Jaren Hall was the first Vikings quarterback to succeed Kirk Cousins when the starter tore his right Achilles tendon on Oct. 29 at Lambeau Field. With the Vikings’ playoff chances riding on Sunday’s game against the Packers, they will turn again to the rookie quarterback.
Coach Kevin O’Connell announced Thursday the Vikings will start Hall on Sunday night against Green Bay, giving him back the starting job nearly two months after a concussion ended his brief stint as the team’s No. 1 quarterback. Hall played the final 11 snaps of the Vikings’ win over the Packers after Cousins was injured, and started the following week against the Falcons, but left that game after just 11 snaps when he sustained a concussion while trying to reach the end zone on a third-down scramble.
His injury opened the door for Joshua Dobbs, who’d been acquired in a trade-deadline deal with the Cardinals five days earlier. Dobbs led the Vikings to a comeback victory in Atlanta and a win at home against the Saints the following Sunday, extending the team’s win streak to five games and keeping the job through the team’s bye week despite six turnovers in two losses before it. But after Dobbs was benched for Nick Mullens following three scoreless quarters against the Raiders, and after Mullens threw six interceptions in a pair of losses that knocked the Vikings out of the lead for a wild-card spot, the Vikings came back to Hall this week.
Against the Falcons, Hall, a fifth-round pick out of BYU, completed five of his six passes for 78 yards, running twice for 11 yards before he was injured.
O’Connell has said on several occasions this season how important Hall’s development is to him, and the Vikings seemed reluctant at times to put the rookie back in the mix to start while he was still learning the offense. They moved Hall ahead of Dobbs on the depth chart the past two weeks, though, to give him more practice work as the No. 2 quarterback rather than running the scout team as the No. 3 QB.
During that time, offensive coordinator Wes Phillips said, Hall has been able to work on details like syncing his footwork with his reads, so he’s arriving at the top of his dropback while receivers are breaking open on their routes.
“It takes time for that,” Phillips said. “He’s worked really hard. All he’s done is improved. The thing with Jaren I think everyone would agree with, that fans look at the positive side most of the time, like, ‘Put the backup in there,’ right? But there is an unknown factor for a guy who just hasn’t played a lot of NFL football. We liked a lot of the things we saw in a very small sample size against Atlanta before he got hurt. There certainly are some things that we just don’t know, in those situations, how he’ll respond. But you feel like you know the person. You know his day-to-day work ethic, you know his preparation. And so you feel like you’re betting on traits when you’re putting him in the game.”
A four-interception game from Dobbs against the Bears sent the Vikings into the bye week evaluating their QB options, and Mullens’ four-interception game against the Lions triggered the shift to Hall. The Vikings have one chance left to beat a division opponent at U.S. Bank Stadium, where they’ve lost more games (five) than any season of the eight-year-old building’s history.
They will bet on the rookie to provide some of the explosiveness they had with Mullens while avoiding the turnovers that opened up the QB job yet again.
“I feel like he has been doing a great job just learning the process of being a rookie,” wide receiver Justin Jefferson said. “It’s definitely been a tough year, just battling with the injuries and for his first game to start having an injury. So it’s definitely been a struggling season with injuries but I mean, just like I’ve been saying, it doesn’t matter who’s out there at quarterback, we always have that confidence in them. We feel like our preparation that we have throughout the week gets them right for the game. And I feel like Jaren is definitely a great quarterback. He has definitely some potential to spark this offense up if we put him out there to play.”