(Photo: Joe Bielawa)

The Wife and I attended a friend’s birthday party last night.

It was good to catch up with old friends. Free beer is also a great thing. And as most conversation topics with groups men sitting around for more than 30 seconds tend to do (especially with beer), we talked football. Specifically what the Vikings need to do to make 2014 suck less than 2013’s 5-10-1.

It may have been the Mich Golden talking, but most of the group seemed adamant that the Vikings HAD TO (HAD TO) draft a QB at #8 overall no matter what.  Even if Teddy, Bortles, and JFF are off the board the Vikings HAVE TO go QB.

I brought up that it would be a reach to grab one of the next wave of QBs at #8 (Garoppolo, Carr, McCarron) and it’d be Ponder 2.0. But my argument fell on deaf ears.

QUARTERBACK QUARTERBACK QUARTERBACK!

—

Now I consider most of my friends to be average Vikings fans, and that’s by no means meant to be disparaging. 95% of the fanbase would fall into that category: Cheer/boo on gamedays, get excited for the draft, but not obsessively combing through every offseason transaction or movement by the team.

For example, they wouldn’t have gotten an email alert saying former Viking Jasper Brinkley had been released by the Cardinals on Friday Afternoon. Or spent half an hour on Twitter reading & debating the merits of bringing Jasper home to compete with Audie at MLB. The average fan focuses on the highlights and there’s NOTHING wrong with that.

Not everyone can be as interested obsessed deranged as myself.

So I wonder if most average Vikings fans feel that way about the draft. That the QB is Priority #1 no matter what.

I get the logic. It’s a QB league. All of the winning teams have an Elite QB or at least serviceable production at the position. The 2009 Bert Favor Ride aside, the Vikings have had subpar QB production for the better part of a decade. Daunte is still head and shoulders above Jackson, Bollinger, Frerotte, Rosenfels, 2010 Favre, Ponder, Webb, Cassel, & Freeman and he hasn’t played for the Vikings since 2005. So we are QB starved here in the Land of 10,000 Frozen Lakes.

But I feel this is a ‘Can’t see the forest through the Trees’ situation.

We need a QB, yes, but we need help everywhere else too, especially on that 32nd ranked defense. Depending on what happens in Free Agency, you could argue that the Vikings should look to upgrade EVERY SINGLE defensive position in the draft — outside of Harrison, B-Rob, Xavier, & Sharrif.

If one of the Top-3 QBs (Especially TB or JFF) fall to #8 we SHOULD be all over them, it’d be great value. But in the earlier scenario where all three of them are off the board, it means there will an abundance of elite defensive talent there to scoop up. Our guys Khalil Mack & Justin Gilbert, CJ Mosley, hell maybe even Clowney falls to 8.

—

A future Franchise QB is key, we agree. After all it’s not like we do a segment called “Andy Talks Potential Future Franchise Vikings Nickel Corners & Compares Them to Restaurants”. But we have a bounty of solid picks (four in the Top 100) of a historically deep draft with a lot of holes to fill on defense.

Reaching for a QB wouldn’t help either party involved: the team uses a high pick on a guy who may not be ready, but the player gets a heap of pressure put on him because the team used a high pick.

It’s a catch-22 and one of the main reasons Christian Ponder has failed as a Viking so far. He was a 2nd-3rd round talent, but he went #12, and the pressure to live up to those expectations crushed him. He wasn’t ready. He has had his moments. But his lows are too low and frequent to cover up for his highs.

If we can get serviceable, consistent, Game Manager (dun dun dun) type production at the QB position while Zimmer & Edwards fix the defense, would be a HUGE win for the team. I contend that if we had “Alex Smith Level” of play at QB last year we win the North and that’s WITH the defense giving up 480 points.

Plus average QB play doesn’t mean we can’t draft one to develop. Look at Russell Wilson and the Seahawks. 3rd round pick and all indications point to him developing into a top tier QB, but was an average-above average starter in his 2nd season. Still took home a Lombardi because of a solid run game and elite defense.

That’s why I’m an advocate of waiting on a QB if we can get our mitts on one of the Top-3 at #8. Take one of the elite defensive prospects in the 1st round and draft a QB in the 2nd or 3rd round to develop.

Bring that QB along with training wheels (ala Russell Wilson). Don’t ask him to win you games and don’t put him in a position to make crippling mistakes. As a non-1st round pick there will less pressure on him to perform, use that. Let him feed Adrian the Rock and get Cordarrelle the ball by any means necessary. Let him develop at his own pace while our #8 pick is tearing it up on defense.

Rome wasn’t built in a day.

The Vikings won’t be rebuilt in one either and going “Ponder 2.0” in the draft definitely wouldn’t expedite the process.