Everything about this Vikings Lions matchup tells me IT’S A TRAP!
I wish I could remember where I heard this opinion this week, it might have been The Power Trip Morning Show on KFAN, it might have been someone random on Twitter…I apologize in advance for not remembering well enough to give credit where credit is due, but that doesn’t take away from the validity of this statement…
“Minnesota sports fans don’t know how to celebrate success.”
We’ve been burned too many times. Gotten our hopes up regularly enough know that the only possible outcome is heartbreaking defeat on the other end. I guess that’s what you get as the city with the longest championship drought having four professional sports teams.
So when this statement was uttered, it didn’t surprise me at all. Of course we don’t know how to celebrate a playoff birth, we know Favre is gonna throw across his body. Of course we can’t live on the high of the Minneapolis Miracle for more than a week, The Philly Flop was right around the corner. It’s what we do here, we’re fatalists because we’ve learned through experience that the other shoe will eventually drop…because it always does.
That’s why this Week #13 matchup against the Lions scares the bejeezuz out of me. Everything that goes into this weekend’s matchups with the Lions screams “TRAP GAME” from the highest of highs.
Let’s start with this team’s history against the Lions. All in all, it’s been a pretty good run for the Vikings who hold a 79-39-2 all-time record over the Lions, but recent history has us tripping over here. We remember 2016 when a promising Vikings team dropped two games that season to the Lions as Matt Prater hit last second field goals twice, one for the win and one to send it to OT where the Vikings eventually lost. We remember the final week of last season where a failed 2-point conversion was all that thwarted a feverish Lions comeback. And we remember Week #5 of this season where it took a Greg Joseph walk-off to defeat a team that to this day is still winless on the season.
The Lions are not a good team, but they seem to give the Vikings fits at the worst possible time.
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Moving on, the Vikings lost last week and were bumped out of a playoff spot with Monday Night’s win for Washington, still “they control their own destiny”. Man I hate that phrase. When has a Minnesota team “controlling their own destiny” ever worked out favorably. That said, remember when I mentioned that the Lions were winless on the season. How easy would it be to look past as winless team towards a short week with a Thursday home game against the Steelers on the horizon? I don’t care if they do it intentionally or not, it’s human nature and the Vikings have shown time and time again that they are very human.
It’s our own fault too. After the Vikings got off to a 1-3 start the entire fan base was all about moving on to a new coaching staff, looking forward to the draft, and reconfiguring Kirk Cousins contract to get out early. Then they stormed back to 5-5 and were the #6 seed in the playoffs and we all got stars in our eyes and we bought back in. We should know better than that.
How about that little glimmer of hope that we’ve been given with Dalvin Cook’s not-quite season ending shoulder injury. They made a mistake giving us hope that he could return in as little as two weeks, because it gave us hope. We don’t handle hope very well here. Minnesota fans know that the most likely situation surrounding Dalvin is that the injury will get drawn out and he won’t return, a-la Danielle Hunter and Anthony Barr – OR – he’ll be healthy enough to return but it will come at a frivolous time when the team has already been eliminated from the playoffs. You know it’s true.
Of all the years that you just cannot trust the Minnesota Vikings to handle the business that they should handle, this is the year that they’ll lay an egg. Remember before last week’s game when we talked about how 8 of the Vikings 10 games were decided on the final play of the game? Well that number is now 9 out of 11 after last week’s loss to the 49ers. Games they should win, they make closer than they should be…games they should lose, they hang in there and win some. This being a game that they should win scares me a little.
I’m just saying, and don’t pretend that you’re not thinking all of these things as well. It’s what we do, it’s what our teams have done to us. We’re jaded, and that feeling won’t go away until we experience some semblance of championship success.
I hope I’m wrong this week, I hope that it’s the most boring fourth quarter ever because the Vikings are up by so many points, I just don’t have faith in that playing out the way it’s been predicted. I’ll gladly eat crow if and when they blow the Lions out of the water, but I need to see it first.
Until then, I’ll abide by the famous words of Admiral Ackbar…”IT’S A TRAP!”
Aj Mansour is a member of The Power Trip Morning Show on KFAN and works for iHeartMedia and the Vikings Radio Network. He’s also a senior writer for VikingsTerritory.com. Be sure to follow him on social media for the latest Vikings news and big opinions – @AjKFAN
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