Vikings linebacker Ben Leber said that, despite the team's 2-5 record, there is still great chemistry in the locker room.
"Certainly there's some times where you take the losses pretty hard, but I think man-for-man we're all sticking together and we all have each other's back and that feeling of mutual respect is still there," he said.
Did Leber have any explanation why the defense has no sacks in the past three games and has given up a lot of rushing yardage, such as in the final moments of the Patriots loss?
"It comes down to nothing but fundamentals and some technique stuff, which is disheartening, but at the same time it's good because they are correctable," he said. "We just, sometimes we don't make tackles in some situations and other times we don't stay in our gaps and not get too nosy, and you know that's right across the board. It's a whole team defense thing and believe me, we're upset about it and we're going to get it corrected.
"We feel like we're doing the same things that we did last year, preparing the same ways, getting good practices during the course of the week, and we're just coming up short during the games. The positive thing is that we're in every game. It's not like we're getting outmanned, [or] we're getting outcoached, [or] we're getting blown out of these games -- we're in them. We're right there. We just need to have a few of those plays go our way."
Leber added: "I think everybody on defense is reeling from it a little bit; that's very uncharacteristic of us. Our mentality in that situation, 99 times out of 100 we're kind of on top of that situation, so we're upset about it. Again, there's not much you can do about it today but just come back and refocus."
Looking back to the Patriots loss, Leber said: "I think they did some things right, and I think a lot of it was on us, a lot of it was things that we kind of did wrong and they certainly capitalized. On every play there's a guy out of a gap or out of alignment somewhere and a lot of those times you don't even know because somebody else is making a play or being disruptive. So in some of these situations, we're not making the plays and it's being out of gaps."
Leber said it's not easy to take the losses.