The Minnesota Vikings are a 3-2 football team heading into their bye week. They’ve done some good things through the first five weeks of the season, but they also have a lot of areas they need to improve.
Frankly, the Vikings are a bit fortunate to have three wins, considering the comebacks they had to mount to beat the Bears and Browns. They’ve trailed going into the fourth quarter in four of their five games, including three games where they didn’t score a touchdown in the first 45 minutes of action.
That level of play isn’t going to be nearly good enough for the rest of this season. The Vikings have had one of the easier schedules in the league so far, but they have one of the toughest schedules for the remainder of the campaign.
Improvement must start with cleaning up these four unsightly statistics, which are all areas where the Vikings rank at or near the bottom of the league.
NFL rank: 32nd
Through five weeks, no team has taken more sacks than the Vikings, whose quarterbacks have gone down 21 times on 180 dropbacks. That 11.7 percentage leads the league; the Ravens are the only other team with at least a 10 percent sack rate on offense.
J.J. McCarthy was the worst offender, taking nine sacks on just 55 dropbacks over the first two weeks (16.4 percent). But Carson Wentz was sack-prone too, with 12 of them on 120 dropbacks. It’s something McCarthy will have to show that he can improve in order to regain the starting role.
Sacks fall on the play-caller, the quarterback, and the offensive line to varying degrees. All three have to find a way to fix this drive-killing issue for the Vikings after the bye week, starting against an Eagles defense that is surprisingly towards the bottom of the league in sacks so far.
NFL rank: 31st
This one, to some extent, goes hand in hand with the previous stat. The Vikings are converting third downs less than a third of the time, which is not where you want to be. Only the Titans and rookie QB Cam Ward have been less effective on third down this season (29 percent). Kevin O’Connell’s team was up near 40 percent last year.
Part of this stat has to do with the average third-down distances teams face. But despite their sack woes, the Vikings are actually near the middle of the pack in terms of yards needed on third down. One reason for that is that third down is where a big chunk of those sacks have occurred. Third and longs are tough for everyone, so a big key to being successful on third down is avoiding those situations by staying on schedule on early downs.
With that said, the Vikings are also well below the league average with a 47 percent conversion rate on third downs of three yards or fewer remaining, so they also need to improve in short-yardage situations.
NFL rank: 32nd
Most of the statistics for the Vikings’ defense are pretty positive. They’ve been good so far, even if it’s fair to admit that their advanced numbers are skewed a bit by a dominant performance against the Bengals in Week 3. The one area where the Vikings could use some real improvement is in their run defense.
The raw numbers for the Vikings’ rushing defense (yards per game, yards per carry, etc.) aren’t great. But this stat we found was particularly interesting: 47 percent of Vikings opponents’ first downs are coming on the ground, which is the highest rate in the league. Teams aren’t having a ton of success against the Vikings through the air, but why throw the ball when you’re confident you can move the chains with the run game?
That stat would be notable by itself, but it’s even more interesting when you look at the 2024 numbers and see that the Vikings had the second-lowest rate in this category last season, with just 25.5 percent of opponent first downs being acquired via the run.
NFL rank: 1st (in a bad way)
Simply put, the Vikings have to find a way to stop generating so many flags against them. They lead the league in both total accepted penalties (44) and penalties committed on a per-game basis. They’ve had procedural issues on offense, they’ve committed fouls on defense, and they’ve been flagged in the kickoff and punt phases on special teams. Across the board, they have to clean up their execution and avoid the negatives that put them in more difficult siutations.
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