Cassel

The Vikings stunned division leading Philadelphia yesterday. They did it without star running back Adrian Peterson AND his very good back-up. They also scored 48 points. They haven't done that since 1998!

So, what was different? Well. I've always said that they rely on Adrian Peterson for too much of their offense. Without him, Matt Cassel did yesterday what every other successful quarterback does in the league. He threw the ball. He threw it long. He threw it short. He threw it in the middle. He threw sideline patterns. And he threw it to every body that was available. Accurately.

AND he still handed the ball off for short (very short) runs up the middle to keep the defense honest. Peterson's replacement didn't get good yardage in his 30 carries yesterday, BUT he did get POSITIVE yardage on all but three or four of his carries. As much as I like Peterson, so many of his carries are for negative yardage, so we find ourselves in so many second and 13, or second and 14 situations. ALL of Asiata's runs might have been for 1 or 2 or 3 yards, but at least he found the hole and ran FORWARD. Second and 7 is much easier to deal with. The end result for the Vikings is that they kept the Eagles high-powered offense OFF the field by having LOTS of long sustained drives. We dominated in possession time yesterday: 36 minutes to 23 minutes. THAT was the difference.

Cassel is very good. Even with our defense giving up close to 500 yards of offense, we coasted to a win against a very good Eagles team.

More Cassel please. No more Ponder.

Ever.