Keenum helps Vikings trample Rams
MINNEAPOLIS — Case Keenum sure took it to his old team.
He gave the Minnesota Vikings another reminder of his ability for good measure, with his status as the starting quarterback still not secure.
Latavius Murray rushed for 95 yards and two touchdowns, Adam Thielen turned a short catch into a 65-yard score and the Vikings smothered the National Football League’s highest-scoring offence in a 24-7 win over the Los Angeles Rams on Sunday.
Keenum completed 27 of 38 passes for 280 yards and no turnovers against the team that benched him last season for No. 1 overall draft pick Jared Goff. He guided the Vikings (8-2) to their sixth straight victory in a matchup of division leaders.
“I’m not at my best if I’m using a percentage of my mind in worry about other things,” he said, “so I shut that out and I come out to play.”
For another week, Keenum kept the Teddy Bridgewater talk on the back burner.
“It’s going to be hard to yank him out of there right now,” coach Mike Zimmer said. “I still have really high hopes for Teddy, and a lot of things happen throughout the course of the season, so we’ll just see how it goes.”
Minnesota’s defence started the second half by forcing four punts in a row by the Rams (7-3), whose four-game winning streak in which they scored 144 points was finished in lopsided fashion. The Rams entered the week with a league-best thirddown conversion rate of 46.7 per cent. They were just three-for-11 against the Vikings.
“Football is really simple: You line up the man in front of you. You beat him,” said Vikings defensive end Everson Griffen, who returned from a foot injury, but had his eightgame sack streak stopped.
The Los Angeles defence was trampled in the second half for 288 yards, and Keenum went without a sack for the sixth game this season. Thielen handed him the longest touchdown pass of his career, by turning a simple curl route early in the fourth quarter into a game-breaking score after spinning past Rams cornerback Dominique Hatfield. Injuries took two of their top three cornerbacks out of the game for the second half.
“We talk about it every single week that you’ve got to be ready to go, because it is a very humbling league,” Rams coach Sean McVay said, “and I felt we got humbled today by a very good team.” Goff grounded Goff and the Rams stretched their streak of scoring on their first drive to five straight games, with a nine-play, 75-yard march that Todd Gurley capped with a short up-the-gut touchdown run.
With the crowd noise reverberating off U.S. Bank Stadium’s translucent roof, Goff had to walk back and forth to the wide receivers to call the plays amid the din to keep McVay’s fast-paced, no-huddle scheme going. It was stuck in neutral after that opening possession.