Category: Brett Favre

The Minnesota Vikings vs the Kansas City Chiefs

By The Jazzy One, on August 22nd, 2009

Well, Brett Favre played his first preseason game as a Viking. He definitely wasn’t great, but I still saw some promising things from both him and the rest of the team.

Let’s Talk About Brett

Brett Favre played the first two series with the Vikes. He went 1 for 4 for only four yards. That was the bad… I think fans wanted to see Brett lead the team on a TD drive. Of his three misses, though, I really felt like only 1 of those passes was a bad pass. One of them was off the mark because he was getting completely trucked by a Kansas City defender, and the other one, in my opinion, was a bad play by Jaymar Johnson. Johnson looked like he just kinda stopped a the end of his route. Favre tried leading him a bit with the pass, and Johnson didn’t react. Those types of things will be fixed by having more seasoned receivers (like Bernard Berrian) running those routes, and they’ll be fixed by having more than 3 days of practice between Brett and the team.

On the flip side, I did like seeing 1 thing while watching Brett…. very little indecision. Brett dropped back and got rid of the ball (and good lord can he still zip that ball). We haven’t seen that much decisiveness probably since Randall Cunningham. He knew what he had to do with the ball, and he did it. Obviously last night there were communication issues with the receivers, but those will go away with more time.

Special Teams Still Looked Good

I think we’re going to see a big improvement in that department this season, which is good. Our defense was great last year, but a lot of times they had to work against shorter fields than they should have, just because our special teams unit couldn’t stop the other team’s returners.

Our Starting Defense Looked Pretty Good

Not quite as good as last week, but still good. Even without Jared Allen on the field, the front four managed to get pressure on the QB. Cassel, though, is more mobile than I realized (I didn’t watch any New England games last year), and he turned some of that pressure into some rushing yards. Cassel also did a good job at finding the 1 on 1 matchups, and he picked apart the Vikings secondary a bit. I don’t worry about that TOO much, because the Vikings (like most teams) use a pretty vanilla defense during the preseason, but I will admit I did have flashbacks to a time when any QB could pick the Vikings apart.

But I’m gonna have faith in the Vikings that that won’t happen this year.

Tarvaris Jackson Looked Great

Wow, I bet he silenced a few trade rumors, at least for a week. He went 12 for 15 for 202 yards. On his first series, he missed two of the three passes he missed, and still looked good doing it. His first pass was DEEP to Sidney Rice. Rice had to slow down quite a bit, but still had plenty of room to make the catch. Unfortunately it was incomplete because Rice couldn’t quite stay in bounds. Still, a nice deep ball from Jackson. His second pass was actually completed and it looked sharp, but Jackson made a dumb mistake of being almost 5 yards past the line of scrimmage when he threw it. At that point, even though he made a couple nice passes, I figured the fact that neither of them counted was going to set a negative tone for the rest of the game.

Instead he came out firing again. He completed 12 of his next 13 passes, and moved the ball very efficiently. His 64 yard pass to Reynaud could not have been thrown any better, and on this TD pass to Shiancoe he was scrambling away from a blitz and buying time for a receiver to get open. Great job.

My only gripe with Jackson is that he holds onto the ball a little too long sometimes. That’s ESPECIALLY obvious after watching Brett Favre get rid of the ball. The flip side of that is that he can create with his legs, which is something that none of the other QBs on the roster can really do.

But What About Booty?

Well, Booty’s stats looked decent… 6 for 8 for 61 yards. To be completely honest, though, Booty just doesn’t grab me. I know he’s young, and I know he was a great college QB, but there’s nothing about watching him over the last 2 preseasons that makes me say “this guy is going to turn into something special”. Maybe I’d change my tune if he got to play with the first team, but still, even though he’s playing with third string receivers, he’s also playing against third string defenses. It should balance out.

I’ll probably talk about this more on Monday, but after last night’s performance by Jackson, I think Booty might be the odd man out.