Will Pat Elflein be better or worse for the Vikings in 2019?

Confidence may be lost

Even Pat Elflein’s biggest supporters can’t argue that his play fell off last season. In the span of one year, he went from being one of the strongest aspects of the Vikings’ offensive line to one of it’s weakest.

It’s very possible that Elflein just wasn’t very healthy or at least fully recovered from his ankle surgery. This was mentioned above so we won’t get into it again, but another reason for his decrease in performance was that maybe he just lost his confidence.

This guy had an extremely productive rookie season where he was consistently manhandling the man over him. But then he missed the entire 2018 offseason to recover from his injuries and when he came back in Week 3, he found things to be much tougher.

Elflein wasn’t having the success he did during the previous year. Instead of manhandling his guy, he was the one getting tossed around.

Maybe the lack of preparation and conditioning in the offseason was the big reason for this. But maybe after the first couple of games where he was struggling, he also started to doubt himself.

What was once easy for Elflein became very difficult and things only got worse as the season went on.

If he struggles early in the 2019 season there could be a snowball effect of self-doubt which will hamper his play. He could be 100 percent physically healthy, but if he doesn’t believe in himself that won’t matter and he’ll be a liability to Minnesota’s offensive line once again.