The Vikings finalized their 2020 coaching staff on Monday, splitting defensive coordinator duties between Mike Zimmer's son and one of his closest colleagues.
The team announced defensive line coach Andre Patterson and linebackers coach Adam Zimmer will be co-defensive coordinators in 2020, replacing George Edwards after the former defensive coordinator left to join the Cowboys' coaching staff.
Both Patterson, 59, and Adam Zimmer, 36, will continue to work with their position groups, while taking on additional responsibilities in planning the team's defense as a whole.
It remains to be seen how the arrangement will work, and how much significance the promotions for Patterson and Adam Zimmer actually carry, given Mike Zimmer's hands-on role as defensive architect and play-caller. But sources inside and outside the team expected the Vikings would either give the younger Zimmer the job or split it between him and Patterson, rewarding the only defensive coaches who remain from Zimmer's original staff in Minnesota.
In the end, the Vikings chose an arrangement that kept them from shuffling more position coach responsibilities on a defensive staff that will see substantive changes for the first time since Mike Zimmer replaced Leslie Frazier as head coach six years ago.
Adam Zimmer has coached the Vikings' linebackers since 2014, and had his first player receive All-Pro honors after the 2019 season when sportswriters picked Eric Kendricks to the first team. Patterson, whose relationship with Zimmer dates to their time together at Weber State in the late 1980s, has coached a pair of second-team All-Pro players in defensive ends Danielle Hunter and Everson Griffen.
The team officially confirmed Gary Kubiak as its new offensive coordinator, and moved assistant offensive line coach Andrew Janocko to wide receivers coach after Drew Petzing left to join Kevin Stefanski in Cleveland.
The Vikings also hired former Broncos and Redskins coach Phil Rauscher _ who had worked with Kubiak in Denver _ to be assistant offensive line coach, and made former Dolphins and Bengals coach Daronte Jones their new defensive backs coach.
Assistant defensive backs coach Jeff Howard, who had been with the team since 2013, is no longer listed as one of the Vikings' coaches _ meaning the team's secondary will be under completely different leadership after an uneven 2019 season. Jones, who'd spent two seasons apiece with the Dolphins and Bengals, will inherit a position group that could be in for big changes with Trae Waynes and Mackensie Alexander headed for free agency, Mike Hughes recovering from a broken neck vertebrae and Xavier Rhodes facing an uncertain future.
The Vikings' defensive staff had remained largely untouched through Zimmer's six seasons, as it led the league in scoring in 2017 and finished in the top 10 five times. But expiring contracts for several coaches, after a season where the team's passing defense slipped to 15th in the league, meant changes could be in store for a group that had embodied consistency to this point.
While Kubiak will assume play-calling duties on offense for the first time since he was the Broncos' head coach in 2015-16, the changes on the team's offensive staff largely amounted to putting familiar faces in new positions. Janocko will work with wide receivers for the first time since the 2013 season, when he was an offensive assistant under coach Greg Schiano in Tampa Bay. Rauscher worked on Kubiak's staffs in Denver in 2015 and 2016, staying on in 2017 after Kubiak stepped down and spending the 2018 and 2019 seasons in Washington.
