The Vikings got a good one in Dalvin Tomlinson, but he may not be the right one

The first wave of free agency has passed, and it certainly feels like the Vikings — as active as they wanted to be — let most of the market pass them by, signing a projected starter and a key backup. The projected starter, Dalvin Tomlinson, is an interesting and perhaps polarizing addition. Primarily a nose tackle for the New York Giants, he’ll be tasked with a three-technique role in Minnesota.

That’s not completely alien to Tomlinson. He split snaps between the two alignments in 2020 after the Giants added Dexter Lawrence and also spent significant time at the three-technique in 2017 when Damon Harrison took on the nose role in New York.

It’s also somewhat reminiscent of several frustrating additions the Vikings have made over the years, with hybrid nose tackles like Shamar Stephen — recently released — and Jaleel Johnson doing little to help Minnesota’s defensive front in providing pressure or stopping the run.

That’s not necessarily evidence of a strategic error, however. Tomlinson might have the same profile as those former Vikings DTs, but he’s a good deal more talented, both as a run stopper and pass rusher. Tomlinson’s value on the market is fairly commensurate with the $11 million per year the Vikings handed him and might honestly be worth a bit more as a good nose tackle. His contract, worth $21 million over two years, including a $12.5 million signing bonus, is generally smart value for a team looking for a nose. That’s especially true once you account for the three void years added to the contract to smooth out the signing bonus, making for a cap hit of just $6.5 million in 2021.

The Vikings added three void years to lower the cap hits. So there will be a $7.5M dead money charge in 2023 after Tomlinson is off the roster.

He also has $500K available in incentives each year for playing time and sacks.

— Dan Duggan (@DDuggan21) March 17, 2021

But value in a vacuum and value to a specific franchise are different, and the question the Vikings have to ask is how much better a team can get by adding another run plugger next to Michael Pierce, a true nose tackle who is also good against the run. For what it’s worth, Pierce clearly recognizes their overlapping skill sets.

#Vikings Michael Pierce on Dalvin Tomlinson: “He’s another guy like myself who dominates the line of scrimmage and he’s found a way to get to the quarterback for 3 ½ sacks the past two years. It’s going to be fun to play next to him.’’

— Chris Tomasson (@christomasson) March 16, 2021

#Vikings Michael Pierce on Dalvin Tomlinson: “Kind of reminds me of when I had Brandon Willliams next to me in Baltimore. Things should be interesting next season.’’

— Chris Tomasson (@christomasson) March 16, 2021

He also reveals that this isn’t wholly unique in the NFL. The Ravens had the third-best defense in the NFL when Williams and Pierce were on the field together, while the Giants have been finding ways to get extra nose tackles on the field for ages, even before they hired general manager Dave Gettleman. While their defensive performance hasn’t been spectacular during the time Tomlinson has lined up with other noses in New York — ranking 31st, 22nd and 28th in the NFL from 2017 to 2019 — they put three nose tackles on the field in 2020 with impressive results, ranking ninth in points allowed.

So it’s clearly not impossible to put a good — or even great — defense together without a priority on interior pass rushing. And there’s evidence emerging from the analytics community that interior defensive linemen with run-defense capability mean quite a lot in the modern NFL because it allows teams to play with lighter boxes on early downs. Anecdotally, we saw defenses drop off dramatically when they lost premier run-stopping nose tackles, like the 2015 Vikings with Linval Joseph or the Buccaneers this past year with Vita Vea.

But the fact that it’s possible doesn’t mean that it’s ideal. Good defenses tend to get pressure, and the Vikings had the fourth-worst pressure rate in the NFL in 2020. It’s not a one-to-one tradeoff. But that pressure will still come, at the end of the day, from players meant to rush the passer. If they can’t win their matchups, good coverage will get exposed.

This might seem immaterial for a fan base that saw Alvin Kamara match a rushing touchdown record late in the season, but the Vikings have sported effective run defenses without pairing two run pluggers up front, sometimes even featuring three-techniques who have been poor against the run. The Vikings had the fifth-best run defense (by yards per carry) in the NFL in 2017 with Tom Johnson anchoring the three-technique spot. And that team held Kamara to 61 rushing yards over two games.

They were able to accomplish that in part because they had Joseph and two healthy linebackers. Getting Pierce back from opting out and both linebackers back from injury should replicate much of that setup.

It’s also worth noting that if the Saints weren’t running all over the Vikings last year, they probably could have just thrown the ball, as that wasn’t a particularly difficult task for opponents either.

We also know that a great run defense doesn’t, by itself, lead to a good overall defense. One of the best run defenses of all time, anchored by the Williams Wall, allowed only 2.8 yards per carry in 2006. That ranked first in the NFL by a wide margin. That Vikings team, though, ended up allowing the 14th-most points per game, in part because the passing defense was 19th in net yards per attempt.

In some ways, the Vikings’ approach here is overkill. The run defense will undoubtedly get better, but it’s still significantly less important than passing defense. Indeed, one of the reasons run defense is important is because of its contributions to passing defense, so diminishing your pass defense to shore up the run is essentially putting the cart before the horse.

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If the Vikings merely signed a stunning run defender with no pass-rush capability, that would probably be a pretty good argument that they misallocated their resources, even if the player they signed was above average.

But that’s not the full story. Tomlinson wasn’t a bad pressure producer in 2020, ranking 35th among all interior defenders with at least 200 pass-rush snaps, per Pro Football Focus. That’s not great, but it’s not bad. And it’s certainly better than Jaleel Johnson and Shamar Stephen, who ranked 84th and 85th, respectively, of 86 players.

But Tomlinson hasn’t been a great pressure producer throughout his career — 2020 was an outlier for him — and the pressures he has created sometimes come as cleanup rather than quick individual wins. That’s why PFF’s evaluation of him as a free agent knocks him for this element of his game.

Tomlinson has a distinct profile as an above-average run defender and a below-average pass rusher. He ranks in the 82nd percentile in PFF’s run-defense grade since 2017, and he knows how to finish plays, generating one of the best run-stop percentages in the league. As a pass rusher, Tomlinson has graded above 62.3 only once: 74.7 this past season.

One might argue that an increased workload in the B gap as a three-technique tackle might account for this improvement in pressure production, which should translate to his new role in Minnesota, but that turns out not to be the case. His pressure rate was lower when he was farther away from the quarterback, generating pressure on only 7.1 percent of his pass-rushing snaps. That would rank about 50th among interior defenders in 2020.

When he benefits from the double-team on the nose tackle next to him, he doesn’t draw additional double-teams as a defender himself, nor does he pressure the pocket consistently, something we see throughout his career. This is one reason why he doesn’t uniquely enable pass-rush capability for others without being able to rush the passer himself and doesn’t make blitzing any easier or harder for the team. The Giants know this, which is why he rarely took snaps in obvious passing situations, taking only 15 percent of snaps on third-and-6 or more last year and 6.8 percent over the last three years.

And that might be why the person who wrote the article on the importance of interior run defenders didn’t like the Vikings’ move.

I'm very much in on having one (1) run-stuffing DT on a team to allow you to play 2-high all of the time. Three is a bit much idk.

— Eric Eager 📊🏈 (@PFF_Eric) March 16, 2021

The NFL revolution toward light boxes — one Zimmer has taken to heart, fielding light boxes more than almost any other team in the NFL on first-and-10 — might encourage one to give the Vikings some slack on this move. Add in the potential for a “tite” front revolution in the NFL, spearheaded by Vic Fangio and Brandon Staley, and there’s reason to believe that Zimmer could design a defense that improves its pass-game efficiency by moving to even more two-high safety sets and setting up linemen with a head-up nose tackle alongside run defenders on the inside shoulder of opposing offensive tackles.

But while those “tite” fronts require a two-gapping nose tackle, they don’t require two or three. The Rams did deploy a run plugger at one of the flanking interior spots, with Michael Brockers lining up across from a tackle as Sebastian Joseph-Day lined up over the center, but the Fangio version with the Bears lined up pass rushers on the wings on either side of Eddie Goldman, and the same can be said with the Denver Broncos setup.

The Seahawks’ version — which brings the flanking tackles in even closer, over the guards, in a “Bear” front — features a hybrid edge rusher/tackle like L.J. Collier at one spot and a more traditional three-technique like Jarran Reed at the other spot. The post-Pierce Ravens have done the same, lining up Williams at the nose and having pass rushers like Derek Wolfe and Calais Campbell play the roles on either side of the nose.

It might be easy to look at what the Vikings fielded in 2020 and simply be pleased with the clear and obvious upgrade from both a run defense and pass-rush standpoint, and that’s understandable. But the goal isn’t to get better, it’s to be good.

Many times, those two track together. But settling for marginal upgrades that close out opportunities for more effective players at the same position can hold the team back.

Jurrell Casey, Ndamukong Suh and Sheldon Rankins were all available, all of whom had higher pressure rates in their most recent seasons than Tomlinson had from the B gap in 2020 and substantially higher pressure rates over the past three years. Even when looking at total pressure rates instead of those specifically from the B gap, Tomlinson’s pressure rate over the past three years — 6.5 percent — falls behind Rankins at 9.7 percent, Suh at 8.0 percent and Casey at 8.0 percent. The story is the same when looking at their peak years in the past half-decade: Casey hit 10.8 percent, Rankins hit 10.2 percent and Suh hit 8.8 percent — all more than Tomlinson’s 8.3 percent.

While Tomlinson is generally the better run defender, the gap in pass-rush pressure between him and available tackles spotlights what could be a questionable investment at a time when the Vikings don’t have the kind of cap space to make many free-agent mistakes. It won’t doom the defense, and won’t even necessarily prevent it from being a genuinely good unit, but it could stop it from reaching higher heights than it would have with a different approach.

The Vikings signed a genuinely good player. But sometimes that’s not the right move.

(Photo: Patrick McDermott / Getty Images)