The lowest point of Minnesota’s 2025 slate likely was the lackluster effort on Thursday Night Football.
In that 37-10 loss to the Chargers, which followed a near win over the Super Bowl champion Eagles, the Vikings passed for 130 yards and ran for 34. An early deficit resulted in a sky-high 76.6 percent pass rate.
That was the hardest O’Connell has leaned on the passing game this year.
Conversely, Sunday against Washington was the “softest” — and the most frequently he’s run it since his debut 2022 season. Minnesota ran the rock on 55.7% of its offensive plays; the prior highwater mark in a game under O’Connell was 53.5%, which produced 141 yards in a 29-13 Week 18 win at Chicago in 2022; the Vikings rotated from starters to reserves in that game, with a spot in the playoffs already guaranteed.
That switch in strategy prefaces Ben Goessling’s analysis for the Minnesota Star Tribune this week, basically, that Minnesota’s offense looked closer to what McCarthy directed in his final year at Michigan.
Supporting their win in the 2023 College Football Playoff National Championship Game, the Wolverines ranked seventh in the country, according to Sports Info Solutions, with 563 rushes in a span of 15 games.
Goessling wrote the following:
The conditions for the Vikings on Sunday were as pristine as they’ve been all season. General Manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah talked before the season about building a team that could win “any type of fight”; the Vikings’ 31-0 win over the Commanders didn’t demand a great deal of resourcefulness.
But the Vikings, who had lost their last four games and scored six points in their last two before Sunday, weren’t in a position to quibble with how they secured this victory. And while a win over Washington might not earn them many style points, it came in a manner that has been rare for them under O’Connell but might actually work for them at this point in McCarthy’s tenure.
Check out Goessling’s breakdown of Minnesota’s adapted personnel and usage of the big fellas here.