorly, and calling over 50 passing plays in the process despite absolutely no success, is beyond senseless. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different outcome. By that definition, Coach Frasier is as crazy as Howard Hughes.

And after Monday night he might have the same career prospects, too.