There was frustration on the face of everybody in the locker room on Sunday afternoon at U.S. Bank Stadium as the Vikings tried to explain all the mistakes they made in their 27-19 loss to the Baltimore Ravens.
The recurring theme? The pre-snap penalties.
The Vikings were whistled for a whopping eight false starts against the Ravens, which made it extremely hard for the offense to move the chains. That was enough to make head coach Kevin O’Connell want to pull his hair out as he tried to make sense of it after the game.
“Whatever was going on was not acceptable,” he said. “We’ve got to get it fixed, and we will.”
The culprits included left tackle Christian Darrisaw, center Blake Brandel and right tackle Brian O’Neill on the offensive line, plus quarterback J.J. McCarthy, receiver Justin Jefferson and tight end Ben Yurosek.
“I’m the orchestrator of the orchestra,” McCarthy said. “I take full responsibility for anything that happens.”
As much as McCarthy deserves credit for falling on the sword, it would’ve hit harder had he been able to actually shed light on the situation. Asked to pinpoint what exactly went wrong, McCarthy couldn’t provide an explanation.
“We’re going to have to get together as a group and talk about it,” O’Neill said. “I haven’t been a part of something like that before.”
It seems impossible that a home team can get called for a false start that many times. That issue is almost always reserved for a road team.
“We’ve got to find a way to first and foremost correct whatever the issue was,” O’Connell said. “There seemed to be a flinch here and there way, way, way too much.”
Some theories that got thrown around by the Vikings after the game included McCarthy’s use of the hard count during his cadence, as well as the Ravens making calls in the trenches that mimicked the inflection of the ball being hiked.
“They were trying to get us to jump,” running back Aaron Jones said. “They were playing a little game there.”
As he tried to come to grips with what happened, O’Neill kept shaking his head back and forth.
“We’ve got to operate better as a unit,” O’Neill said. “I’ll take it upon myself to make sure we get it fixed.”
Is it something that can be fixed easily?
“I’d like to think so,” O’Neill said. “We’ve got to go do it.”
The worst part is the Vikings have worked so hard to correct this issue. They were plagued by presnap penalties in the early stages of this season, and now it’s rearing its ugly head once again.
“That’s been a huge point of what we think it’s going to take to win the game every week,” O’Connell said. “We talk to the team about eliminating those self inflicted. We didn’t do that in any way, shape, or form. We’ve got to fix it.”
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