It’s Happening Again… I’m Starting to REALLY Believe

As of the writing of this piece, the Vikings are the NFC North Champions with two games left to play, with an 11-3 record and a really decent shot at going 13-3 and keeping the #2 seed in the playoffs. As Vikings fans, we’re all used to this pattern, which seems to happen about once every 5-10 years. What pattern you ask? The pattern of the Vikings putting together an amazing team that, at least in my lifetime, ends up going to the NFC Championship and giving us all this hope that becomes false hope as something heart/laws of physics breaking happens. Because of that, we all have become either completely cynical and dead inside or even worse, this weird mix of optimism and the feeling of pending doom, like finding a $100 bill on Bikini Atoll in 1946.

That’s where I lie on the spectrum of feelings for this team. Now, the way that I write when I’m not covering a specific news topic from that day is what people call stream of consciousness writing. I don’t necessarily have a preconceived idea as to what my article is going to be about (again unless I’m going in with an idea/topic), I just sit down and let my brain sort of vomit out all of the different tidbits of information I’ve come across online or my feelings about a specific situation, etc. Every time I’ve attempted to do just that over the course of the past week or so I keep coming back to the same basic idea and that is that I’m really starting to believe in this team. That’s not really earth-shattering stuff, or it at least doesn’t sound like it but it’s really the way that I believe in this team that actually is.

I’ve believed in Vikings teams before. But I’ve also always felt, or rather known, that the teams that I did believe in had an exploitable flaw for the most part. Growing up in the Moss/Carter era, which really should be referred to as the Red McCombs era, the Vikings had an offense that the league literally had never seen before. They were capable of putting up 50-60 points with what appeared to be little effort and because of that, and the fact that McCombs was a cheap bastard who personified a sleazy oil tycoon from a Bugs Bunny cartoon, the Vikings defense was basically patched together with players that weren’t really, you know, good at football. Sure, in 1998 we had John Randle, Jerry Ball, Robert Griffith and others but after that, we literally had teams that were so far under the salary cap that the league penalized McCombs (who had attempted to hit the minimum cap number by using signing bonus money). While McCombs claimed that the Vikings defense was “championship level/quality” they obviously weren’t after ’98.

That was apparent when the Vikings were shutout by the Giants in the 2001 NFC Championship and that really is the best example of a team that I did believe in, but did feel like that team had a defense that was an obvious issue. They relied far too much on Moss (and Culpepper/Carter to a lesser extent) as an organization even then, before the Randy Ratio. They figured that because of his ability to score from anywhere on the field, as long as that field wasn’t in New Jersey, they didn’t need the world’s greatest defense. So they went into the NFC Championship with the league’s 24th ranked D. After that, things really started to fall apart for the squad, with Korey Stringer dying, Carter leaving/retiring, Denny Green being replaced by Mike Tice, etc. I really didn’t have any faith in those teams, especially after McCombs traded Moss right before he sold the team (despite promising the main new owner Zygi Wilf that he wouldn’t) and we ended up with Troy Williamson and then Brad Childress and freaking T-Jack himself. Ugh, those were dark times.

That all turned around in 2009 when the Vikings added Brett Favre to see if the theory that every Vikings fan kept repeating over and over (“This team is a decent QB away from a Super Bowl!”) was true or not. Now, I had pretty blind faith in that team as well. So much so that I spent a lot of the divisional round of the playoffs mostly in a hot tub. However, I didn’t have much fear of the divisional round of the playoffs because of ’98 and ’01. But, because of ’98 and ’01 I obviously did have a major fear of the NFC Championship. While I did believe that the Vikings were the better team and that they really didn’t have a major exploitable weakness, I had a really bad feeling about that game. It was on the road. It was against a good team with an elite QB. It was Brett Favre, who at that point in his career was known for “blowing” NFC ‘ships and was on the Vikings basically because he had done that with the Packers. Favre was handing the ball off to Adrian Peterson, who was known to fumble like crazy back then.

So, I wasn’t very confident going into that game or even as the game started and the Vikings completely basically dominated the first half from a time of possession and yardage perspective. Then Reggie Bush fumbled that punt and the Vikings, who had the lead, were on like the 2 yard line and Favre attempted to hand the ball off to Peterson, who had a gigantic hole/easy TD (which would’ve essentially buried the Saints and killed any chance of momentum (and almost as importantly the crowd noise)) and.. You know the story. The turnovers were classic Vikings and I basically resigned myself to eating an Ambien after each in an attempt to dull the feeling of knowing what was going to happen. I knew the Saints would win even when the Vikes got second, third, fourth… Tenth chances to win that game despite all of the turnovers.

So, when I woke up… In May of 2015, I started this site. By that time the Vikings had a new head coach, Mike Zimmer, who has shown over the course of his tenure that he somehow is creating the most anti-Vikings teams ever. As a Vikings fan, there are certain negative things or situations in games that trigger a view of the future in your mind. Or really, I was going to say feeling but it’s more than that, it’s a certainty that the Vikings are going to lose. It can be 30-24 with two minutes left against the Packers, after the Vikings were up 30-3 in the early third quarter, and you just know that the Pack are going to get the ball back, the Vikes will go into their prevent D and Favre/Rodgers will pick that apart and win by 1. Amazingly, with Zimmer as head coach, there have been multiple examples where this “certainty” kicks in but the Vikings actually respond and get a turnover or the offense actually goes down the field, eats the clock and then scores a touchdown to bury the other team. They NEVER used to do that, not at least since I became cognizant of football in the early 90’s after Sean Salisbury came to my middle school and spit talked all over everyone. They don’t turn the ball over. They’re disciplined. They really don’t let up despite the score. It’s what the great teams do, and this team is really showing that it is indeed great.

My entire point with this article is that I’m starting to get that feeling again. The feeling that this team is going to end up in the NFC Championship. The main difference this time is that I really don’t see or feel like this team has that exploitable weakness or like something bad is going to happen. On paper, I’d take this team over any in the NFC, for sure. Now, obviously, you can’t rely on the on-paper team when it comes to predicting or playing this game because there’s the human element that exists and that makes sports so exciting (or painful, as we know). But, with coach Zimmer, this team basically is executing the way you’d want them to if they were robots, so you can almost take their on paper stats and apply it to a prediction, they’re that disciplined (or have been this year, especially). The players on defense are sticking to their assignments while not attempting to do too much because they trust the guy next to them (which is key in a zone, especially). The players on offense, mainly quarterback Case Keenum, aren’t (for the most part) overextending themselves or taking a lot of risks. Even in the Carolina game, really the first game in a long time where the Vikings were down (big) in the 4th quarter, the team didn’t panic or give up and they ended up tying the game with two minutes left (before doing the exact opposite of what I just gave them credit for on that last defensive drive). Sure, they lost, but a few things had to go wrong (turnovers, the D playing terribly, etc.) for Carolina to win by a last minute TD at home. That loss was strangely encouraging, actually, because it showed that this team doesn’t give up and that it takes a ton of factors (that the Vikings typically were great at) for one of the better teams in the NFC, that are in the playoffs, to pull off a win?

So, while I don’t really want to verbalize where I’m headed with this (for jinx purposes), I guess I’m saying that I do feel like this team is going to make that move and that for the first time in my life I’m not looking for some expired sleeping pills “just in case”. Really, the only negative variable that this team has had to deal with is something completely out of their control, injuries. So, knock on wood, really the only thing that I think can stop this team from reaching the Super Bowl is the injury bug. It’s starting to look like the Vikings will be in the playoffs with teams that they’ve mostly already played and for the most part, defeated. Playing Carolina at US Bank Stadium is a totally different animal and while New Orleans is a “different team” than they were Week 1, I really don’t think that they stack up well against the Vikings. However, I do want to get this down in writing (so I can brag later) and say that I do think that the Vikings will face the Saints in the NFC Championship. Which is literally like reliving a nightmare for everyone in Minnesota. I mean, can you imagine?

I can. And for the first time? I’m not (that) worried.

 

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