How Minnesota Vikings could still win without Kirk Cousins

Minnesota Vikings’ Strong Special Teams

To win without Kirk Cousins, the Vikings will need to be strong in all aspects of their team, and that includes special teams. They could be in a lot of low scoring games where field position is key.

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They’ll need Britton Colquitt to continue to boot them out of bad field position. He could be extremely important to the success of the team in a Cousin-less world. Without Cousins under center, the Vikings will rely heavily on the run game. Defenses will be aware of this and will stack the box in order to stop it. Sometimes that’ll work and the Vikings could find themselves with drives that go backward and Colquitt could be punting from inside the 20-yard line. He showed last year his leg is still plenty strong even at age 35, and he can punt them into a much better situation.

Without Cousins at quarterback, points would also be hard to come by. The Vikings could end up kicking more field goals than scoring touchdowns, and Dan Bailey’s leg will be extremely valuable. He will need to have a season at least as accurate as he did in 2019 where he hit 27 of 29 field goals for a 93.1 field-goal percentage.

The Vikings could find themselves in a lot of games that are decided by a field goal or less and if they are going to win, then Bailey has to be money all season long.

They will also need a strong return game to win consistently. The Vikings appear to have landed their return man of the future with K.J. Osborn. They used a fifth-round pick on him for a reason and it wasn’t for his ability as a receiver. Osborn has experience returning both kicks and punts and the Vikings will be expecting him to put them in good field position more often than not. He’ll need to prove worthy of that fifth-round choice and if he can get some big returns early in the season, that’ll make teams wary of kicking to him, which could result in an increase of pooch kicks and excellent filed position in return.