The Vikings’ rapid decline from the best record in the NFL to missing the playoffs last season was due in large part to struggles on their injury-plagued offensive line. Vikings guard Alex Boone says he knew the line wasn’t getting the job done, and that was a weekly frustration as the team fell in the standings.
Boone said on PFT Live that when a team begins to struggle like the Vikings did last season, it’s natural to look around and ask who’s to blame, and the line takes a large share of the blame.
“It started to get frustrating, and once you get frustrated as a team, it’s hard,” Boone said. “It’s hard to overcome that. Because everybody’s mad at everybody. Everybody is kind of like, ‘If this group would pick it up, or if this group would just pick it up.’ And a lot of people were looking at the o-line, and I was hurting for the team because I knew we needed to pick our game up, and there was nothing we could do. Everybody kept getting hurt.”
There’s only so much you can do to add personnel during the season, but the Vikings have made improving the line a big priority in the offseason, with two new starting tackles in Mike Remmers and Riley Reiff. They’re hoping that results in a line that looks a lot better in 2017 than it did in 2016.