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.    

Free Agency: Vikings Football; Special Kirk Cousins edition!

It is shaping up to be the decision that could shake the foundation of the Minnesota Vikings for years to come.  Find the right quarterback to steer a fundamentally well-built team on the right course toward Valhalla; in layman’s terms, sign the guy that might reverse nearly 60 years of heartbreak by guiding the Vikings to their first Lombardi Trophy. 

Vikings fans have been through this before.  In a well-remembered tale, longtime adversary Brett Favre donned the purple and gold for one magical season, and one that was anything but.  The less said about Donovan McNabb in purple, the better.  Josh Freeman?  I have successfully repressed that memory.  The current situation is different; while Freeman was a young man who could have stuck around if not for that horrendous Monday night game, Favre’s tenure was a short window-opening, and the window slammed shut on fans’ fingers in 2010.  McNabb was the NFL equivalent of a transitional champion in professional wrestling; someone with name recognition holding the belt until the higher-ups decide “the kid” (or another better quarterback) is ready.

In 2011, “the kid” was Christian Ponder, who ultimately didn’t pan out.  In 2014, the Vikings tried again with Teddy Bridgewater, who began his career in Week 3 after an injury to Matt Cassel (with Ponder still on the team at the time).  The jury is still out on Teddy after a horrific knee injury completely derailed any season he may have had in 2016 or 2017 after a reasonably successful, though not flashy 2015. 

Indeed, the biggest on-the-field crime of the Adrian Peterson era was not building all that well around him.  For a long time, Adrian carried the team to some pretty mediocre records, but without him things would have been far worse.  In many respects, the Vikings have had the same problem as the Packers.  While Green Bay has been recently exposed as a nearly-incompetent offense/team without Aaron Rodgers, the Vikings for several years would have been as incompetent without Adrian Peterson.  While the Packers have only managed one trip and one Super Bowl win with the career Rodgers has had, it is still one more than the Vikings have even sniffed since 1977; yes, the Raiders loss predates the entire Star Wars franchise by about four months.

For the Minnesota Vikings as a franchise and a fanbase frothing at the mouth for “just one before (they) die,” the Minneapolis Miracle— ten seconds which turned back decades of agony for one week— was nice but not quite nice enough.  In a season where the hype built on a weekly basis as every Minnesota fan knew they were hosting the biggest sporting event in the nation and one of the biggest in the entire world, they were ultimately left out in the cold, once again trophy-less and ring-less.  Let the “no rings” and “empty trophy case” jokes fly for another year.

Now, a decision needs to be made.  Free agency looms and the Vikings must decide who to bring back and who to add in order to position the team for another run at glory.  Fans do not want to wait another eight years just to win a playoff game.  Some were in high school when the Vikings beat the Packers in the 2004 wild card game.  Those same people likely sat in their dorm rooms watching the Vikings beat the Cowboys in the 2009 divisional playoff game. 

Oh wait, I’m describing my own experiences.  Moving on…

Losing via Bountygate hung over the franchise like a dark cloud, and the Minneapolis Miracle was the first playoff win for the team since that fateful night nine years prior.  Other teams win playoff games with great regularity, so why can’t the Vikings?

After leading Minnesota to 13 of 14 wins after a mysterious knee injury sidelined Sam Bradford, 

Case Keenum seemed like a solid choice to try again in 2018, but he’s off to a well-deserved contract and likely the starting job in Denver according to the latest reports.  Bradford, who got saddled to an injury-riddled 2016 Vikings team, is being pursued by the Buffalo Bills after they sent Tyrod Taylor to the Browns.           

Drew Brees was thought to be available, but only for a nanosecond, as the Saints signed him to a two-year deal that will likely have him finish his career there.  I am not looking forward to the potential revenge for the MM should the Vikings and Saints make the playoffs and face off again.

In the end, the only option at this point is to make a play for Kirk Cousins, and it sounds likely that the Vikings will land him.  The real question is how do you construct the team for a situation like last year if (God forbid) it happens again?  Honestly, Josh McCown at the right price wouldn’t be a bad option to have around for a year.  Or just keep Teddy as a backup and/or draft a guy.  You need some kind of insurance policy if things go dreadfully wrong.  Last year, the Vikings lost their starting quarterback and almost made it to the Super Bowl because they had such a plan in place.  I don’t think any of us could have predicted such a run for Case Keenum, but it certainly beats the daylights out of the alternative (Aaron Rodgers walks into A. Barr and the Packers’ season goes with him).      

With the NFL news cycle going crazy, free agency truly is the most wonderful time of the year.  Whichever direction the Vikings decide to take, I just hope it doesn’t take another decade to make it back to the NFC title game.

(Edit: It appears likely that Kirk Cousins will indeed sign a 3 year contract tomorrow.)

Super Bowl Week: We didn't bring it home, and now we need a quarterback AGAIN???!

Well, that sucked.  I don’t really have many words for it; the NFC championship game was over from the moment Case Keenum threw that pick-six.  And now the Eagles are playing in what could have been “our” Super Bowl.  We never really had a chance.    

(Okay, maybe that’s a little over-dramatic, but I tried writing this post immediately after the game ended and it was an emotional diatribe about how the Vikings are always a bridesmaid but never a bride and were never going to even make it to the Super Bowl until I was dead and gone.  Writing all of it out was cathartic, but I chose not to save it.) 

It’s just as well the Vikings fell short of “bringing it home.”  No one had ever done it, and now the team no longer has to worry about being the first.  Let that duty fall to…oh man…the 28-3 catastrophe themselves, the Atlanta Falcons.  With our luck, that will wind up happening.  It would, however, be sweet, sweet revenge to win the Super Bowl there on what would be the 20^th anniversary of a certain sordid event in Vikings history.

I, personally, am ready for the big game, but I can’t help feeling like this would all be 100 times more exciting if the Vikings had made it.  Then again, I’m enjoying the relaxing feeling of knowing there’s no chance for the Vikes to go 0-5 in the Super Bowl all-time by losing to Tom Brady.  Better to lose in the NFC Title Game than to think you’re all that, only to fall hard.

The next task for the Vikings will be choosing a starter; which feels like the opening moments of any Pokemon game.  Will they choose Bradford, Bridgewater, or Keenum?  Or, will they keep one of them for depth purposes and go out and catch a wild Kirk Cousins?  From the sounds of it, he’ll give us a chance if he feels the offer is right.  He obviously feels the situation is right.  Personally, I feel like he has huge potential to thrive in an offense with a healthy Dalvin Cook and plenty of weapons plus a defense that will hopefully return to form next year and get him back on the field shortly after he leaves.  That is, of course, if he wants to come here. 

None of this will come to a head until free agency, so that will be the next time this blog gets updated.  Until then, Skol on.