The red-hot Minnesota Vikings return to action Monday night against Caleb Williams and the Chicago Bears. While the Vikings, are surging, the Bears are slumping.
In their first meeting in the windy city, a 30-27 Vikings win in overtime, Williams threw for 340 yards and two scores, while also rushing for 33 yards despite the Vikings win. Since that time, the Bears fired their offensive coordinator.
With now-interim coach Thomas Brown calling plays, the Bears had one of the worst offensive performances of the entire season in San Francisco last Sunday.
Despite that, Viking defensive coordinator Brian Flores knows the rookie QB is a special player and his unit better be ready to play as they found out in Chicago in November.
"Tough guy to tackle, tough guy to get down," explains Flores. "He's got kind of an innate feel for pressure in the pocket and how to avoid or evade it. And he's fast. Again, it's a major, major challenge for us. We gotta do a good job of trying to keep him in the pocket. It's gonna be a total team defensive effort."
A win Monday night will improve Minnesota to 12-2. The Vikings are asking fans to show up to the stadium shunning their usual purple in favor of a "whiteout".
On the offensive side of the ball, the Vikings and quarterback Sam Darnold had their most explosive performance of the season in beating Atlanta 42-21. Darnold threw for over 300 yards and five touchdowns with no turnovers. Darnold was named the NFC Offensive Player of the Week and it goes down as the best performance of his career in what's already a career season.
To put his game in perspective:
Darnold is just the ninth quarterback in NFL history and first since Aaron Rodgers in 2019 with at least 325 passing yards, five TD passes, a completion rate of 75-plus percent and a passer rating of 155-plus with no interceptions.
He became the first Vikings player with five passing TDs in a game since Daunte Culpepper in 2004 and had his 11th game this season with a 100-plus passer rating to set the franchise record.
"So, I think the biggest thing for me is just continuing to make good decisions," Darnold told reporters this week. "You know, being able to, when I do let the ball rip, let it rip with confidence. I think that's been the biggest thing for me these past few weeks and I'm just going to continue to do that."
The success, both personal and with a team that's 11-2, is a new experience for the former first round pick who struggled in New York and Carolina, and came to the Vikings after a backup season in San Francisco on a one-year contract.
"Just being able to just stay present, I think that's the biggest thing is understanding kind of what we got to do this week," he says. "We're playing a really good Chicago team, a really good defense that like I said in the beginning, they bring some different stuff, whether it's coverages, pressures, all those things. So, we got our hands full this week and I'm looking forward to the challenge."
This is Minnesota's only Monday Night Football appearance this year, and it's a rare one for Darnold who played his first NFL game with the Jets on Monday Night Football in 2018.
"Anytime we get a chance to play in front of our fans, man it's an unbelievable opportunity," Darnold says. "Especially this upcoming game, Monday night, looking forward to the whiteout and I know it's gonna be an electric atmosphere."
Despite Chicago's recent struggles, head coach Kevin O'Connell says they expect a big challenge Monday from a team he says is definitely loaded with talent. He said the fans this past Sunday made a difference and he expects nothing different against the Bears.
"Just wanna take another opportunity just to highlight what it was like on Sunday to have that kind of environment and atmosphere, it was next level fantastic by our fans and we're gonna need it," says O'Connell. "60-minute battle with an NFC North team, that we've got to play well. They're very talented and you can already see, Thomas' impact on their team. So we're gonna need to put together a really good week of preparation, got an extra day, gotta use it, putting the pads on today and we'll get ready to go."