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Since replacing Gus Frerotte late in the first half on Dec. 7 at Detroit, Jackson has completed 19 of 27 passes, thrown five touchdowns with no interceptions and posted an impressive 141.7 passer rating. He helped the Vikings rally to beat the Lions and then threw a career-high four touchdown passes en route to earning NFC offensive player of the week honors in a 35-14 victory Sunday at Arizona.
But despite Jackson’s success, coach Brad Childress declined to named him the starter Wednesday for this weekend’s game against Atlanta.
In fact, Childress said Jackson and Frerotte split reps in practice, although Frerotte was listed as having been limited as he continues to recover from a lower-back injury.
What isn’t clear is if Childress is really considering going back to Frerotte or if he’s simply trying to keep the Falcons guessing for as long as possible. The Vikings can clinch the NFC North with a victory Sunday or a Bears loss to the Packers on Monday night.
Childress has gone down this road before. Eight times since taking over as the Vikings coach in 2006, he has refused to reveal his starter in the week leading up to the game. On six of these occasions, including last Sunday, an injury has factored into the equation.
“You’d like to do it sooner rather than later,” Childress said of deciding on a starter. “But I think the point is you’ve got a guy coming off of an injury. It just makes sense to give both of them a piece of the action. When you’re starting a guy, he’s getting all the reps. So if you’re not quite sure how it’s going to go, you might as well give them both a piece of the pie so they’re not only learning (the game plan) visually, but they’re getting a little muscle memory with it, too.”
Frerotte, 37, broke a bone in his back against the Lions and was expected to miss one or two games. The day after he was hurt, Childress told reporters the veteran would be his starter if he was healthy. On Wednesday, Childress backed off that, saying: “We’ll just see. ... I’ve got two good quarterbacks, so that’s a good problem to have right now.”
The Vikings haven’t officially revealed the extent of Frerotte’s injury, and Childress and Frerotte both declined to confirm a report during Fox’s telecast Sunday that the fractures involve the transverse process or the small bony projections off the right and left side of each vertebrae.
“It felt great today,” said Frerotte, who went 8-3 as the Vikings starter after replacing Jackson two games into the season. “I don’t know if it’s completely 100 percent, but it felt really good. . . . We’ll see how it goes through the night and see what it feels like when I wake up in the morning.”
Asked if even he would be surprised to see Jackson not get the start Sunday, Frerotte said “nothing surprises me.” Jackson did his best to be diplomatic about the situation.
“We’re still teammates regardless of how everything goes,” he said. “When I was starting at the beginning of the year, he was supporting me. When he started, I supported him. We’ll continue to do that. That’s part of being a good teammate. I feel like we’re both good teammates and here for the team goals, so it don’t really matter. It matters, but at the same time, whatever Coach does, we gotta deal with it.”
While Frerotte would not say whether he had suffered fractures to his transverse process, it wasn’t lost on him that the same injury to former Vikings quarterback Daunte Culpepper opened the door for Frerotte to start two games for Minnesota in 2003. Culpepper also was hurt in Detroit and Frerotte, like Jackson, was outstanding in the first game, posting the highest passer rating in Vikings history (157.2) in a 35-7 victory over San Francisco. The following week the Vikings beat Atlanta 39-26.
“It’s kind of funny because it’s almost the exact same thing,” Frerotte said. “It’s like deja vu. It’s really strange. But you just live every week and enjoy yourself. I told T-Jack, ’Just enjoy it because you never know how long anything is going to last.’ You know, we’ve been great together. I told him, whatever happens this week we’re teammates and we’re behind each other 100 percent.”
