With the preseason finally underway in the NFL, it seems as good a time as any to start previewing the upcoming season, mainly the division of most importance to me: the NFC North. This week is the Minnesota Vikings.
You can find the Detroit Lions and Chicago Bears previews here and here.
Let me apologize right now; this is not a preview about football. Well, it’s not about football in the sense that I won’t be looking into the receiving corps or how I think the defensive line will hold up.
I don’t think about those things with this team because I really hate everything about the Minnesota Vikings.
Putting any thought into whether or not I think Adrian Peterson’s fumbling issues will continue would be a waste of brain space. I don’t want even the most rarely-used, most beer-soaked chemical synapse connection between the most minuscule neurons in my head to be invaded with the mention of the Minnesota Vikings.
So… I’m not going to try and pull the wool over your eyes and take a technical look at this team. I can’t do it; it wouldn’t be fair to you for me to try.
But what I can do is attempt to explain why this organization, if there is any sports justice – or the idea that eventually, teams and players will get what they deserve – will once again go down in purple and yellow flames of failure.
Because of my own affiliations, it could be easy to think that this is all about Brett Favre, but it isn’t. I would despise the Vikings just as much if Gus Frerotte were still starting at quarterback (which would probably put me in agreement with fans of teams Frerotte has started for).
Anyway, this dislike of the Vikings has been building on itself for years. The Packers and Vikings have been one-upping each other, challenging one another ,and playing intense and dramatic games that have shaped the NFC North continuously in my lifetime. They are always there, lurking…like cockroaches.
And that was before Brett Favre and his biggest obsession, Brett Favre, was oh-so-difficultly, by some miracle from the sky, coaxed to return to his reserved spot in the limelight.
He was the only ingredient that could have taken my already severe feelings about this franchise to another level. It is the perfect pairing of people and things, I take great pleasure in watching suffer – so in that sense, it’s wonderful I guess.
It should not have come as a surprise that he ended up in Minnesota, for many well-documented reasons, a big one being it remains one of the few places he knew he was still revered enough to get away with his whole schtick. Or in other words, he knew Brad Childress coached there.
Brad Childress has been willingly bent over the table in the basement so many times by Favre that if he does not yet own a gimp getup, it is probably only because it hasn’t arrived in the mail yet.
The most infuriating thing about him, and the organization as a whole, is that they still try and feign this sense of control, that they had it planned this way all along and things are going right according to schedule.
But when you hand the keys to the car over to an ego-maniacal quarterback, and have the NFL coaching community’s equivalent of Officer Barbrady, you are facilitating an unhealthy marriage, like it or not.
Yet all of the posturing from the Vikings while they were readily taking Favre’s every order wouldn’t have been so aggravating had the calamity we were all waiting for happened last year. They were, up to that point, really just embarrassing themselves.
Everything changed when they started winning on what seemed like a weekly basis, led by Favre, who was playing out of his mind, soul-crushingly amazing football. The severity of the situation got very real.
I waited and waited and hoped for the other shoe to finally drop until I realized it wouldn’t happen. There apparently was no such thing as sports justice or karma; those were just ideas that idiot fans like me held onto while the nightmares of the football world began to take shape in front of my eyes. But then, and I wrote about this at the time for my student newspaper, it all came crashing down (slightly NSFW).
It was the stuff with which happiness is made.
This brings us to this year and the notion of sports justice.
No franchise, no self-respecting coach that goes about business in such an openly desperate while still-trying-to-pat-themselves-on-the-back-at-the-same-time manner, deserves a championship. It’s why the Packers ultimately failed when they let Favre yank them around those last few seasons. The game doesn’t work this way.
It’s why the Vikings, the duo of Childress and Favre in particular, came thisclose before falling on their faces at the finish line last year.
And this offseason, it’s been business as usual. Childress is still acting as if he has a say in any of this, and Favre isn’t fooling anyone anymore, except the Vikings. No franchise should be rewarded for the sad behavior that Favre demands from his employers, and no team should be more than happy to check their testicles at the door. It’s a cliché, I know, but this is a team sport, right?
They have the talent and anxiety – if this year doesn’t end in a Super Bowl title, the current Vikings’ ship (pun intended) will be officially sunk – for a successful year, just like the last one. Problem is, they are still oblivious to how silly they look and where it should eventually lead…again, if there’s any sports justice.
I don’t think they deserve the glory. Not this year, not with these guys behind the wheel. And since they’ll always be the Vikings, not ever.
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* – Favre photo courtesy of Mike Roemer/Associated Press
* – Barbrady photo courtesy of oneanswer.tv
* Â - Brad drawing courtesy of zackwallenfang.blogspot.com
Twitter: twitter.com/griffingotta Email: griffingotta@gmail.com
