Week 15: Win and In, quite literally.

I think we had a collective freakout on Sunday.  It’s amazing how stressful a Vikings game can be, even when the team has 10 wins more than a week before Christmas Day.

(Speaking of which, Vikings-Packers, however much it ends up meaning, is on the 23^rd, not the 25^th.)

There are several ways to look at Sunday’s loss…the first since early October.  The first way is sheer panic.  We didn’t think much of it when the Vikings lost that ugly game to…Carolina in 2009, did we?  We already had the division sewn up; it didn’t matter.  Or so we thought.  The next week brought an unfortunate overtime loss to the eventual 7-9 Bears.  And the rest is history.

Another way to look at it is that this year’s game went better than that.  The Vikings got handled for much of it, but they overcame a bad performance to come back and tie the game late in the fourth.  If not for a long Cam Newton run on which Matt Kalil got away with holding, we might be talking about a nine game winning streak.  Overall, it was not a great game, as so many little things that hadn’t gone wrong for a while went wrong, and we can only hope the Vikings got a bad game out of their system.  Better now than in January, especially if the Vikings get a first round bye. 

The Vikings got a taste of losing, and it should hopefully keep them humble and hungry.  Adam Thielen even said that the team had forgotten what losing felt like, so the loss might be a good thing in the long run.  All I know is win this week and all is forgiven.  You’ll automatically clinch the division if you beat Cincy, meaning you wouldn’t have to play at Lambeau Field more than once this year.  If they end up making it, the Packers—who are the team it would hurt the most to lose against this postseason in particular (hypothetically)—would have to come to The Slatra House (Norse word for slaughter, meaning “to butcher”).  The same would be true for Detroit; a return trip to Minneapolis if they played the Vikings a third time at all.   

The media is probably looking at last Sunday’s game as the “Vikings aren’t for real” game, which is fine given that the team performs better when the media isn’t drooling all over them anyway.  Makes me wonder how the Packers or Cowboys handle it.    

Next week’s Cavalcade will be going up on Friday, as I am busy with Christmas stuff on the day of the Vikings-Packers game.  Hopefully I’ll be typing up a description of a division championship.