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- Mar 19, 2019
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New for 2019 Verizon Vikings Training Camp, Vikings Daily Digest will deliver content directly from Twin Cities Orthopedics Performance Center with news of the day and a few recurring elements.
EAGAN, Minn. — A notable characteristic of the Vikings defenses under Head Coach Mike Zimmer and Defensive Coordinator George Edwards is how fast the group plays together and how well each starter plays off the other.
Those qualities have improved over the past five years, helping Minnesota climb to the tops of the defensive rankings.
Familiarity with the system and each other has especially helped, enabling Zimmer and Edwards to install quickly and players to communicate smoothly and make in-game adjustments on the fly.
“We’ve had a lot of shared experiences, so we can reach back and remember when something happened a while back,” Edwards said Thursday. “We can say, ‘OK, remember when we get in this concept, we need to adjust it. Remember when this kind of helped or hurt us, we need to adjust how we’re doing it and tweak certain things.’
“It’s allowed us to really spend some time looking at different things that hopefully, schematically can help us and [provide] us a better evaluation of the guys that we’ve got in here to be able to implement them as soon as possible,” Edwards said.
The pace of the past three days of practices was slowed down somewhat for a group of 37 rookies and select veterans, somewhat of a walk-before-you-run situation. Things will accelerate beginning Friday when the entire roster is set to practice for the first time.
Before that, however, Edwards was able to assess the play of young defensive backs. He was asked specifically about draft picks Marcus Epps and Kris Boyd. Edwards said, “those guys have really paid attention to the details” and have shown “pretty good recall from what we did in the spring.”