What Use Is Kevin O’Connell?

There are times when a team can lose a primetime game and feel hard-done-by. A good squad can have an off-night, or run into a particularly bad matchup, and suddenly millions of Monday Night Football viewers have incorrectly concluded that those fellas are bad at football. The Vikings, who came into Monday’s game against the Bills with a 6-1 record, offered no such misrepresentation. Anyone who watched that game came away with a precise understanding of who the Minnesota Vikings are: a team that can’t move the ball to save its life.

I shudder to think of the hypothetical casual fan who was excited to tune into a game between two six-win teams, only to be treated to a game that, despite being close in a technical sense, never really offered any drama. The Vikings are to blame for that, as they managed to lose 23-6 while putting yet another inept offensive performance on tape. Minnesota finished the game with 178 total yards and nine first downs, and possessed the ball for 17:28, their lowest mark in franchise history. That was somehow all they could manage against the 30th ranked pass defense in the league.

The star of this horrible show was Carson Wentz, who was forced into starting quarterback duty thanks to Kyler Murray’s hamstring injury. Wentz completed eight of his 25 passes for 81 yards, and threw two interceptions. It was a historically bad performance, one so vivid in its awful particulars that Joe Buck and Troy Aikman were able to set aside any hard feelings they might currently have for each other and join in channeling their disgust at the field: