MINNEAPOLIS -- The Minnesota Vikings’ offensive line meeting room is presently packed with 16 players, collectively weighing in at 2.042 tons and occupying 17.8 percent of the team's current 90-man roster. It is the most expensive group in the league, with its $42.37 million cap charge more than 74 percent above the league average at the position. And while it will not remain this size in September, the group's current constitution shows just how serious the Vikings are about fixing their biggest problem from the 2015 season.
Mike Zimmer let offensive line coach Jeff Davidson go the day after a 2015 season that saw Teddy Bridgewater pressured more than any quarterback in the league, according to ESPN Stats & Information. He hired Tony Sparano -- his former coaching colleague in Dallas -- to oversee a group that Zimmer said needed to get tougher in 2016. The Vikings gave fiery San Francisco 49ers guard Alex Boone a four-year, $26.8 million deal on the first day of free agency, and signed former Cincinnati Bengals tackle Andre Smith to a one-year, $3.5 million deal a week later.
The group will spend this week together at the Vikings' mandatory minicamp, before the pads go on and the intensity is ratcheted up at training camp six weeks from now. But the tone for what players should expect was set months ago.
"It's just a lot of competition," left tackle Matt Kalil said. "We have three full groups going, and that's pretty rare. It just brings along competition. You see someone do well, and you're like, 'Well, I've got to match that and show what I can do.' It just makes us better."
Kalil might be the player on whom the most responsibility rests in 2016; he is playing on a fifth-year option that will pay him $11.1 million, and says he went through an offseason without surgery for the first time since 2013. The Vikings will put Boone next to Kalil in hopes he can help stabilize the left side of the line, where too many blitzers passed between Kalil and Charlie Johnson in 2014, as well as Kalil and Brandon Fusco last year.
In charge of it all will be Sparano, who spent the 2015 season with Boone in San Francisco and will put his imprimatur on a group that figures to be nastier than it was in 2015.
"I like him a lot," Kalil said. "He's definitely going to push me this year and give me that extra edge I need to take that next step again and be where I want to be. I kind of set the bar high my first couple years, so I've got to get back to that."
The atmosphere around the group, for now, is as much collaborative as it is competitive. The Vikings have eight linemen entering at least their fifth season in the league, but they also have six who have been in the league for two years or less, and Boone says there's plenty for the members of the group to glean from one another.
"When you have a great room, everybody gets a voice, and you listen to what works well for others," Boone said. "So many people say, 'An old guy can never learn anything from a younger guy.' They're so outside the box sometimes, that when you listen to them talk about something, or explain something, it's so interesting to be like, 'Why would you think that?' They're like, 'Because I don't know any other way.' You start learning things from everybody."
The tenor will eventually change, though, as John Sullivan tries to reclaim his starting center spot after two back surgeries and Phil Loadholt tries to win back the right tackle job after two years of season-ending injuries. The fights for those jobs, the Vikings hope, will eventually produce a line that's more effective than last year's unit. The lengths the team traveled to set up those fights shows how urgent a problem it believed it had.
