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As awkward as Cousins is, he's still the 2nd best QB in the North and the Vikings back-up's are truly awful.
Fallers
Kellen Mond, quarterback
Kellen Mond’s first drive ended in an interception and so did his last. It would be one thing if either of Mond’s interceptions were impressive plays from opposing defenders, closing down on a pass from 20 yards out, but it’s quite another thing that they were both directly to their respective defenders – one that could have been a pick-six with a slightly better return and the other that iced the game down 10 points with 2:38 remaining. Mond finished with a passer rating of 21.3 and threw for 4.1 yards per passing attempt.
O’Connell was about as frank as he’s ever been in assessing Mond’s performance. “He’s moving the team on that first drive of the night, we get into a third down there in their half of the 50, chance at maybe getting some points, and the pocket kind of collapses on him,” he said. “That’s playing in the NFL. Can you be compact? Can you find a way to get that ball thrown to the open receiver without your arm getting tipped?
“I’ll go back and see kind of what happened, protection-wise,” he added, “but ultimately, I just think that’s playing in this league. We’re in kind of that fringe field goal range, can we secure points, can we be safe with that ball? And then the last interception, I think he just lost track of where that post safety was and tried to press to make that play that we were trying to make all night.”
Things don’t look great when it comes to finding a backup for Kirk Cousins. “You would love to have come out of tonight feeling like, ‘Shoot, they both moved the team and scored a lot of points, and we’ve got a heck of a hard discussion and conversation ahead as a staff and as an organization.’,” said O’Connell.
“Although we didn’t do that, I still think there’s some real teachable moments, and then some real moments where we’re able to evaluate and really look at where we are at that position, as we re-stack everything to go into this week, to see how we need to allow those guys to compete.”
It was bleak. Sean Mannion was the better of the two quarterbacks but that doesn’t feel like saying much. Instead, the Vikings might do better looking outside of their roster for this season’s backup.
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"I give you my word as a Biden"
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