Rich on What's at Stake for the Bills and Vikings on Monday Night Football to Wrap Up NFL WK9

Week 9 closes with a 6-1 showdown, and Rich made the case that Bills at Vikings is about a lot more than one game. It could decide a quarterback's future in Minnesota and maybe where Jonathan Taylor ends up.

Start with the headline matchup. Buffalo has the league's number one scoring offense at 33.3 points per game. Minnesota has the number one scoring defense, allowing 13.3. The last time Monday Night Football featured the number one offense against the number one defense, Rich said, was Week 16 of 1997. The 49ers' top defense beat the Broncos' top offense 34-17. Denver went on to win the Super Bowl, and San Francisco lost to Green Bay in the NFC Championship Game. Both teams went deep.

Rich ran through the numbers. The Bills are first in points per game and touchdowns, second in total yards and first downs, and drop off only in red zone touchdown percentage, where they rank sixth. The Vikings defense is first in points allowed, touchdowns allowed, red zone touchdown percentage and first downs allowed per game, and second in total yards allowed. "That's it," Rich said. Josh Allen needs nine rushing yards to become the fifth quarterback in NFL history with 5,000 career rushing yards. And Minnesota's defense is on a path to greatness: the last team to allow fewer than 13.3 points per game over a season was the 2006 Ravens, 20 years ago.

But that's the "bright shiny object," Rich said. Nobody is talking about the Vikings offense against the Bills defense, and that might be where the game is decided, because it's Carson Wentz's gig now.

Rich walked through the history. Wentz started in Week 2 while Kyler Murray was out with a concussion and didn't light it up in a rainy 9-3 game in Chicago. Murray returned at Tampa, where Minnesota was all over the Bucs' offense and knocked Baker out for nearly a month. But Kyler hasn't lit it up since, which led to talk of a soft benching. He did hurt his hamstring late in the loss in Detroit, Rich noted, and that was discussed Sunday before the reports came out Monday. If the narrative is that Minnesota needs to see Wentz, Rich said, "these four quarters are going to go a long way in seeing if that's true or false."

One very interested observer: Justin Jefferson. "So far not many griddies," Rich said. Jefferson is being targeted 6.7 times a game, the lowest of his career. He's averaging 4.7 catches and 55.8 yards a game, both career lows, and 12 yards per catch, also a career low. He has had 1,000 yards in each of his first six seasons and is chasing Mike Evans' record of 11 straight to start a career, but his current pace is 893. Rich suggested that is part of the reason Jefferson might be seen as more vocal on the sideline.

Then Rich connected the dots to the trade market. Could the Colts be holding off on trading Jonathan Taylor because Minnesota wants to see this game first? If Buffalo's 24th-ranked defense keeps Jordan Mason and Aaron Jones down and the offense struggles again, Rich said, maybe the answer isn't who the trigger man is. "It's who's running it. And then Jonathan Taylor winds up in purple based on the results of the Monday nighter. I don't think I'm overstating everything here. This is what's at stake."

The studio leaned Buffalo. One voice said the Bills have advantages everywhere except total defense and wondered whether Wentz can keep up with Allen, James Cook and D.J. Moore, who is back and scored last week. The counterargument: the Vikings defense made Caleb Williams miserable in Week 2 after a near-60-point opener. Weather was a factor in that one, came the reply, and this game is in a dome. "Buffalo should win, right?" someone said. "But this is the NFL and weird stuff happens."

The room kept coming back to Cook, "one of the best players we don't talk about." Rich had the stats. Cook leads the NFL with 462 rushing yards before contact. He is the second player with 700 or more rushing yards through the first seven games of a season multiple times. The other is O.J. Simpson. And he has 75 or more rushing yards in six straight games, the longest active streak in the league.

Then Rich made the studio guess the last Bills player with 75-plus in seven straight. Thurman Thomas? No. Fred Jackson? No. Willis McGahee? Wrong again. The answer was Travis Henry, who had eight straight in 2003.

The kicker: Minnesota's defense allowed a season-high 230 rushing yards in the Week 8 loss to the Lions. Maybe that's the way through for Buffalo. "Just give it to Big Jim Cook," came the suggestion.