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.
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