One of these days, someone is going to write a book about what really went on behind closed doors between former Minnesota Vikings general manager Rick Spielman and head coach Mike Zimmer. But until that day comes, we’ll just have to hold on to the tidbits we get from random interviews.
Speaking of such, Spielman had some interesting things to say about his time working with Zimmer in Minnesota. During an appearance on NFL.com’s Move the Sticks Podcast, he talked about the difficulties of doing his job effectively with there being so much turnover within the assistant coaching staff.
“That’s a tough part of the job,” said Spielman. “I think we went through maybe six different [offensive coordinators] during coach Zimmer’s era. …It was constantly like a moving target all the time.”
There was definitely an ongoing coaching carousel at offensive coordinator when Zimmer was overseeing things.
Norv Turner actually walked out on the team after butting heads with the former Vikings coach back in 2016, while John DeFilippo was hired and fired in the same year in 2018. Kevin Stefanski and Pat Shurmur were both one-and-done before moving on to head coaching jobs, although Stefanski did serve a bit as the interim offensive coordinator the previous year before being promoted.
And Gary Kubiak retired from coaching and watched the reins get handed over to his son, Klint Kubiak.
With changes basically happening every year, Spielman admitted it was hard to keep adapting on the fly with no stability.
“You try to do your best to adapt and the guys that we do have, can you do some things from your scheme to maybe adjust a little bit to their skill set? But when you have the coaching turnover that it is and you’re always trying to marry up the personnel to the scheme, are there ways that some of these coaches and you see some of them doing some things that say, ‘Hey, I have to adjust my scheme to what the players can do as well,’” said Spielman.
“Some coaches are just, ‘This is what we run, and this is what we have to have, and if they don’t fit this, then I don’t want them.’
“Some coaches are just, ‘This is what we run, and this is what we have to have, and if they don’t fit this, then I don’t want them.’ Some coaches—and just listening to a lot of coaching interviews and stuff like that—[say], ‘I can do this with this player, and I know we can potentially adjust our scheme to fit what he does best.’”
We could spend a lifetime speculating about where it all went wrong for Spielman and Zimmer. NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders recently came out and said the two weren’t on speaking terms in the months leading up to both men being fired.
After nearly a decade of working together, it’s becoming quite clear it was time for this working relationship to end.
