Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer has been around the NFL game since 1994, when he entered the league as the defensive backs coach following a successful five-year run as the defensive coordinator at Washington State. By 2000 he was coordinating NFL defenses in Dallas, Atlanta, and Cincinnati where he made a name for himself as one of the top defensive minds in the game before being hired to his first head coaching job in Minnesota in 2014.
With a coaching career that began back in 1070 as a defensive assistant at Missouri, Zimmer has been around to see a lot of trends in football, from smashmouth teams of yesteryear, to the introduction of spread offenses, to up tempo approaches becoming more and more popular, and the latest being the RPO craze that has overtaken offenses in high school, college, and the NFL.
So when asked at his presser yesterday whether defensive innovation has "kept pace" with what offenses are doing, and if he's taken a look at what college defenses are doing, Zimmer provided a unique perspective.
"Yeah, but it's different," Zimmer starts off by saying. There is a lot of college [schemes] coming into the NFL, and it has always kind of been like that with rocket sweeps and the zone reads, and the RPOs and all that stuff."
"The difference is most of those quarterbacks, and I'm not trying to discredit anybody, they can't throw it like NFL quarterbacks. The NFL quarterbacks are always the guys that have thrown the best throughout the entire time, so that part has been a little bit different defensively. They can get away with a few more things, but everything is cyclical - the double A's and the Tampa 2, and all that stuff, the RPOs - it all goes around and around, and guys study it, and study it, and study it, and try to figure out ways to stop it, and once they do they've got to go to something else."
See Zimmer's full response in the clip.