Two Articles Perfectly Sum Up What It’s Like to Be a Vikings Fan
Joe Johnson
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Ask any of the fifteen or so writers between purplePTSD.com and VikingsTerritory.com who have taken some time off this off-season, writing about even your favorite team can become difficult in the off-season. One trick that I use is to basically just search “Minnesota Vikings” on Google News to find whatever tidbits of information were released that day/week, then I hit up different message boards to see which topics are getting organic feedback and are thus of some interest to Vikings fans (because I’ve lost the ability to emulate human emotion after that NFC Championship game last season). In doing that this morning I came across two articles on Google News that perfectly explain where the Vikings fan base is and why this upcoming season is so important as one focuses on the failures in the past while the other breaks down the hope that we all have for the Vikings this upcoming season.
The first is a rivalry of sorts between two of the teams that have gone 0 and 4 in the Super Bowl and that’s obviously the Vikings and another team that knows heartbreak in the Buffalo Bills. The Vikings lost their four Super Bowls over the course of a decade whereas the Bills lost four in a row at the start of the 90’s, so you can spend time online arguing which fan base has had it worse (which is right up our alley here at purplePTSD.com) or you can look at the second article and see that at least one of those teams is attempting to get that monkey off of it’s back by finally winning a Super Bowl. The article from the general SB Nation NFL page asks which team “deserves the record for the most crushing NFL playoff losses?”. The second article is out of SB Nation Rams page, which is called The Turf Show Times and asks which of the “NFC Heavyweights” has the better roster. That’s important to note as the Rams put together a super team, at least the NFL version of a super team, this off-season and proves that the Vikings are doing something right in the personnel department.
It’s actually hard to answer the first question and you’d think that I’d be partial to the Vikings as I own two Vikings related websites and about fifteen absolutely devastating personal memories of those Vikings myself. The article is actually really great and while it’s a depressing trip down memory lane it attempts to make a case for both teams while leaving the decision up to the readers as to which fanbase has had it worse. The Vikings win out at nearly a two-thirds clip because of recency and consistency, where the Bills struggled mightily to get over that final hump in the early 90’s, that was a quarter-century ago and so a lot of those memories have faded. Beyond just the 1998 and 2009 NFC ‘ships that the author brings up for Vikings fans, the Vikings recently failed in a major way in a game they were widely expected to win. The 2017 NFC Championship game brought the Vikings in, with their highly touted defense against a back-up quarterback and we all know what happened after the first drive of the game (where the Vikings did march down the field to score). After a couple turnovers the game was over and it wasn’t just the score of the game, which was a rout, but it was about how those points were scored and how confused the absolutely stacked Vikings defense looked against Doug Pederson, Nick Foles and that Eagles offense. While that should terrify every person reading this article (unless you’re from Philly and are just here to brag), the good news is that the Vikings poached a coach from that offense to potentially learn exactly how and why they were beat on every single level in that game and also due to the fact that the Vikings went out and spent an absolute fortune to land the first franchise quarterback under 30 (or really, 35) that this team has had really since most of us have been alive, myself included.
The second article also leaves the answer up to the reader and basically just posts both rosters. The difference, to me, is that most of this Vikings roster has played together and isn’t one with a whole lot of changes coming to it, at least on the defensive side of the ball. On the offensive side of the ball for the Vikings, they have a new quarterback and a new offensive coordinator but to mitigate any risk they seem to be combining the new offense of John DeFilippo with the strengths of new quarterback Kirk Cousins and with what worked last season with receivers like Stefon Diggs, Adam Thielen, Kyle Rudolph and the returning Dalvin Cook. I believe that the Vikings have the better roster and that they don’t have as much to worry about in terms of making all of those pieces work together come September, so it’s sort of a double win.
Either way, training camp is still a few days out and it’s the off-season so you’ll get a lot of articles that just ask open-ended questions or even worse, someone breaking down those articles and then just giving you links for both. The good news is that as Vikings fans we’re used to being disappointed, so, you’re welcome? Oh yeah, the links. To read and vote on which team has the worse playoff memories, Click Here, to read about the Rams vs. Vikings in terms of which team has the better roster, Click Here. It’s the best way to sum up the disappointment and excitement that frames every discussion Vikings fans have, every emotion they share and every game they watch. I know, I can’t wait for training camp to start either.