5 biggest takeaways from Vikings vs. Bengals in Week 1
By Adam Carlson
A complete lack of discipline
When listening to coaches during their press conferences, fans can usually hear a coach talking about the discipline of their football team. After the game on Sunday. this is a topic that Mike Zimmer couldn’t talk about because there was none.
The Minnesota Vikings had 12 total penalties charged against them during the game for 116 yards, and that isn’t even counting penalties that offset or were declined. To put that in perspective, the Bengals had three penalties accepted against them for a grand total of 15 yards.
Those penalties were just about everything you can imagine. Holding, false start, offsides, pass interference, illegal formation, and just about every other rule in the rulebook. It’s hard to win when you lose the penalty yardage battle by more than a football field.
If Minnesota wants to be competitive in the future, it will need to drastically reduce these mental errors. It doesn’t matter if they are getting beat by the player they are assigned to, the Vikings can’t afford to give yards away and need to force opposing teams to earn them.