Three head coaches were hired by the Minnesota Vikings under Rick Spielman’s leadership: Brad Childress, Mike Zimmer, and Leslie Frazier (who began as an interim coach when Childress was sacked). Of the three coaches, Zimmer had the longest and, perhaps, the most successful tenure; however, it appears that tensions between Zimmer and Spielman grew toward the close of the season.

During his recent appearance on Matt Falk’s podcast, former Vikings quarterback Kyle Sloter made a major assertion regarding Zimmer and Spielman’s relationship.

During the Spielman/Zimmer era, the Vikings did go through a lot of quarterbacks: Matt Cassel, Teddy Bridgewater, Sam Bradford, Case Keenum, and Kirk Cousins. While some of it—like Bridgewater’s injury, for example—is undoubtedly outside of Zimmer and Spielman’s control, it seems like both men had different ideas about what the team should be looking for in a quarterback.

Depending on what accounts you believe, Zimmer never liked that Cousins signed with him and occasionally seemed to have a bad connection with him while he was in Minnesota. After Bridgewater’s injury, he was a strong supporter of the player and probably would have preferred to see him return, but Spielman and the Vikings had other ideas.

If Spielman and Zimmer truly harbored the deep animosity for one another as Sloter claims they did, they did a pretty good job of hiding it. The team was never really “bad” while Zimmer was coach, and he was successful enough to rank third in franchise history in terms of wins behind Denny Green and Bud Grant. But somewhere along the line in that romance, it would seem, the bloom fell off the rose.