It must have been a lot of fun to be a Minnesota Vikings hater on Saturday. For the first half, at least. The second half? Probably not so much. By the end of overtime, the collective eye roll across the national media landscape had reached seismic proportions.
This team is ridiculous. It’s nonsensical. It’s a roster teetering like a house of cards, waiting for a true contender (or stiff breeze) to knock it all down. And every week, they seemingly come back with a new and even more outlandish script for how to win.
We’d all be saying they jumped the shark if this was a TV show. The writers have lost the plot. We can no longer suspend disbelief to enjoy the fiction. But as they say, the truth is stranger than fiction.
The football gods are being played. This cockamamie football team is fooling them — and, more specifically, the Norse god they embody.
We’d all love to be Thor, god of thunder. Powerful, respected, and with abs almost as impressive as Kirk Cousins’. An undisputed powerhouse that comes out every Sunday to hit you like a legendary hammer to the face. That would be really fun. Teams like the Philadelphia Eagles or Buffalo Bills can enjoy that for us.
While they get Hemsworth, we get Hiddleston.
These Vikings are tricksters. Grifters. The embodiment of Loki, god of mischief, disguised as a mighty 11-3 contender, ready to make as much chaos as possible.
Sure, they needed a bunch of late heroics just to beat subpar squads nearly every week. And, yes, they faced a bunch of backup quarterbacks and sub-par teams to bolster their record. Well, I hate to break it to you, but Loki is too smart to walk into a fair fight.
That’s good because the Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles showed us how the Vikings would do in a fair fight against a real superhero, and it went something like this.
DVOA and advanced analytics tell us the Vikings aren’t even a top-10 team! Great point. Unfortunately, this isn’t college football, and style points don’t matter. The playoffs aren’t seeded by your power rankings but by the win-loss column.
For example, the Eagles sit 2.5 games ahead of the Vikings with three games remaining. If they have three “quality losses” while we stack three more “fraudulent wins,” your opinion on who’s more deserving won’t matter.
My condolences, by the way. It’d be a shame if Jalen Hurts missed those three weeks and opened the door for the Vikings to steal the No. 1 seed. Really, we’re sorry, Eagles Nation. Loki’s heart breaks for you.
While we hope Jalen Hurts is okay in all seriousness, I won’t feel guilty for a moment if Gardner Minshew fails to live up to the production of Hurts’ MVP-level campaign. It may be petty, but the wailing and gnashing of teeth as the Emmanuel Acho’s of the world try to reconcile this Vikings team getting a first-round bye? As our co-star would say…
So my final message to Vikings fans: Embrace who this team really is.
We’d all love to be the hero, but being the villain can be really fun.
Let them leave Christian Darrisaw out of the Pro Bowl despite being among the most dominant tackles in football this year. Let them rank the Vikings behind the 7-7 Detroit Lions on all their power rankings. And let them continue to underestimate this team and trash our Kohl’s cashing, chains-wearing, youth pastor quarterback.
Because just when they think they’ve got us figured out and pinned down, we’ve got another trick up our sleeve. We’ve got another ace in the hole. We’ve got another record-breaking, mathematically inconceivable fourth-quarter comeback to launch.
And maybe, like most villains, we’ll be destined to lose in the end. But I say we keep pushing our luck.
Let’s bamboozle the league into letting us enjoy a bye or host a playoff game at U.S. Bank, and let’s see how far this grift will take us.
Embrace the fraudulence. Let’s make some mischief.
