Week 3: Whoops, we skipped Packer week!

Sorry about that...we completely skipped last week's tie against Green Bay, and the consequences that came from it.  Well, we have a new kicker, and Kirk Cousins appears to be the real deal.  I am still salty that the coaching staff took the ball out of Kirk's hands in the final few plays of overtime when he was dealing and probably would have thrown another touchdown to win the game.  Instead, the coaching staff decided that they could maybe trust a kicker who hadn't made a kick all day.

Spoiler alert: they couldn't...and that's why Dan Bailey is now our kicker.

Fast forward a week; this is a game you absolutely have to win with a short week to follow, and your next two games being against the Rams and Eagles.  Buffalo may very well threaten to join the 0-fer club, population Detroit (2008) and Cleveland (2017).  Theoretically, this should be the easiest game the Vikings play all year...but of course, the Vikings never make anything easy on themselves, so I'm not holding my breath on a blowout win.

The Vikes will probably make this game closer than it has to be.  Then again, it could turn out exactly like the Bengals game from late last year.  That's all I have to say about this game on short notice. 

Week 1: Captain Kirk (Cousins) Steers the Good Ship Skol!

It all begins again. 

In Week One, the Vikings embark on a long journey toward that glitzy new stadium in Atlanta, GA; and the team might very well be good enough to get there barring another year like 2016.

2017 saw the Vikings lose Sam Bradford and dynamic rookie Dalvin Cook by the fourth week of the season.  Other than them, the team stayed relatively healthy.  The end result was Stefon Diggs performing a miracle to exorcise the long-standing Bountygate demon and give the Vikings their first playoff win since then.  We won’t talk about the next week, though.

Indeed, the Vikings were unable to “bring it home,” but many people have suggested they could bring it to Atlanta.  After years of being mediocre, does anyone else enjoy the respect the Vikings get now from the sports media?  For a long time, I joked that the national perspective was “the Vikings are Adrian Peterson and no one else,” which was true, for the most part, except for the brief Favre era.  It is great that the Vikes actually get props and the conversation isn’t “well, the Packers are going to win the North, there’s no debate.” 

If the Vikings are supposed to be a Super Bowl contender, they have to come out and play like it in their home stadium, where they won 7 of 8 games in 2017.  I would go so far to say you can’t lose your home opener if you want to play in Atlanta in February.  I’m not ready to crown Jimmy Garoppolo king based off of a few wins last year.  If he gets the 49ers off to a 6-0 start or something like that, then maybe.

My prediction is that the Vikings make the playoffs again this year, and the only way they miss the playoffs is if 2016 repeats itself.  With the initial Kirk Cousins deal, we’ve got three years to make this Super Bowl thing happen.

Finally this week, there was a lot of talk after the Minneapolis Miracle that whatever “curse” had plagued the Vikings for decades, Stefon Diggs had stomped a mudhole in it.  If that’s true, than the Philly loss was “just a bad game.”  I said myself a couple of years ago that I thought the “curse” would end after 50 years.  Considering it started with the misplacing of the 1969 league championship trophy (Minnesota’s lone championship to date), that means…2019, when Super Bowl 53 is played.  Time to see if that prediction rings true.

Skol Vikes.