Gotta Love Playing Detroit

With the Vikings on their bye week, I decided to take a bye week myself.  Hopefully both of us are now ready to come back in full force.  Well, hopefully the Vikings are at least. 

We are all glad to hear that Adrian Peterson made if safely back from his weeklong trip to Alaska during the bye week.  He spent the week there wrestling grizzly bears.

Same for Jared Allen, who spent the week off in 1984, taking fashion tips from the people of the time.  Kevin and Pat Williams went to Vegas for the week, to take part in the Martorano's Masters Meatball Eating Championship being held there.  Suffice it to say, all Vikings players used their bye week wisely and we are now more ready than ever to dominate the rest of our NFL season. 

Before moving on to this weeks game, let’s not forget what happened two weeks ago at Green Bay.  Favre walked into Lambeau for the first time as an opposing player and dropped a 4 touchdown, 244 hard, 128.6 passer rating bomb on all his old fans there.  As a Vikings fan, you couldn’t help but smile watching the footage of Favre walking on to the field amidst a roar of boos from the crowd.  It was another scintillating performance from Percy Harvin, who had five catches for 84 yards and a touchdown, as well as 175 yards on five kick returns.  It was an all around good day, other than our defense in the 3^rd quarter, which could be described as lousy, or uninspired, or even just crappy.  We gave up 17 points in the 3^rd quarter, and it looked like things might be going the way of the Ravens game, but then Percy Harvin had a 48 yard return to the Green Bay 38 yard line, we drove for a touchdown, and that was that.

Let’s move on to the present.  Word is that Antoine Winfield is going to be missing his 3^rd straight game with his ankle injury.  He is a very key piece in our chance to wreak some havoc during the remainder of this season.  Thankfully, the next two teams we play, Detroit and Seattle, have a combined record of 4-12 right now.  Our defense should be able to scrape by without him for at least the next two weeks if need be. 

There is nothing really to say about the game against Detroit.  We better win it, and we better win it easily.  Anything less than an easy victory will be a disappointment.  They have ONE victory in the past two seasons.

Speaking of Detroit though, it reminds me of a game against Detroit back in 2007 that, as far as my memory serves me, is the most entertaining NFL game I have ever watched.  That whole season was insane.  It was AP’s rookie year, and he was dominating, yet Childress refused to make him the starter until something like the 12^th week of the season.  (I never doubt Childress’ impeccable judgment for our team.)  We oscillated back and forth between being an offensive force, and being an offensive stink bomb.  Of the eight games we won, we scored 27 or more points in six of them, scoring 24 and 20 in the other two.  Of the 8 games we lost, our average score was 14.13 points.  You never knew what you were going to get with that team.  We started three different quarterbacks that season, T-Jack, Holcomb, and Bollinger.  All this randomness came together for one perfect storm against Detroit, and we blew them out in entertaining fashion.  There were so many highlights during that game it could have filled a 10 minute slot on SportsCenter.  We had AP throwing a nasty juke on some unfortunate Lion leaving him grasping air, Andre Allison with a great kickoff return, a slow motion interception return, and a fake field goal. 

All great things, and there were two more I couldn’t even find highlights of that I specifically remember from that game.  One was a heads up/major bush league play by Cedric Griffin where a Lion receiver had fallen to the ground and it was disputable whether it had been caused by a Viking or if he had just tripped, so Griffin intentionally side-stepped out of the way to avoid touching him, then picked up the ball, which the receiver had just let go of and it was sitting on the field, and ran it back for a touchdown.  This was reviewed and eventually the receiver was ruled down by contact.  Later on in the game, there was another review, for what I can’t remember, and this review felt like it lasted about 20 minutes.  And in that time, we had shot after shot of all the players just standing around the field and talking to each other like they were having coffee with an old friend.  There were little clusters all over the field of players, not segregated by teams, taking advantage of the break to catch up with each other.  I specifically remember seeing John Kitna over and over again talking away, looking like he was explaining something in detail.  It was funny to watch.

Hopefully today’s game can be as entertaining.  Here are the videos I found from the 2007 game.

http://www.nfl.com/videos/minnesota-vikings/09000d5d804bed8d/NFL-GameDay-Lions-vs-Vikings-highlights

http://www.nfl.com/videos/minnesota-vikings/09000d5d804c2c7d/Chris-Kluwe-Highlight-WK-13-vs-Lions-2007