The one thing everyone knows about Brian Flores is that the man loves to blitz. He’ll blitz on early downs, he’ll elaborately disguise blitzes, he’ll blitz six defenders; there’s no limit to what he’s capable of. As long as a bunch of dudes are running toward the quarterback, Flores digs it.
In his first season as the Minnesota Vikings’ defensive coordinator, he blitzed a whopping 51.5% of the time. That didn’t just lead the NFL, it was the second-most of any NFL team since they started tracking blitz plays in 2018. The 2019 Baltimore Ravens and the 2023 Vikings aren’t just the only teams that blitzed on more than half their passing plays — they’re the only teams that even have gone over 46%.
But, at least in Flores’ case in 2023, that extreme shift to the blitz was out of necessity, not because of a belief that blitzing so much is an optimal strategy. With Danielle Hunter and no other edges of consequence, the Vikings had to send so many bodies just to get quarterbacks to feel even a candle’s worth of heat. Even with the extreme blitzes, the 2023 Vikings finished 31st in team pass-rush grade, per PFF.
Enter Jonathan Greenard and Andrew Van Ginkel last offseason. Suddenly, the Vikings didn’t need to send the blitz on half their plays to pressure quarterbacks. It turns out that having two high-end edge rushers is better than one.
Still, weaknesses on Minnesota’s interior defensive line meant that Greenard and Van Ginkel weren’t enough to get pressure consistently. So, while Flores dialed up the blitz only 38.9% of the time last season, it was still the highest rate in the NFL by over four percentage points. Furthermore, the high blitzes still produced diminished returns, with Minnesota’s PFF pass-rush grade ranking just 25th in the NFL.
The Vikings were always expected to go after a defensive tackle this offseason to address this weakness. It might be surprising that they went out and got two of the biggest names at the position in free agency. Kwesi Adofo-Mensah landed two multi-time Pro Bowlers in Jonathan Allen and Javon Hargrave, investing $35 million of average annual value into the position. And they still might invest in the position at April’s draft.
These are big names, but they also carry some risk. Allen and Hargrave played a combined 11 games last season, and Allen had just two pressures per game in 2024 after averaging three or more in each of the previous four seasons. Hargrave is 32, and Allen is 30, ages where defensive tackles typically decline rapidly.
However, the upside of the duo is too great to overlook, at least in Minnesota’s calculations. Bringing in these two premier pass-rushing tackles is about more than getting pressure on the quarterback. It’s also about giving Flores the freedom not to blitz.
You couldn’t quite say that teams figured out Flores’ defense in 2024 because, with the exception of Jared Goff and Matthew Stafford, they couldn’t. Not for sustained sessions, anyway. But could teams exploit Flores’ blitzes enough to make games closer than they should have been? Absolutely. The Vikings had to rely on turnovers to cancel out big games from the likes of Jordan Love, Geno Smith, and even Kirk Cousins.
That’s why the pass rush up the gut matters. It’s not just about finding the fastest route to quarterbacks who get rid of the ball quickly — Goff, Stafford, and Love, to name a few — it’s about not exposing yourself in the middle of the field so much. If the Vikings can send four defenders instead of five or six, Blake Cashman is free to defend sideline-to-sideline. It allows Flores to drop Van Ginkel into coverage, where he did great work in ball-hawking in 2024. It lets Josh Metellus help the secondary instead of selling out for the quarterback.
And perhaps most importantly for Flores, it leaves opponents guessing. Even when offenses knew the Vikings would be blitzing more than anyone, Flores created confusion with disguised blitzes, lining players up near the line of scrimmage and rushing and sending people nearly at random. They knew the blitz was coming, but from who?
Allen and Hargrave creating chaos in the middle should make Flores’ smoke-and-mirrors tricks more effective. If all goes well, offenses won’t know whether the blitz is coming and won’t know who is or isn’t coming at the quarterback.
It’s safe to say that Flores will always favor aggression. In addition to his tendencies in Minnesota, Flores’ Miami Dolphins ranked second in the NFL in blitz rate in 2020 (40.8%) and in 2021 (39.6%). To some point, blitzing seems hard-wired into his DNA. But there’s a difference between blitzing 39% of the time and blitzing 30% of the time, which would still have put the Vikings in the league’s top five.
Now, instead of blitzing to patch over the holes in a talented but flawed defense, Flores can simply run the unit as he sees fit without compensating for a mediocre pass rush. Flores already thrived when his options have been limited, and these recent moves mean that we’ll see what he can do with a more versatile, adaptable defense.