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EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. -- The Minnesota Vikings have not come to a decision yet about whether Adrian Peterson will play in the preseason, coach Mike Zimmer said Monday. If the league's leading rusher does see the field before the start of the regular season, it will be in large part because he wants to get in an exhibition game. "I'm going to sit down and talk to him about it and if he wants to play then we'll discuss what we think," Zimmer said. "If he goes in there, he's probably not going to get one pass and out. So he's going to play (for a longer period of time if he does play)."  Zimmer said he has discussed the possibility of playing in the preseason with Peterson, but reiterated he hadn't settled on anything with his running back. If Peterson were to get some work in the Vikings' third preseason game, it would also coincide with the team's nationally-televised opening of U.S. Bank Stadium on Aug. 28 against the San Diego Chargers. But the coach wasn't terribly concerned with the marketing side of the decision. Nor did he feel like he needed to see Peterson in a game before the Vikings begin the season on Sept. 11 at Tennessee. "I see him on highlight films every week," Zimmer said. Peterson hasn't carried the ball in a preseason game since he returned from knee surgery in 2012, and his only exhibition game appearance during that time came in 2013, when he played one series in the Vikings' third preseason game against San Francisco. Last year, as the running back returned from a NFL suspension that cost him 15 games in 2014, the Vikings decided not to put Peterson on the field during the preseason. The team's offense began the season misfiring in a 20-3 loss to the 49ers, in a game where Peterson gained 31 yards on 10 carries, posting just 10 yards on his four runs out of the shotgun. After that, the Vikings largely scrapped the idea of shotgun runs, returning Peterson to the I formation sets where he'd been most comfortable. Zimmer admitted at the end of the 2015 season the transition might have been smoother had Peterson played in the preseason. "I probably made some mistakes going forward -- he's out for the year, we come back, I don't play him in the preseason games and then we're kind of figuring out things," Zimmer said in January. "I felt like we were figuring things out a little bit at the beginning of the year, especially offensively with that whole dynamic. That was probably a mistake that I made. I probably should have been more involved with trying to get things, and I don't know, maybe playing him." With Peterson present and healthy for all of the Vikings' organized team activities and minicamp, though, Zimmer left things more open-ended through the spring. The Vikings' two joint practices with the Cincinnati Bengals last week gave Peterson a chance to work against another team without the risk of injury from live tackling, and it's possible those practices will be the closest he comes to game action before the regular season. Ultimately, the decision will largely be in Peterson's hands. Asked why he would play the running back, Zimmer simply said, "If he wants to."
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