The Vikings warrior poet coach dispenses his words of wisdom
ED NOTE: This has bad words. Most of the other things we write on here usually don’t, but this one does. It seems to be a popular bit, so until the law catches up with me, I’m going to keep doing it. Thanks for understanding, and thanks for not reading and not letting your kids read it if bad language isn’t your thing. Hope you enjoy the rest of our articles—Ted
At some point, every warrior poet deals with opponents you try take seriously, but just can’t get worked up for. They’re inferior at almost every position, their field general is more inexperienced than a year one med student trying to do brain surgery, and your field of battle kills birds at a rate higher than Americans shot down Imperial Japanese planes during the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot during WWII.
So you reach into your bag of tricks to keep everyone focused. Maybe you yell a little louder, or swear a little bit more. Or maybe you lay off a little, and let the troops blow off some steam and have some fun:
#VictoryMonday pic.twitter.com/a21Hai8xvz
— Minnesota Vikings (@Vikings) October 15, 2018
Whatever method you chose, you picked the right course and approach. Even though it was a slow start and things weren’t firing on all cylinders early, you wouldn’t let a win slip from your grasp. You grabbed victory by the neck, and dragged it across the finish line.
Because you are Zim Tzu, The King In The North, Defrocker of Cardinals, Subduer of Equestrian Excrement Consumers, Nightmare of Clan Fromage, Breaker Of Gold Fever, High Septon Of Eagan, Lord Commander Of The Iron Range And Twin Cities, Master Of Fortress TCO, Honorary Elder Of Mankato and Protector Of The Realm.
And when The Great Unwashed need to hear how you dispatched a team that probably tasted like chicken after you cooked them, you just can’t come right out and say it, point blank. That would be a tad uncouth, and unbecoming of a warrior poet. So you need to hire mercenaries* to do your dirty work for you.** We take what Zim Tzu says, then we hook up words and phrases and clauses to get you very far.***
*Hi.
**It’s just a press conference about a football game. No mercenary shit is done. Although it would be cool as hell, not gonna lie.
***No this isn’t Conjunction Junction, Interplanet Janet. It’s just me making shit up about what Mike Zimmer actually thinks, as my lawyers from Franklin, Bash, and Bateman want me to remind you.
As usual, Zim Tzu had an opening statement.
What Zim Tzu said: Thought it was a good team win yesterday, it was nice to see the running game get going. We had 195 yards rushing. Defensively I thought we played very well, 0-10 on third downs. I thought we pressured the quarterback well, pretty good in coverage most of the day. Special teams we flipped the field position a few times, had them down inside the 20 yard line a couple of times. We had good field position with some of our return game. A good team win, and we’re going to have to continue to play well on the road this week against a pretty darn good Jets team.
What Zim Tzu meant: We fuckin’ dragged Arizona but gave them some garbage shit at the end to make themselves feel better about having to live in a goddamn desert. Jesus, everthing is babyshit brown out there. Fuckin’ terrible place to live. Sand everywhere, snakes, scorpions, about 130 degrees in the summer and don’t even give me that bullshit about it being a dry heat....yeah, fuck that place. We won, defense looks to be getting back on track. Fuck the Jets, aka the team Kirk Cousins played like a goddamn Stradivarius during free agency.
Q: What was the key to limiting the big plays that have been plaguing the defense the past few games?
What Zim Tzu said: We’ve been practicing these things that have been hurting us, and we’ve been emphasizing certain points that needed to be addressed, and so I think that’s really what the biggest reason [is].
What Zim Tzu meant: Well during the week I was talking to George Edwards and I said ‘hey George you know that scheme we’ve been using a lot where all of our guys run away from the fuckin’ dude with the ball like Sir Robin from Monty Python? Yeah, that’s a great fuckin’ movie but a stupid goddamn scheme. If I wanted that kind of bullshit I’d have Mike Pettine and Dom Capers fucking this up way more than you ever could. Knock that shit off.’ So he did.
Q: Do you have an update on the status of Mike Hughes after he had an MRI this morning?
What Zim Tzu said: Yeah, he’s going to go on IR. He’s got a torn ACL.
What Zim Tzu meant: FUUUUUUCK!!! Do you know three of my top five draft picks have had fucking knees blow up on them since I’ve been here? More irritating than Fran Drescher’s fucking voice.
Q: What can you say about the progress of Brian O’Neill since he got here until now?
What Zim Tzu said: He’s progressed an awful lot. I thought he played pretty well yesterday. He battled, very smart, picked up a lot of the things that they were trying to do. He’s getting better all the time.
What Zim Tzu meant: He’s playing like a bona fide NFL tackle. In other words, he’s the exact opposite of Human Turnstile Matt Kalil. It’s amazing we picked an offensive lineman that doesn’t suck, but I’ll take it.
Q: How deflating is it for an opponent when you’re able to score going in and out of halftime?
What Zim Tzu said: It’s big. It’s a chance to go ten or 14 points up, if you’re getting the ball back in the second half. Quite honestly, that’s why I try to defer as much as we can, because we have a chance to get the ball in the start of the second half. But you know, if you get 10 points in an eight-minute span, or 14 points, then that’s pretty good.
What Zim Tzu meant: Oh it’s funner than kicking you in the balls, Tomasson.
Q: In terms of the defense’s success on third down against Arizona, is there a common theme that you saw on tape?
What Zim Tzu said: Guys made some good plays. The third down interception that Anthony Harris made was a big play. I think we had a couple sacks in there, maybe three. Mackensie [Alexander] made a good play on the first third down, Trae [Waynes] made a nice tackle on the shallow cross, and I think it was third-and-ten or something like that. The guys did a nice job of executing.
What Zim Tzu meant: Well, we had guys on defense do this thing we like to call ‘tackle’, which was painfully absent the first few games. It’s amazing what happens when we quit doing the Dead Arm Dance tackling technique and smacked some fuckers in the mouth for a change.
Q: What does losing Mike Hughes mean for the depth of the cornerback position? Will Holton Hill be expected to play a larger role?
What Zim Tzu said: This has always been a deal where somebody gets hurt, and everybody else has to continue to step up and play. We feel bad about Mike, because I think Mike is going to be a really good football player, but we got other guys here and we expect them to come in and do a good job.
What Zim Tzu meant: It’s like going home thinking you had taken out a nice steak to cook on the grill, because the weather is still good, and it’s not snowing, or raining, or colder than your ex-girlfriend’s soulless fucking heart outside. But you get home and yeah, in your rush to get to work you forgot to pull out that nice ribeye. God damn it! So you look in the fridge and you have some three day old casserole bullshit in there, so yeah whatever the fuck I guess I’ll warm up that gruel and eat that instead. At least I can have a nice cold beer and OH FUCK ME I’M OUT OF BEER, TOO. It fucking sucks, man.
Q: What is it about Latavius Murray’s game that has enabled him to have success in the downhill runs?
What Zim Tzu said: Number one, he’s a great person. He’s a very diligent about his work, practices hard, but he’s got good feet and acceleration. He stayed with the reads really well yesterday, I thought. He runs with his pads forward. When he gets a chance, very seldom is this guy going backwards when he gets hit. A lot of those things I really like.
What Zim Tzu meant: Number one, Latavius would knife your grandmother if it was the difference between fourth and one or a first down. Secondly, and this was truly amazing, I think we witnessed a Fuckin’ Fatima Miracle when I saw offensive linemen blocking and opening holes for him to run through. Hail Mary, Full of five yard runs.
Q: Was it an emphasis to go to Laquon Treadwell early yesterday and how much of the impact can he make if defenses start paying him more attention?
What Zim Tzu said: It really wasn’t. It’s just the way the game started out. We had a couple calls in there. Kirk [Cousins] is a guy who is going to throw the football where it needs to go. He’s not really trying to get the ball to this guy or that guy, it’s mostly coverage dictated. Obviously, some plays are put in for each guy but the more that we can add, the more players that we can add that are spread the ball around the better it will be for everybody.
What Zim Tzu meant: Yeah so here’s the deal. On Wednesday I told Flip ‘we’re going to throw the first two passes to Treadwell and if he drops them I’m going to take an industrial stapler and literally fucking staple a goddamn deflated football to his hands’, and Flip said ‘hey that might do the trick’, and lo and behold I guess he didn’t want to have a fucking football stapled to his hands. Or my foot up his ass.
Q: What do about the tipped passes? It looked as if Kirk Cousins was trying to get the ball out quickly on those possessions.
What Zim Tzu said: I knew I was going to get asked that so I was prepared. Some of them were quick passes, right, where the line was sliding one way and the back was going the other way and we were cutting the defensive end with the back. There was two times they jumped over the top of them and tipped the ball down. One time he ended up sacking him, there was one when we ran a naked (bootleg) and we left a guy alone on that side who wasn’t blocked, so basically a few of the times were when we didn’t block. There were a couple times where we got pushed back a little bit and guys got their hands up. One of the early ones, maybe the third down or fourth down early in the game I think we got pushed back on those two.
What Zim Tzu meant: I knew you fuckers were gonna ask me this question, since Granitejaw McDreamy had approximately 182 passes blocked. Don’t throw it into the fucking arms of defensive linemen. That’s how to keep it from happening. It’s not fuckin’ rocket science.
Q: What did the interior offensive linemen do to open those runs up?
What Zim Tzu said: There walking guys up in the gaps. They basically had eight-man fronts against our one-back formations and we were having to come off the double teams, the combination blocks a little bit faster, and there was a couple times where we got them knocked off the ball and once it gets there, there’s nobody from here to past that back wall to make the tackle. We just have to stick with it. Like I told the team the other day, sometimes it’s going to be a two yard run and then it might be a two yard run, then it might be a 20-yard run. I think we had four of those yesterday. Sometimes you just have to keep pounding it until you pound it through the wall.
What Zim Tzu meant: Well I touched on this a little bit earlier, but much like our defense is now doing this technique we like to call ‘tackling’, our offensive linemen have developed this radical new thing called ‘blocking’. It’s when you take the guy across from you, move him to the side, and then you watch the running back move past you towards this fucking mystical place called ‘the end zone’.
Q: How close of a call was it with Dalvin Cook yesterday?
What Zim Tzu said: It’s close. I mean we just have to feel comfortable with it.
What Zim Tzu meant: C’mon baby, just the tip. See you cockteases next week.
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