How much did the Vikings offense really change?

Kevin Stefanski didn’t exactly re-write the playbook to smash Miami into pieces.

In Week 14, the Vikings scored just seven points against the Seahawks’ rebuilding defense, pushing Minnesota to its third loss in four games and necessitating the dismissal of rising star offensive coordinator John DeFilippo. In Week 15, quarterbacks-coach-turned-OC Kevin Stefanski helped propel Minnesota to its biggest offensive performance of the season in a 41-17 win over the Miami Dolphins.

So was DeFilippo really that big of a problem? Or is the Miami defense just really that bad?

It’s tough to tell after just one game against a mercurial opponent, but the answer looks like a little of column A and a little of column B. Stefanski utilized a roster filled with weapons to its fullest to rout the Dolphins in Week 15, but he didn’t exactly overhaul the team’s playbook to get there.

What does that mean for the Vikings? And, more importantly, what does that mean for their playoff hopes? Here’s what we learned in the new OC’s debut.

Stefanski exploited a bad rushing defense while exposing a new facet of the Vikings offense

Dalvin Cook had a couple of solid performances under DeFilippo, but the former coordinator kept his top tailback on a tight schedule in his first season after a torn ACL ended an electric rookie campaign. In 3.5 games in 2017, Cook averaged 18.5 carries, but that number fell to 10.9 in his former OC’s 13 games with the franchise.

Stefanski did not have similar doubts about his young running back. On Sunday, Cook earned 19 carries — three more than he’d ever had with DeFilippo — and took them 136 yards, scoring his first two touchdowns of the season in the process.

There are several extenuating circumstances about Cook’s explosion. The first is that it came against the Dolphins, who have allowed more rushing yards per game than anyone but the Cardinals and Raiders, and rank 26th in the league in opponent yards per carry. You’d have to go nine men deep on the Miami stat sheet to find a defensive lineman on the “total tackles” chart.

The second is that it came in a blowout that meant a steady diet of clock-churning runs. The Vikings had little incentive to throw the ball in a game where they led by double digits for the majority of the afternoon. But Cook also gave them a reason to be confident in their ground game after an impressive first half.

He had five carries for 61 yards and a touchdown in the first quarter alone, easily his most productive opening frame of 2018. But the way Stefanski used him while this game was still competitive — in the first quarter and after the Dolphins cut the Minnesota lead to 21-17 in the third quarter — suggests the budding OC knew what Miami was going to expect, then did the opposite.

Cook’s blazing speed makes him a dangerous runner near the sideline, leaving the Dolphins forced to fortify the edges in response to the young back. Instead of playing into Miami’s preparation, Stefanski softened the ‘Phins up with a series of inside runs — four of Cook’s six carries came between his guards. It worked; he gained 25 yards on those carries.

More importantly, those successful runs on the inside consolidated the Miami defense, giving Cook and teammate Latavius Murray the extra room they needed to bounce big runs to the outside for major gains. Cook’s 13-yard touchdown in the first quarter is probably only a three- to four-yard gain if he doesn’t spring for 11 yards up the middle three plays earlier. It also helped set the stage for an 18-yard Murray touchdown off the left tackle one drive later.

In short, Stefanski took his star running back’s biggest strength and played to it, but not before making the Dolphins rethink their defensive strategy. DeFilippo struggled to recreate Cook’s 2017 magic outside the tackles; Stefanski rebuilt it by forcing Cook inside against a deficient defense and then turning on the burners once Miami thought it knew what to expect.

The Vikings didn’t need Kirk Cousins to do much, and he thrived while picking his spots

The biggest issue with the Minnesota offense under DeFilippo is that he was unable to unlock Cousins’ potential behind center. The Vikings got more conservative as the season wore on, limiting the quarterback to a series of short routes that reduced his back-breaking turnovers but also effectively took away the big plays that defined his highest highs in Washington.

The gunslinger hasn’t exactly turned to his deep-ball slinging ways, but he didn’t have to Sunday. Under DeFilippo, he threw 73 deep passes in 13 games, completing 42.5 percent of his throws. That made up 13.9 percent of his total passing output in Weeks 1-14.

With Stefanski calling the plays, Cousins threw three deep balls, completing all three. That made up 14.3 percent of his passes against the Dolphins, but they were set up by a steady diet of short plays. After averaging 7.2 air yards per pass in Weeks 1-14, Cousins’ passes traveled an average of 6.9 yards in the air against the Dolphins.

That doesn’t seem like an improvement, but considering the Vikings had this game well in hand for more than half its 60 minute running time, it suggests Stefanski may be more willing to allow his quarterback to launch the ball. And Minnesota’s track record in game one of its interim OC’s tenure suggests those deep passes will come after drawing defenses closer to the line of scrimmage with a combination of designed short-yardage plays like Cook runs and screens to players like Stefon Diggs and Aldrick Robinson.

That’s a sensible, if obvious, strategy that could work in the future, though the Dolphins’ deficient defense didn’t give Stefanski much of a challenge. His early success with the run set up a wide-open Diggs for the game’s first touchdown after seemingly every Miami defender on the field got fooled by a play-action fake to Murray:

Even when the Dolphins knew the pass was coming, like on this third-and-9 fourth quarter touchdown, the visitors were powerless to stop it.

That’s what Stefanski will be tasked with harnessing over the final two weeks of the regular season and into the playoffs. Cousins is a boom-or-bust quarterback with the capability to drop 50-yard throws into a basket downfield. Minnesota’s new offensive coordinator’s job is to develop the kind of offense that gets opposing safeties taking an extra step in the wrong direction to free up those big gains.

The Vikings skill players are on board with his new play caller

To the surprise of no one, Stefanski earned rave reviews from his players after engineering a 41-point explosion against the league’s 27th-ranked scoring defense. Even if, as players acknowledged, he didn’t have to change all that much about the team’s approach.

“He knows me well,” Cousins told the press after Stefanski’s promotion. “But at the same time, you don’t reinvent much this late in the year.”

“There were things we did a little bit differently this week that you could tell Kevin was waiting for his opportunity to do this,” tight end Kyle Rudolphsaid after the game. “I think he learned a lot of things last year from our offense and what Pat [Shurmur] did with this offense that we got back today.”

It makes sense the Vikings would want to take a step back in order to take a step forward. DeFilippo’s path from Browns’ failed offensive coordinator to a hot head-coaching prospect was predicated on his ability to get creative and glean the most from a young North Dakota State quarterback and Nick Foles as Philadelphia’s quarterbacks coach. When he was handed a ready-made offense in Minnesota, his affinity for out-of-the-box playcalling turned out to be a bug rather than a feature.

By simplifying things Sunday, Stefanski sent the message he believes in his loaded depth chart of skill position players.

Stefanski’s goal in Minnesota will be to replicate Shurmur’s top 10 offense, but with upgrades at tailback and quarterback. On Sunday, he looked at a big-armed quarterback, a running back who lit the league on fire in four pre-injury games as a 2017 rookie, and one of the league’s top receiving corps and decided he wouldn’t have to get too fancy to carve up a Dolphins defense that’s giving up 402 yards per game this fall.

It worked like a charm ... against Miami. Stefanski’s real test will be when he has to adjust his “so simple it’s genius” approach against a better Lions defense and then the Bears’ smothering top-three unit. If the former quarterbacks coach can find a way to hang 40 points on Khalil Mack and his crew, then it’ll be safe to say he’s an upgrade over the since-fired DeFilippo. The Vikings made a drastic move in order to save their season; so far it’s worked, but with the Dolphins in town, it’s tough to give Stefanski a passing grade just yet.