Just about everyone had an opinion about the Minnesota Vikings’ disastrous loss to the Detroit Lions on Sunday. For Dan Campbell and the Detroit Lions, it was their first win of the season after an 0-10-1 start. For Minnesota, it may be the beginning of the end for the current regime.
After Jared Goff delivered the game-winning pass, the list of people sounding off on the organization was long. It’s a list that includes one former Vikings head coach, Mike Tice.
This is the same Mike Tice who admittedly was involved in a Super Bowl ticket scalping dilemma that landed him a whopping $100,000 fine. It’s the same Mike Tice who was the head coach in Minnesota when the love boat party scandal went down in 2005.
If THAT former Vikings coach feels confident enough to speak out and bury the current regime after a loss to the Lions, things have clearly gone terribly wrong.
Making it even worse is that when combing through Tice’s Twitter account, he sends a lot of NFL-related tweets, but you’d be hard-pressed to find notes from him ripping on the Vikings. Obviously, even he has seen enough after the latest debacle.
For the Vikings, it was their fourth loss suffered on the final play of the game, and this one stung the most. Minnesota is clinging onto their playoff lives, so any loss significantly chips away at their odds to sneak in. Losing to Detroit, who had been winless into December, is flat out unacceptable.
While Tice’s words won’t carry any weight with the Vikings’ decision-makers, his merely throwing his two cents into the discussion paints a picture of how bad things are at the moment. When he was verbally jumped by some on Twitter, Tice put a cherry on top by reminding everyone that he beat the Green Bay Packers in the playoffs when he was running the show.
That’s a checkmate move by Tice if there ever was one. Like every other Vikings follower, he is clearly flustered with what is going on.
Minnesota won’t have much time to bury the embarrassment, which might be a good thing. Instead, they’ll be back at it on Thursday night when they welcome in the Pittsburgh Steelers on a short week. This matchup against Ben Roethlisberger and Co. has quickly morphed into one of those “must-wins” for the Vikings to ensure everything doesn’t become completely derailed. If it does go that route, Tice might have a few more choice words.
