Vikings Players that No-Showed in Philly, Show Up in Pro Bowl
Joe Johnson
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When the initial Pro Bowl players were announced earlier this year, the driving narrative in Minnesota was that Harrison Smith was snubbed, but that it didn’t matter as the Vikings would be prepping for the Super Bowl anyway and thus it wouldn’t matter who made the most worthless game of football outside of the reincarnation of the XFL next year. With the Vikings completely falling apart in Philadelphia, from the top down, from coaches down to the players, it was a bit hard to watch some of those players joke around and even really smile on the field as they practiced for the Pro Bowl this week as a fan. I understand that they’re conditioned to get over/not dwell on losses, and I don’t want to rag on the players personally because I know that’s bad form (from a journalistic point of view), but still… That game really hurt and I’d rather that the players have actually foregone the Pro Bowl, or at least have worn some sort of black arm-band and veil than show up and play well a week after playing the worst game of football perhaps they’d ever played. But, just as the Vikings historically/typically easily dispatch the team that beat them in the playoffs the year after that same team dispatched them in the playoffs, the Vikings players appeared to be back to their regular form in Sunday’s game (a week after they all played like chickens with their heads cut off because they didn’t pay their meth debt(s)).
But, I’m being hyperbolic for the sake of adding something of interest to a boring subject while also attempting to use this site to therapeutically work my way through the complex emotions churning in my brains. The Pro Bowl is a massive waste of time (outside of the skills competition(s)) and while everyone wants their players to not be able available for the Pro Bowl (ever since they moved it to the weekend before the Super Bowl), most don’t really care to watch it because it’s free of the drama and importance that every other NFL game has in a league that only has 16 games a season. So, seeing the Vikings playing for the NFC squad was a hard pill to swallow, as most of us (actually, according to the Facebook poll from last week about 95% of us) thought that the Vikings would easily dispatch the Nick Foles lead Eagles and thus that we’d be spending this Sunday exploring downtown Minneapolis whilst smiling ear-to-ear as the first team to ever have a home team play in the Super Bowl that they were hosting. Instead, we got to see the Vikings players heavily impact the AFC vs. NFC Pro Bowl in Orlando Sunday night a game in which the AFC won by one point (so at least the Vikings players are being consistent and ending their season with another loss… Way to go, fellas).
It was raining for most of the game, which changed the dynamic a bit as typically the Pro Bowl is a game where the defenders are on autopilot and the quarterbacks are trying to throw the ball down the field as much as possible. The rain seemed to have more of an impact on the AFC than the NFC in the first half, as they were trailing 20-3 at halftime and clearly were struggling to get anything done on offense. The opposite happened in the second half, where the NFC was only able to muster three points to the three second-half touchdowns that the AFC put together (sound familiar?), unfortunately for the NFC, there was no Orlando Miracle to salvage the game for the NFC and the AFC ended up winning 24-23, in one of the lower scoring Pro Bowls in recent memory.
The only touchdowns scored by the NFC were actually by the Vikings, one on offense and one on defense. Adam Thielen scored the first points of the game on an 8-yard strike from none other than Drew Brees (at the end of a 75-yard drive). Thielen had three catches for 25 yards and a touchdown, who was eclipsed by Kyle Rudolph who lead receivers on both teams with seven receptions for 70 yards (which easily doubled the amounts of any other NFC receiver).
Word is that had the NFC won the game, Harrison Smith would’ve won the (Defensive) Most Valuable Player award as he was able to remember how to play football a week after playing like a freshman who was elevated to Varsity at the last minute before the State Championship game. Smith, who wasn’t voted in by the fans of the NFL (hence the “snub” talk above), proved that he belonged there by intercepting a Ben Roethlisberger pass that was meant for Antonio Brown. He returned that interception 79-yards for a touchdown, which was the second longest interception returned for a touchdown in the history of the Pro Bowl. The other Vikings defenders in the game also contributed, with Xavier Rhodes ending up with four tackles and a broken up pass, Linval Joseph getting one tackle (a pretty violent one on Colts tight end Jack Doyle) that was one of the highlights of the game.
I’m sure not many of you watched the game, as the number of clicks we’ve received since the Philadelphia Disaster being about a quarter of what they were the week after the Minneapolis Miracle and really, I don’t blame you. I really didn’t want to watch it, either. The pain is still to raw and I’m still not emotionally invested in this team, as I do believe that at some point they need to reward all of the emotions, time and money we all spend on this team. While the Wilf’s have been great owners (especially as compared to Red McCombs), and they did put more money into the stadium than they needed to (considering the dynamic of NFL owners and cities/areas when it comes to new stadiums), but I really think that they need to go all in this off-season to prove that they’re not happy with what happened in Philadelphia.
The Vikings clearly have no quarterbacks locked in on their roster for 2018 and there are a lot of QB’s to choose from both internally and externally (I’m using the term “internally” loosely, as again, no one is under contract, so that means Case Keenum, Teddy Bridgewater and Sam Bradford). If they want us to get excited again, they need to make a splash in free agency (and the draft, really) and while that may be subjective from person to person, I really am hoping that they can bring in a quarterback that screams franchise and while I’d love for it to be a healthy Sam Bradford, his history of injuries and the fact that he’s getting older doesn’t really scream that to me. So, I’m saying this again (after my article about how the Vikings can avoid a hang-over season)… Bring in Kirk Cousins, Zygi/Rick Spielman/Coach Zimmer. He’s capable of passing for 5,000 yards a season and would be nigh-unstoppable if he could throw to Stefon Diggs, Adam Thielen and Kyle Rudolph and he could maybe, just maybe, make it so the Vikings players could avoid playing in next year’s Pro Bowl because they’re prepping for the Super Bowl.