A look inside how the Vikings offensive line was historically bad in Week 4 loss to Browns (2024)

In the first three games of the season, the Minnesota Vikings had the fourth-best pass protection in the NFL. According to Pro Football Focus, Kirk Cousins benefited from the sixth-lowest pressure rate at 27.6 percent and was taken to the ground just five times, a sack rate of 4.0 percent.

Individually, we were seeing great games from newly re-signed Brian O’Neill as well as makeshift guards Ezra Cleveland and Oli Udoh. O’Neill hadn’t allowed a pressure all season and Udoh allowed only three, placing 15th in pressure rate among guards.

That streak of good play came to a crashing halt against the Cleveland Browns, who fielded a front with two first-rounders — including a Defensive Player of the Year candidate — and a set of extremely capable tackles and rotational players across the defensive line. On Sunday, Cousins was under duress on 55 percent of his snaps, higher than any other starting quarterback in Week 4 and the fourth-highest pressure rate Cousins has seen in a Vikings uniform.

Those other games included a Week 17 matchup in 2018 against Chicago (55.3 percent), a 2020 Week 3 matchup against Tennessee (62.1 percent) and a 2019 Week 2 game against Green Bay (69.7 percent). Unsurprisingly, they were all Minnesota losses. The highest pressure percentage Cousins has seen in a Vikings win (with at least 15 dropbacks) came against Houston in Week 4 of 2020, when he saw a pressure rate of 44 percent.

Generally, pressure rate and win rate converge at about 40 percent — quarterbacks who are pressured between 38 percent and 42 percent of their dropbacks in a game only win 40 percent of them. Pressure them at a rate greater than 45 percent, and win percentage drops to 36.7 percent. For games matching the catastrophic 55 percent rate we saw for Cousins, the leaguewide win rate plummets to 26.7 percent.

Offensively, pocket disruption comes from a variety of places — the offensive line, quarterback, offensive game plan and so on. Those had all been working in the Vikings’ favor in the first few weeks.

So what went wrong in Week 4?

In previous years, the fact that the Vikings were one of the slowest teams to get rid of the ball played a major role. This year, Cousins has been quick to throw. Though he was slightly slower in this respect in Week 4, he still managed to get the ball out faster than his peers, averaging 2.46 seconds in the pocket with the ball. That mark ranks eighth-fastest among Week 4 quarterbacks and was much faster than his 2020 average of 2.75 seconds, which ranked 22nd among 36 quarterbacks last season.

This has resulted in a decided drop in explosive plays and fewer deep shots overall, but the offense found a good balance Sunday. Most of the team’s downfield throws occurred on quick one- or three-step drops against single coverage rather than wait-in-the-pocket-type dropbacks like on play-action or five- and seven-step drops.

It’s not necessarily as simple as an offensive line that consistently gave up quick pressure, but it’s worth starting there. PFF tries to assign pressure to a specific pass protector (or the quarterback) whenever possible, and most of the pressures given up against the Browns were assigned to the offensive linemen. Rashod Hill gave up an astounding 10 pressures while Udoh gave up eight.

For a franchise littered with mediocre pass-protection performances, this manages to stand out in a big way. Last year, Dakota Dozier never gave up more than seven pressures, and the leader in single-game pressures was Ezra Cleveland with eight allowed in Week 14 against Tampa Bay.

Over the past three seasons, there have been about 200 full games for individual Vikings offensive linemen. Out of those 200, only seven resulted in more than five pressures given up. Two of those seven instances occurred against the Browns on Sunday, and they happened to be the two highest pressure totals.

The fact that two offensive linemen allowed that many pressures in the same game is astounding, but it’s even more unbelievable when accounting for the fact that Cousins’ time to throw was remarkably quick. In the eight-pressure game from Cleveland last year, Cousins held on to the ball an average of 2.86 seconds before throwing, a fairly long time for modern NFL quarterbacks.

In short, the offensive line bears quite a bit of blame for the pressure this last week. They gave up pressure in under 2.5 seconds on 32.5 percent of dropbacks, the 15th-highest of any game played this year, but that also means 22.5 percent of dropbacks saw pressure on longer plays. That’s high among games played this year, as well, ranking 44th.

Not very many plays saw extremes — only two plays had pressure appear in under two seconds and none saw pressure over three seconds — so the Browns game lives in that statistically murky area where bare stats like time to pressure can’t give us the full answer. After all, a quick-hitting play that takes too long might lead to pressure, and that pressure can be just as much to blame on the play design, the receivers or the quarterback as it is the offensive lineman who is charted as giving it up.

Some pressures are simply a product of the right play from the Browns at the right time, like when Cousins was hit by a blitzing John Johnson III on a screen early in the second quarter. Other times, pressures hardly impact the play at all, like this one marked to Hill from Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah that didn’t impact Cousins’ throwing platform on his 20-yard completion to K.J. Osborn.

Then there’s the fourth-and-6 throw to Adam Thielen that fell incomplete in the middle of the second quarter. Hill gives up pressure to Myles Garrett somewhat quickly, but Cousins’ drop and read should let him get rid of the ball more quickly. Instead, he reloads, hops in the pocket and tries to throw again — allowing Garrett to impact the arc of the ball. This is arguably on both Hill and the receivers. Cousins also bears a small amount of blame for not sliding up into the pocket.

The All-22 tells us that Hill likely didn’t get enough depth in his initial kick-slide and ends up crossing his feet while engaged with Garrett, a big problem for offensive linemen that robs them of a solid foundation and limits their range of motion.

On at least one play, Cousins creates the pressure himself by hesitating in the pocket and missing a wide-open receiver on third-and-3. Cousins stares right at an uncovered Osborn but hesitates to throw it for just long enough for the pocket to collapse. It resulted in a Takkarist McKinley sack.

There are instances when an offensive lineman “gives up” a sack, but it’s the fault of a skill-position player for missing his block. On the combined Denzel Ward-Myles Garrett sack, the Vikings slide three offensive linemen into area protection where they’re responsible in a zone-style manner for pass rushers. C.J. Ham would help with the chip. On the other side, they have Udoh, O’Neill, Tyler Conklin and Alexander Mattison pick up pass rushers with dynamic man-style assignments, somewhat reminiscent of the match rules for cornerbacks in coverage.

Udoh two-reads the linebackers, picking up outside-to-in just in case both blitz. If only one blitzes, he picks up the blitzer. If both blitz, Mattison — who is coming out of his stance as a play-action decoy — takes on the inside blitzer. Otherwise, he takes on the next-farthest outside pass rusher — in this case, Ward. Meanwhile, O’Neill and Conklin take on the pass rushers they were lined up over. Should both linebackers and Ward blitz, Cousins is responsible for finding an open player and “takes on” Ward as a blitzer.

Here, Mattison realizes his assignment too late and whiffs on the block. That pressure pushes Cousins into Garrett and Malik McDowell, and he tries to scramble back out and runs into Ward. Garrett helps clean up.

Sometimes the nature of the protection assignment can lead to pressure. Sometimes the Vikings will want to be in max protection, with seven players creating space for the quarterback while three run routes. Because there’s not a way for a tight end in pass protection to feasibly protect against interior rushers, that will leave him against the outermost player.

In Week 2, this resulted in a 64-yard touchdown to Osborn to start the game while Conklin took on Chandler Jones one-on-one in pass protection. Against the Browns, it nearly resulted in a huge gain for Justin Jefferson for 37 yards, but it was called back for holding.

The Vikings also happened to give up pressure from simply being outplayed. O’Neill happened to bookend the pressure story. He was responsible for the first pressure of the day — a play where Jadeveon Clowney slipped inside and got in Cousins’ face on a screen throw much earlier than pressure should come — and the final pressure of the day. Clowney beat O’Neill to the outside and forced Cousins to scramble to his left, short-arming the touchdown pass.

The Vikings slid protection to the left to provide Hill with inside help and allow him to focus on the outside, leaving O’Neill one-on-one with Clowney. Clowney is well-known for his inside moves, so even though O’Neill gets significant outside depth, he’s wary of the inside move. Clowney fakes a move inside before heading for O’Neill’s outside shoulder and executes a double-swipe with great timing to keep O’Neill out of the play.

So, with an exhaustive review of all the pressures in the game, what’s the verdict? Is the offensive line less responsible for the pressure issues than it seemed? Should Cousins have gotten rid of the ball sooner? Did the Vikings call plays that hurt more than helped?

The difficult answer is that a good offensive line performance would have still resulted in a heavily pressured Cousins and a difficult day for the offense. But on top of the perfect storm of other contributors to pressured play, the offensive line played poorly.

Udoh had perhaps the most alarming game of all as a pass protector. There were times where he whiffed on his assignment instantly and completely, like on third-and-13 at the end of the second quarter, which led to a dump-off for 3 yards. There were times he missed on his stunt pickup, like on third-and-14 at the top of the fourth quarter, leading to a dump-off to Conklin for a 3-yard loss. And most bafflingly, when the Vikings had just 1:24 left in the game on fourth-and-3, where he seemingly forgets his assignment midway through the rep.

Defensive linemen will often stunt with the goal of getting a specific player a free shot at the quarterback, employing a decoy — sometimes called the penetrator — to draw both blockers while the looper goes behind the decoy to attack the open space. Often, offensive linemen can stymie this if they get the right angles and can crash the two defensive linemen into each other.

That happens with Garrett Bradbury and Udoh, but then Udoh abandons the block to help O’Neill for no clear reason. O’Neill isn’t exactly winning his rep, but there’s not much Udoh can do to help. In the meantime, both his new assignment and his old assignment break free. While Bradbury might reasonably be expected to hold up his block, the leverage he had was one with Udoh crashing down to help create resistance. Cousins is subject to both of them while trying to slide up in the pocket away from Garrett. Cousins manages to avoid the sack, but it ended up as a fourth-down incompletion.

Hill is an interesting case. He had some technical errors, especially with his footwork, but his biggest problem in the fourth quarter was his leverage. His pressure total is a bit inflated from pressures that came late in the snap or from Cousins being flushed into Hill’s defender. There were also several instances where Cousins declined an open receiver on pressures credited to Hill and spent too long in the pocket.

Late in the game, however, Hill’s pads popped up high and he allowed Garrett into his chest as an effective bull rusher. This was an issue in the Seahawks game, as well.

For Hill, those two primary problems — poor kick-slide depth, forcing him to play catchup against one of the most athletic players in the NFL, and leverage issues against power — defined his night. He was assigned more “unfair” pressures by PFF than any other player on the offensive line, but he also played extremely poorly even when accounting for that.

It was a one-score game, so if either the offensive line played better or Cousins took advantage of clear opportunities, they likely could have forced overtime or won the game. But the most disappointing unit was the offensive line.

Disappointing performances from Cleveland and O’Neill might have been ignorable if the rest of the line had played like an average unit, but they instead compounded the errors and made big issues seem enormous. Bradbury’s typically lackluster pass protection only hurt the effort further.

None of this so far addresses the issue of the running game. While Dalvin Cook had his trademark fluidity, he didn’t look like the explosive back Vikings fans are used to seeing. Mattison had even less room on his runs. In other words, the OL unit struggled in its run blocking, as well. It was blown off the ball at the point of attack, couldn’t create cutback lanes on zones and couldn’t shut down backdoor swims.

The two biggest culprits in this Minnesota loss — Udoh and Hill — also happen to play positions the team invested in during the draft. Wyatt Davis is a right guard who missed some practice time but has largely been healthy. With Udoh playing well throughout training camp, preseason and the early season, it’s far too early to be calling for him to be replaced by a rookie. After all, Cleveland was in a similar spot when he was called up as the third-string guard and he struggled early, too.

Hill is a more interesting conundrum. He doesn’t have the communication or chemistry issues that we saw with Udoh in this game but has a ceiling on his level of play, especially against high-level athletes like Garrett. The Vikings spent a first-round pick on Christian Darrisaw, but he has missed more than a few practices. He missed the entire offseason recovering from groin surgery, with at least one follow-up procedure after his recovery went slower than expected. He has participated in practices for just one week and — even if he’s physically in shape — he has a long way to go regarding chemistry and the speed of the game. Rookie tackles are generally not that good but tend to play better than Hill has.

The Vikings will probably wait it out — perhaps into the bye week — before they make a move here. In the meantime, they’ll have to endure bumpy roads.

The Vikings played a messy game against the Browns. On the surface, the offensive line may be better than it has been for the past five years. But it still seems to be the Achilles’ heel of an offense waiting to take off.

(Top photo: Stephen Maturen / Getty Images)