“Team Song” for Vikings Is New to Justin Jefferson
Justin Jefferson may or may not play at the Denver Broncos this Sunday night. His status is truly up in the air and will likely be listed as questionable Friday on the final injury report.
“Team Song” for Vikings Is New to Justin Jefferson
The phenom playmaker has missed five consecutive games with a hamstring injury and is nearing a return to the field, whether this Sunday or the following Monday, and is on the cusp of rejoining a team totally rejuvenated since his departure. The Vikings have strangely won five straight games without Jefferson.
And when Jefferson talked to reporters Thursday about his status, he revealed an interesting factoid — he had no idea what the band Creed was until recently.
In October, quarterback Kirk Cousins selected the song Higher for locker room flavor after Minnesota had sunk to a 1-4 record. Immediately aligned with the Creed selection, the Vikings began winning games and haven’t lost since Cousins’ choice.
“The only ‘Creed’ I knew about was the boxing movie. I did not know about no Creed until Kirk Cousins started playing it in the locker room,” Jefferson told the media on Thursday.
Jefferson knew Rocky‘s Apollo Creed but not the band.
The band Creed formed in 1994 and has sold 53 million albums worldwide. The group is considered by some as fabric of 2000s pop culture.
Jefferson added about Creed blaring all over the place, “But if it gets the job done, I’m all for it.”
After the Vikings defeated the Chicago Bears in Week 6, which kickstarted the current winning streak, Cousins opined, “Garrett Bradbury, in the locker room pregame, took a clip from the Texas Rangers and made sure that Creed got played before we went out on the field, and I felt like that may have made the difference, so we got that going for us.”
The Rangers used the same song as a soundtrack for their first-ever World Series championship a couple of weeks ago. Creed is making the rounds indeed; Jefferson just wasn’t familiar with the band’s catalog.
“The Rangers have been playing Creed, and they’re rolling in the playoffs, and we’ve been listening to it in the lifts in there here and there, but music’s banging on the boom box most pregames in the locker room, and we thought we’d mix it up the genre a little bit, get some Creed in there,” Cousins said in October about the inspiration.
With Higher still on full rotation, the Vikings play the Broncos on Sunday Night Football and are 2.5-point underdogs. Minnesota hasn’t won a game in Denver since 1999 and is 4-9 (.308) against AFC West opponents on the road in the last 25 years.
In fact, Jefferson was four months old the last time the Vikings beat the Broncos in Denver.
Dustin Baker is a political scientist who graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2007. Subscribe to his daily YouTube Channel, VikesNow. He hosts a podcast with Bryant McKinnie, which airs every Wednesday with Raun Sawh and Sal Spice. His Vikings obsession dates back to 1996. Listed guilty pleasures: Peanut Butter Ice Cream, ‘The Sopranos,’ Basset Hounds, and The Doors (the band).
All statistics provided by Pro Football Reference / Stathead; all contractual information provided by OverTheCap.com.
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