Brian Flores has Minnesota’s defense playing fast, furious and far outside the comfort zone of every offense it has seen so far.
Through three games, the Vikings are 3-0 despite being the first team since the 1957 Cleveland Browns to start that way while finishing each game with under 250 total yards. They’ve also punted 18 times, the most in the NFL.
The offense hasn’t carried them. Flores’ pressure package has.
The numbers are outrageous. Minnesota has blitzed on 71% of opposing dropbacks, a league-high by a mile, with Tampa Bay a distant second at 46%.
That gap is so large it matches the difference between the NFL’s second-highest and 30th-highest blitz rates this season. Through three games, it’s the highest blitz rate in the past 20 years, topping the 2023 Vikings’ 65%, and it’s the highest any team has posted over a three-game span since 2007.
Flores turned the heat all the way up in each of the first two weeks. The Vikings blitzed 78% of the time in Week 1 against Green Bay, then followed that with an 81% blitz rate in Week 2 against Chicago, a game Minnesota won 9-3 in ugly weather.
In Week 3, against Todd Bowles and the Buccaneers, Flores “cooled off” to 57%, which still ranked among the highest blitz rates in the league this season. Those three games are the top three single-game blitz rates by any team this year.
That pressure is showing up everywhere else, too. Minnesota leads the NFL in defensive EPA per game, points per drive allowed, sacks, third down defense, red zone defense, passer rating allowed, pass success rate, completion percentage allowed and more. The Vikings have 14 sacks, have held opponents to a 23% third down defense rate and a 13% red zone defense rate, and have limited quarterbacks to a 67.7 passer rating.
The front is relentless in a way that goes beyond the blitz numbers. Minnesota is playing base defense at one of the highest rates in the league, which means even more bodies are coming after the quarterback.
The Vikings are averaging nearly five pass rushers per play and 1,300 average pounds of pass rushers per play, both league highs. Across more than 100 pass plays, that works out to roughly 175,000 pounds of pass-rushers sent at quarterbacks this season - nearly 100 tons of pressure.
Only Detroit has more, and that’s because the Lions have faced more pass plays.
The next test comes Sunday against Miami, Flores’ former team, with Malik Willis under center for Minnesota. It will be Flores’ first time facing the Dolphins since joining the Vikings, and his history suggests Miami should expect something strange.
When Flores was the Dolphins’ head coach, he used a wildly different approach against former employer New England. In 2019, he rushed three or fewer pass rushers 18 times against the Patriots, one of the highest rates on record.
In 2020, he leaned into man coverage against New England at an 81% clip, also one of the highest rates on record.
Flores has never been shy about going to extremes. He once used at least six pass rushers in a game 28 times, and in another matchup sent a cover-0 blitz at Lamar Jackson and the Ravens around 20 times, another record. Minnesota has accounted for 10 of the 19 highest single-game blitz rates across Flores’ four seasons with the Vikings.
He made his philosophy plain last Tuesday.
"I tell our guys all the time, if we're going to go down, we're going to go down a certain way. We're going to go down blitzing people."
The Vikings enter Week 4 on an eight-game winning streak that dates back to last season. During that stretch, they’ve posted the league’s top scoring defense while collecting 16 takeaways and 32 sacks.
They’ve done it with J.J. McCarthy, Max Brosmer, Carson Wentz and Kyler Murray at quarterback.
Flores’ success in Minnesota is putting his name back into the head-coaching conversation, but he still hasn’t landed another job since being fired by Miami five years ago after back-to-back winning seasons. The split was driven by dysfunction as much as results, with reported tension between Flores and GM Chris Grier and a strained relationship with then-promising quarterback Tua Tagovailoa.
He has drawn interviews in recent years, including with the Ravens and Steelers this offseason, but several factors may still be slowing the path back to a top job: his defensive background in a league that increasingly favors offensive-minded head coaches, lingering questions about his style from Miami, and his discrimination lawsuit against the NFL and several teams, filed in February 2022, which alleges discriminatory hiring practices, including "sham" interviews conducted to satisfy the Rooney Rule.
For now, though, Flores is doing what he does best: dialing up chaos, forcing offenses into mistakes and making Minnesota’s defense look like the most suffocating unit in football.
In Other News...
Vikings Just Lost Another Depth Piece To A Desperate Giants Team
The Giants turned to familiar help along their defensive front, signing Jihad Ward off the Vikings practice squad to their active roster after Brian Burns went down with a torn ACL. Ward had already spent time in New York during the 2022 and 2023 seasons, so the move gives the Giants an immediate option they know well as they try to patch together the edge-rush group.
For Minnesota, it is another reminder of how thin depth can get in a hurry when other teams are hunting for experienced bodies. Ward had been sitting on the Vikings practice squad, but New York needed a quick fix and made room by releasing Josh Tupou, leaving Minnesota to absorb one more roster loss while the market around a damaged Giants defense keeps shifting. [Read more 🡒]
Vikings Finally Explained The J.J. McCarthy Trade Fans Feared
When the Vikings sent J.J. McCarthy to the Giants, it immediately landed as the kind of move that can rattle a fan base, especially with a player whose future had been tied so closely to the teams long-term plans. General manager Nolan Teasley later laid out the reasoning behind the deal, and the key point was simple enough: this was not a trade McCarthy asked for, even if the optics made it easy for supporters to assume otherwise.
Kevin OConnells reaction added another layer to the story, because the head coach described an emotional exchange with McCarthy after the announcement. For Minnesota, the explanation matters as much as the transaction itself, since any departure involving a high-profile young quarterback is going to invite questions about timing, trust and whether the organization sees the move as a football decision or something more complicated. [Read more 🡒]
Giants Plan For J.J. McCarthy Says Plenty About Vikings Trade
The Giants reported plan for J.J. McCarthy is a revealing one for the Vikings as much as it is for New York. Minnesota moved on from the quarterback in exchange for a 2027 fifth-round pick, and the direction the Giants are taking with him suggests they see a player whose best early fit is in a run-heavy setup rather than as the centerpiece of a high-volume passing game.
For Vikings fans, that naturally brings the trade back into focus. McCarthys college success came in a system that did not ask him to carry much of the passing load, and his time in Minnesota showed how difficult that transition could be when the offense asked for more. If the Giants are already shaping their offense around those concerns, it only sharpens the question of what the Vikings believed they had, and why they were willing to move on when they did. [Read more 🡒]