EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. -- On one of the toughest days of his 31 months as the Minnesota Vikings' head coach, Mike Zimmer turned to the two men who made him what he is as a coach.
He called Bill Parcells, his former boss in Dallas and the mentor who told him, after he took the Vikings job, that four or five things will happen every day in pro football that he'd wish wouldn't happen, and he'd need to get another job if he couldn't handle those. And then, Zimmer said, "Well, in spirit, I've talked to my dad."
Bill Zimmer was the man who first taught Mike Zimmer about football, who showed him how to innovate as a high school coach who ran everything from the wishbone to the run-and-shoot. He taught his son that his approach to winning games should be dictated, not by his own preferences or habits, but by the players available to him.
On Tuesday, when the Vikings lost Teddy Bridgewater to a torn ACL and dislocated knee, Zimmer leaned on the words of his two mentors to craft a message of resourcefulness and defiance.
"That's our job: Find a way," Zimmer said. "No one is going to feel sorry for us, no one is going to cry. The Tennessee Titans or the Green Bay Packers, we can go down the schedule, no one is going to feel sorry for us if that's the case. So I'm not going to feel sorry for us either. I'm not going to let this team feel sorry for itself. We're going to grieve today and be upset about it. It's more about our feelings for Teddy and him as a person and getting better than it is about anything else. Teddy's a great kid, and he'll be back as soon as he possibly can if it is real bad. But we're going to keep fighting.
"We can talk all we want, but we have guys in that locker room like Everson Griffen, Harrison Smith, Brian Robison, Anthony Barr, Kyle Rudolph, Adrian Peterson, Matt Kalil, Berger, [Brandon] Fusco and Andre Smith. I can go down the line, and I’ll take them with me into an alley anywhere."
Zimmer's comments Tuesday were as much a message to his team as they were to the public, and it's likely he said a version of the same thing to his players when he addressed them Tuesday afternoon, when the Vikings called off practice after 25 minutes as Bridgewater lay on the field. The Vikings will probably start the season with Shaun Hill, who started eight games for the St. Louis Rams in 2014 after Sam Bradford tore his ACL. They're likely going to need another proven quarterback, with undrafted free agent Joel Stave the only other healthy passer on the roster right now. But they've got a talented defense, the league's leading rusher from a year ago and a coach who spent most of his first season leading his team through Peterson's suspension.
It'd be foolish to assume the Vikings' path back to the playoffs didn't get tougher Tuesday. They've lost a quarterback on whom their hopes for a deep playoff run seemed to rest. But it would also be unlike Zimmer to concede anything. That's the last thing the men who taught him the game would have instructed him to do.
"I have confidence in [Hill]. I have confidence in this football team," Zimmer said. "To me, it’s still about the football team. So if Shaun is the guy, we're going to figure out, as coaches, we're going to try figure out the very best way we can beat the team that we're playing that week. However we have to do it, if it's running the ball 65 times or throwing it 65 times, it doesn't really matter. We have a good football team, and that's what we're going to do."