Jared Allen: Vikings Play Old-School Football, Makes Us Contender

Jared Allen visited the Dave Dameshek Football Program on Tuesday and made his pitch for why the Minnesota Vikings will make it back to the playoffs. Not an easy task for a team in arguably the toughest division, with the Detroit Lions, Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears.

The Vikings defensive end had a very simple answer.

“I think for the simple fact that we have a guy like Adrian Peterson,” Allen said. “You know, in this league, everybody wants to say it’s about the quarterbacks, it’s about the passing, because everybody passes, right? Well, I still believe there’s room for old-school football, where you can run the ball, and you can control the clock, and especially late in the season, where you can wear teams down.”

The theory is right, if you’re eating up the clock on offense, it’s keeping their offense off the field. They can’t score if they’re not on the field, and if they can’t score they can’t beat you.

But the biggest question mark for the Vikings and their offense is at quarterback. The offense needs to be more balanced and you can’t rely on Adrian Peterson running for over 2,000 yards a season.

“Yeah, we need consistent play out of the quarterback position,” Allen said, “we need to be able to throw the ball to open up the passing game … but to have that consistency, to be able to have a guy (Peterson) that you know can put 100 on you, and maybe 200 the way he ran last year … the opposing team’s game plan, they have to prepare (for) both.”

But with the addition of receivers like Greg Jennings, the Vikings are hoping to become less one-dimensional.

“When we play the Packers, we pretty much know that they’re going to be one-dimensional. And, as hard as it is to stop Aaron Rodgers and that receiving corps, at least you can game-plan for it. Now that we have Greg Jennings, and you look at the season Kyle Rudolph had, and if our young guys are anything what they looked like in camp, then we’re going to be duel-threat offensively.”