Vikings Are Dead with No Teddy Bridgewater Despite Greatness of Adrian Peterson

The year was 2008, and Adrian Peterson was obliterating the NFL.

Defenders were afraid to tackle him. That is not an exaggeration. They were fearful. You would see Peterson lower his shoulder pads and 250-plus-pound, strong-ass men would just go along for the ride.

Seven-man fronts, eight-man fronts...none of it mattered. Teams knew he was getting the ball, waited in the gaps for him and he'd still break one for 15 yards. Or 25. Or 40.

Peterson had an astounding 363 carries for a league-leading 1,760 yards. That season was remarkable, even for him. He repeated the feat in 2012, when he rushed for 2,097 yards on 348 attempts and the Vikings went 10-6 and lost in the Wild Card Round. It wasn't solely the sheer wattage that impressed, but the way in which Peterson emulated the likes of Jim Brown, Eric Dickerson and O.J. Simpson—players who took entire teams on their backs and carried them, and carried them and carried them some more.

In 2008, Peterson was 23 years old. This season, he is 31. As he did then, he again will be playing with stiffs and jetsam at quarterback. It will be like going back in time when the offense relied almost solely on him.

The difference this time is that Peterson, by NFL standards, isn't the sprightly dude he once was. Oh, he's still partially superhuman, an X-Man, but even superheroes age. In the NFL, they age in dog years. Chris Burke of SI.com wrote last season that in the Super Bowl era, running backs 30 or older rushed for 1,000 yards only 43 times prior to last season. Peterson bumped that statistic to 44 in 2015, but that was with a healthy starting-caliber quarterback.

If you think Peterson can duplicate what he did then, or even just a few years ago, you're delusional. Without Teddy Bridgewater, who tore his ACL and dislocated his knee Tuesday, the Vikings are doomed.

I don't care how much their defense has improved or how deep that roster might be. In a quarterback league, Shaun Hill barely qualifies, and Peterson can no longer carry the Vikings. If the Vikings bring in Mark Sanchez, what does it matter? He's even worse than Hill. Sanchez couldn't even beat out seventh-round pick Trevor Siemian in Denver.

What's often lost with Bridgewater is how he affected the rest of the team. There was a Ken Stabler quality to Bridgewater (yeah, I said Stabler). To say that Stabler was liked by Raiders teammates is a dramatic understatement. He was cherished.

Bridgewater is the same way. His presence alone had an impact on morale.

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And like Stabler, Bridgewater often didn't put up the prettiest of numbers. But he forced defenses to respect him, which loosened things up for Peterson. It created a ripple effect throughout the entirety of the team.

Now that's gone and defenses will collapse on Peterson once again. But this time he's not that young dude who took on NFL defenses by himself.

I know what Vikings fans are going to say. The defense is talented; it can carry the team. All Hill has to do is make a few good throws a game, the way Bridgewater did, and they can maneuver themselves within a boinked field goal from winning in the playoffs, as they were last season against the Seahawks.

Some of that is true, but the key is Bridgewater, and I've always believed Bridgewater was better than his numbers. Again, the threat of Bridgewater, especially on the edges, makes the Minnesota offense work, the way it did in Oakland with Stabler, despite his shaky knees. The threat of a quarterback who can make plays while scrambling is a big deal.

We have seen teams led by great defenses before, teams that had mediocre passers, but those defenses were historic: the Ravens; the Seahawks before Russell Wilson evolved into a great quarterback; last year's Super Bowl-winning Broncos.

A measure of hope might exist, though. The NFC North, outside of Green Bay, is still a dumpster fire. The Packers will run away with things, but the rest of the division is awful. Blink and you'll miss another pick-six from Jay Cutler. The Lions...well, it's hard to see how losing Calvin Johnson improves a team that went 7-9 last season.

That leaves the Vikings, who merely by being competent could give themselves a chance to remain respectable in the division.

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But respectability appears to be the ceiling for this Minnesota team. Yes, Peterson rushed a league-leading 327 times for another league-leading 1,485 yards in 2015. But how many more high-leverage carries do you think he has in a body that already has more career rushing attempts than Jim Brown, Earl Campbell, Marshawn Lynch and all but 26 other running backs in NFL history?

Yet here he is again, being asked once more to do it all. There's certainly some he can do, maybe even a lot of it. But without Bridgewater, the Vikings' ship is sunk.

Mike Freeman covers the NFL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter @mikefreemanNFL.