another fragile broken buckeye

The roof is probably open because of both pleasant weather and covid-19 (letting the place air out).

I doubt Covid played a role since there were like 23 people there. The roof should be shut and sealed

Why not, here's another dopey Kravitz imitation

Passing offense: B
No major complaints outside the TY drop (and I mean really, TY?), but it wasn't a dominating passing performance, just good enough. (and that INT where Alie-Cox should have fought a little harder for the ball, but he made it up for it later)

Rushing offense: B+
Did what we should have, but I was surprised to see fewer snaps for Hines after he did a lot last week. I noticed less success running outside than is typical for us, whether that is because it isn't Taylor's strength (in comparison to Mack who could really break those outside runs) or whether Taylor isn't reading those blocks as well, or whether its a strength of the Vikings defense. I'm leaning to the latter, since we could run right up the middle on them pretty well.

Passing defense: A-
Coverage was much improved, I'd still like to see more consistent pressure on the QB. But I'll take that stat line any day: 11/26, 113 yards, 4.3 YPA, 3 sacks, 3 INTs, 0 TDs.

Rushing defense: B
Good but still a lot of inconsistency on this d-line. 4.4 yards per attempt isn't great.

Special teams: A
That's 2 weeks that special teams gets the highest grade, though its not such a big deal this week. But perfect on kicks, good coverage, good enough returns.

Coaching: B-
I'm going to continue to put penalties on the coaches, at least for the most part. It was a better called game compared to the prev week, but still not perfect. Pass/run balance was good but then its easy to do that when you're leading and the run is working well. I'll hold judgment for when its a tougher opponent. I still get the sense that Reich tries to get cute at the complete wrong time.

Overall B
A win's a win, but the Vikings look like shit, so we'll see. Still a lot of projections had us 1-1 at this point, just different in terms of who we beat and who beat us. I'd rather have the edge in the division though.

I'll be curious to see how Tennessee looks vs Vikings next week. We get another bad team next week, do we play down to them or crush them? That will inform my reaction both to this team's potential as well as the coaches.

will Houston start 0-3? They've got an easier schedule down the road but that's tough to overcome, not sure they can handle the "first place schedule".

Hooker I agree with you on, as his performance never lived up to his draft status (the '17 draft overall was pretty bad for Ballard), but don't see how you can pin Campbell's injury proneness on Ballard. Campbell played in 29/31 games for OSU from his Sophomore through Senior season, so it's not like he was unable to stay healthy in college.

All good stuff, thanks. As to points 1-3, I gotta agree with Norm above, that it's tough to place blame on Ballard for Campbell's injury problems as there's no indication these problems were apparent when he was drafted. Now, you can say that doesn't matter, and only the results matter and Campbell has not panned out yet, but I think if we're trying to accurately assess anyone's performance you want to exclude stuff that they have no control over.

Hooker has been a disappointment, no question, but even with that pick there are some additional factors I think need to be considered - most notably, it was Ballard's first draft after being hired a couple month earlier and by necessity he had to use the Grigson scouting staff he inherited - all of whom were replaced shortly after the draft. So Ballard gets the blame certainly, but maybe with an asterisk. And I'll add that he didn't try to justify the pick to protect his reputation this last offseason, and did not pick up the fifth year option.

Lastly, I did not feel like Taylor's performance was all that great yesterday. Nice to get 100 yards and all, but it felt a lot more like quantity over quality to me.

I mostly agree. The most impressive thing I saw from him was the additional 2-3 yards after contact. He almost always drove and fell forward instead of being stood up up knocked back. However, from the TV angle it looked like he definitely left some yards on the field as well. It’s way too early to worry about his vision, but what I saw yesterday wasn’t significantly better than Wilkins.

Ballard gets judged on if a player works out or not. That’s just how it goes. Regardless of if ballard had anything to do about it

I think Taylor will just take a bit of time to adjust. He should be fine

Drafting Metcalf would've been stupid, just ask Omaha.

You can't blame injury luck on a GM. Campbell is talented. Hopefully he avoided the ACL injury and can be back this season.