Week 9: Gurley vs Peterson; a tough one to call

I’ve been forced to re-think some things.

The Vikings are 5-2, on a three-game win streak, and conclude a favorable schedule run against the Rams and the Raiders; two teams that have had a recent history of being terrible (as have the Vikings).

The catch here is that these two teams seem to be coming out of that period along with the Vikes.  The Raiders will be a featured subject next week, but I’ve got plenty to talk about regarding this week’s opponent.

The Vikings have a long history with the Rams.  It’s been a fairly successful run, but they threw the biggest haymaker when they beat us in the 1999/2000 playoffs on the way to a very memorable Super Bowl win against the Titans. 

Lately, the series has been all Vikings. Brett Favre rolled to a 5-0 start in his good year with the team, a 38-10 blowout in 2009. Three years ago, Adrian Peterson ran for 212 yards near the tail end of his MVP season while Christian Ponder rode along just trying not to screw up anything. The Vikings held on for a 36-22 win.

Last year, the Vikings crushed the Rams 34-6; a victory that should have been a sign of great things to come for the purple and gold.  Instead, it wound up being one of just a handful of highlights from what we can really call a lost year.  Last season, Matt Cassel led the Vikings.  Some people thought Teddy Bridgewater should have started from the word “go” in 2014.

This year, Teddy gets his chance.  He has Adrian Peterson.  He has Charles Johnson back, which is good with Stefon Diggs limping along a bit.  But, this game will be no walk in the park.  The Vikings offense has struggled to close victories over lesser teams than St. Louis.  When I thought the Vikings might roll to non-nail-biting wins against the hapless Chiefs and Lions, they ended up having to grind and made all of Vikings territory (see what I did there?) squirm.

Last week, it looked like another loss to Chicago before Teddy turned back into Teddy after spending the game looking like someone else.  Resiliency has been a theme for this team all season.  They’ll need it against Todd Gurley, who has been a stud this season since being cleared for NFL action.

In fact, this Vikings-Rams game resembles the famous Chargers-Vikings game from 2007.  A comparison Branden and I have thrown around quite a bit this season is that the Rams heavily resemble the 2007 Vikings. Solid defense, stud halfback, but Nick Foles is a better quarterback than Tavaris Jackson was.

Overall, the Vikings look better on paper, but this team has been unable to score touchdowns in the red zone.  They’ve struggled to beat teams whose seasons are turning pear-shaped.  St. Louis is proving that solid defense + running game = better chance at victory.  The Vikings should win, but the cupcake portion of the schedule has ended prematurely.  

Oakland will be no picnic either.  Derek Carr is blossoming into a star quarterback before our eyes.

Mid-season bonus post: Flexing our muscles? How two "flex" games cost the Vikings everything.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

The Vikings are off to a fast start, or they have successfully rebounded from a slow start to put themselves in the playoff hunt.  A seemingly ordinary game awaits them at noon against an opponent they should beat if they can just take care of business the way they have during this recent run of success.

That is, until the NFL, though no fault of its own, decides that a game between teams that seem evenly matched on paper and have similar, relevant records is the game that everyone wants to see.  The Vikings go into the game and are blinded by the lights, and get trounced in front of the entire nation; an outcome that might not have occurred had the game stayed at its original time.

As much fun as it is to see the Vikings getting on the right track and maybe even getting taken seriously again, the recent trend of “flexing” games into primetime (that have gained importance based on the week-to-week happenings of the NFL season) has not been tremendously kind to our favorite team.  For the sake of this post, I’m only considering games that got flexed to Sunday night.  I don’t really consider moving a noon game to 3:25 to be a “flex.”  (The Giants-Vikings MNF game in Detroit was not really a “flex,” either, but more of a necessity move, so it won’t be detailed here).

In 2007, the Vikings had an 8-6 record and suddenly saw a meaningful game against the Washington Redskins get thrust under the bright lights of Sunday Night Football on NBC (in just the second year of SNF on NBC).  The result: 22-0 Redskins at halftime and a 32-21 victory for Washington, whose players and coaches (and fans) were mourning the murder of Sean Taylor at the time.  This game cost the Vikings a playoff berth because all the Skins had to do was win in Week 17 to get in thanks to the tiebreaker over Minnesota.

The 2009 season, for all the good it brought Vikings fans, featured one of these as well.  The Vikes faced Arizona, a team that had blossomed under veteran QB Kurt Warner (nearly winning Super Bowl 43, the most recent at the time).  The Cardinals steadily built a 30-10 lead and won 30-17.  It was just the second loss of the season (10-2), but the Vikings won just two more games in the regular season to get the #2 seed. 

And we all know how that turned out.

The most recent Vikings game to get this treatment was the Philadelphia game in 2010.  There was nothing remotely compelling about this game; The Eagles were good and we were trash.  Brett Favre had been injured against the Bears, a Monday Night game, and this game has the distinction of marking the end of his legendary games-started streak.  Apparently the game was flexed to Sunday night, but moved to Tuesday night because of a major snowstorm on the east coast.  It remains one of the few Tuesday night football games in NFL history.  

Fondly remembered as the Joe Webb game, a fun bright spot in an otherwise dismal season, the Vikings managed to get a late-season win over an Eagles team that would qualify for the playoffs the following week. 

I guess in the long run, 1-2 in “flex” games isn’t so bad…but the fact remains that national television stumbles are a big part of Vikings lore.  The diehard fans behind Vikings Cavalcade hope that the Zimmer era can change that.

Although I personally don’t consider it a “flex,” earlier this week it was announced that the Vikings-Packers game in Week 11 is now “America’s Game of the Week” on Fox.  If the Vikings play their cards right, they’ll be 7-2 (best case scenario).  The Packers could be 8-1 (also best case scenario).  

This will be, without a doubt, the most meaningful Vikings-Packers clash since Week 17 of 2012, regardless of record.

But I’ll save any more words about that game for Week 11.  The big question I have is this; can the Vikings shed this label of “eternal national stage fright?”