Vikings Exorcise Demons

It was the Ghosts of Vikings past and they passed the test. 

Vikings beat the hapless Redskins yesterday in a game that had players going up against former teams. You had Case Keenum and AP coming back home for a game and Kirk Cousin's visiting his old team. The first half was somewhat of a struggle though as the Skins ran the ball pretty effectively but couldn't get in the endzone.

Kirk Cousins has been lights out.. 23/26 for 285 and Dalvin Cooke put 98 and 1TD on the ground in a move that is a recipe for victory. It wasn't pretty, but a win is a win.

According to the Daily Norseman: 

So how did the Vikings go about winning ugly? Well, there are basically two ways to win ugly generally. The first is to generally play poorly the whole game, but get bailed out with a few key plays against an opponent not playing well. The second is to play okay most of the game but make some key mistakes that prevent a better result against an opponent not playing well.

In this case, the Vikings were this latter form of ugly winners.

It seemed clear going into this game that the goal was simply to get out with a W against a struggling Redskins team and move on. It was a short week, not much time to prepare, not much to suggest it would be a big prime time game with something on the line. And so the Vikings came out with less focus and intensity than we’ve seen recently, but managed to do many things well in securing the victory.

The Vikings won the game because they had 434 yards of offense, held the Redskins to half that, dominated time of possession, didn’t allow a touchdown on defense, won the turnover battle, never had to punt, and didn’t miss a field goal or extra point.

All of that suggests a dominant victory on the scoreboard. But a more comfortable than dominant 19-9 was the final score. The reason was because they had difficulty scoring touchdowns.

The Vikings had led the league in red zone TD conversion percentage, coming in at around a 70% clip, but managed to officially go only 1 for 4 (25%) in the red zone Thursday night.

Here's what the players had to say: