Vikings-Bears: This is the Real Game of the Year
Tom Woldum
|
The Minnesota Vikings have officially broken the hearts of all of us wounded subjects who were hoping that this was going to be Our Year. Our Year to make the playoffs, to make a post-season run, to return to the Super Bowl after a 45-year absence, to shock the world and finally bring home the Lombardi Trophy to Frozen Tundra West. Wherever your personal line is drawn in the Post-Season Continuum—the Vikes ain’t crossing it. We’re on the outside looking in.
This is the time of year where the mediocre teams have no other choice than to find other sources of satisfaction. Namely, that we’re not one of the horrible teams, we’re just blatantly mediocre. The moral victory is that your team wins (nearly) as many as it loses. That it’s worthy of respect and has a route to better things ahead. As a fan, you want to be able to stand up in the bar and shout, “wait til next year!” without hearing snickering noises from fans of the superior teams. That’s something to hang our hats on, isn’t it?
Perhaps not for the Tank-Your-Way faction who feel that the next best thing to a playoff team is a team so horrible that a Top Five draft pick is waiting on the horizon. They may prefer to be fans of the Lions or the Jaguars, preferring a fresh pot o’ hope in the person of a potential #1 selection that goes to the NFL’s worst team. This is the mentality that feeds an entire sub genre of fandom, and oodles of controversy from the anti-tank wing that sits on the other side.
Personally, I know our mediocre squad gave us way more excitement and enjoyment per hour of football watching than any of those tanking teams ever could. At Sunday’s end, we fans will have invested over 50 hours of our lives to this team—that’s the equivalent of two solid days of binge-watching—and up until last week’s debacle in Lambeau we were thoroughly entertained (though not always thoroughly happy with the outcome) throughout the season schedule.
But every game has to have purpose. For the Vikings, each of the last 16 games have had the same purpose, really: win and improve our chances of entering the Post-Season Continuum. What purpose is there now that the Purple have been eliminated from the playoffs? Why sit and watch another Viking game on Sunday?
Ladies and Gentlemen, I submit to you that Week 17’s showdown with the Chicago Bears is the Most Important Game of the Season.
All of those earlier games that we thought were the most important games of the year for our hometown team were just warmups for the Bears matchup. At stake is nothing less than our collective football self-esteem.
With a seventeenth game added to this year’s schedule, a true .500 team will be few and far between going forward (although a win on Sunday will leave the Pittsburgh Steelers at 8-8-1, and an unlikely tie could leave four other clubs with the same mark). A win or loss either way qualifies any club for the title of an average-ish team, or if you prefer, a mediocre one, so 8-9 and 9-8 squads collectively represent the right side of the cut line for fan self-esteem.
The Vikings stand at 7-9. A win brings us to a moral victory, an 8-9 record, and some degree of self-respect. A loss drops the club to a decidedly sub-par 7-10 season record, and perhaps more importantly for any of us who feel that pecking order is important, drops the Vikings into a tie for the season with the Bears.
Tied with the Bears? This whole season I’ve felt like some things in the NFC North were obvious. The Packers were obviously the best team. The Vikings were obviously a mediocre wildcard contender—but a contender nonetheless. The Bears were obviously a Bad Football Team. The Lions, of course, were absolute trash, and yet the Vikings found a way to lose to them—which set them on this new course that seems bound for something less than mediocre. But there will be no satisfaction to be found from ending the season tied with this year’s Bears squad, only the awkward realization that we weren’t even average-ish.
So it all comes down to Sunday’s matchup. Our world view will go one of two ways, depending on the outcome.
With a win, finishing at 8-9, the Vikings clearly retain a tenuous grip on averageness, but with a clear position as the second-best team in a division whose leader is more than likely to lose the services of Aaron Rodgers at season’s end. It’s easy to envision a path to something better in 2023.
With a loss leaving us at 7-10, tied with the Bears, and with a season split with Detroit, the Vikings are clearly a team with the proverbial Long Way to Go before gaining true relevance once again. The question will grow beyond “do we get rid of Rick Spielman, Mike Zimmer and/or Kirk Cousins?” in a bid for sustaining whatever relevance we’ve already earned, to the new question of how do we tear down to build back up? Do we trade Dalvin Cook? Do we cut bait on half of the offensive line? Does it make sense to retain aging veterans like Patrick Peterson and Harrison Smith if we admit we’re not going to be relevant for three-plus years to come? Do we play the 2022 season with an eye on the 2023 draft?
These are questions that may sound kind of fun to the Tank-Your-Way faction, but you don’t have to be sitting on the opposite wing to know this: those questions invite a scenario that would require immensely more patience—and bring substantially less enjoyment—if you plan on again spending 50+ hours with the Purple over each of the next few autumns.
[brid autoplay=”true” video=”936866″ player=”26281″ title=”Top%205%20Rookie%20of%20the%20Year%20Candidates%20″ duration=”126″ description=”Let’s dive into some of the other candidates for the 2021 NFL Rookie of the Year award.” uploaddate=”2022-01-06″ thumbnailurl=”https://cdn.brid.tv/live/partners/17660/snapshot/936838_s_1641505328107.png” contentUrl=”https://cdn.brid.tv/live/partners/17660/streaming/936838/936838.m3u8″]