“If you're going through hell, keep going” - Winston Churchill, discussing the 2011 Minnesota sports scene
Happy New Year friends, or more appropriately, it’s a new year, happily.
2011 had some great moments that will always be remembered. People got married, engaged, had children, achieved goals, reached milestones and generally accomplished all manner of admirable feats in the parts of life that truly count. For everything you’ve done, and everything you’re happy about, I offer a tip of the cap, and my sincerest hope for success in all future endeavors.
Unfortunately this blog is about Minnesota sports, and by all measures in that department, things remain pretty shitty. At the beginning of 2011, we had a baseball team that couldn't make it past the first round of the playoffs, a football team that had declined faster than Tara Reid in the late-90s, basketball and hockey teams working on multi-year playoff droughts and a university who's revenue sports probably thought "postseason" was a brand of cereal.
Nowadays, times have changed. I don't mean that in the traditional sense, as in facing a significantly different set of circumstances, just that times have literally changed. It's 2012 now.
Where was I going with this?
Ahh yes, hope, capital H-O-P-E, which springs eternal and is never stronger than the third day of a new year. The hangover from the New Year's party has finally worn off and you’re once again able to perceive more than general outlines of objects. People have been fired, players drafted, free agents signed, it's a brave new world...just not one in which you'd notice much difference.
But certainly some things have gotten better, and in the case of those that haven't, at least several people have been fired, which is really the next best thing. I bring to you a message of hope which, although not always conveyed in my writing, is nonetheless felt deeply in my heart. We may not get to the mountaintop in 2012, but I’m fairly certain we can make it out of last place!
Unfortunately, before we can ring in the limitless potential of the new calendar year, we first need to do the postmortem on the old. The State of the 'Ville as it were, an annual tradition being broken up into five segments over the next week: Vikings, Wolves, Wild, Twins and U of M.
None of these stories are particularly happy ones as yet, but we can’t consider where we’re going without acknowledging where we’ve been. And that, in a word, is down. So there’s really nothing to do but pump it up, or find a new hobby.
Let's start with the saddest state of affairs.
The 2011 Minnesota Vikings: Just disappointment, hold the heartbreak
Moving into 2012, I am thankful that my enjoyment of the NFL as a league grows less dependent on the Minnesota Vikings with each passing year. I will always watch and never stop hoping, but it’s just too good a league to let your enjoyment of the whole hinge on the actions of one franchise.
Particularly one with the questionable decision-making history of this one.
Rick Spielman’s promotion to GM is the most recent chapter in the “Right Idea, Wrong Execution” saga of the Purple. You're familiar with this, it's where the team finally does what it should've done a couple seasons earlier, only now with the worst possible timing imaginable.
Take the Brad Childress hire, when a new set of owners took over from the prior skinflint and immediately decided to shell out big time money for the hotshot coordinator on the market. The only problem was, the new guy was worse than the old guy, who had actually achieved pretty impressive success, given his budget. Call Mike Tice a buffoon if you'd like, but that buffoon finished .500 or better in each of his last three seasons and beat Green Bay in the playoffs with a roster of spare parts. Who knows, if not for Fred Smoot and the Loveboat, maybe he sticks around and gets the benefit of the deep pockets that propped Chilly up for four years.
For a more recent example, how about the selection Christian Ponder in last year's draft? The team finally throws a high draft pick at a franchise QB, which fans had been clamoring for ever since they learned how to pronounce "Tarvaris". Only problem is, it's about three years to late to make any difference. So you get what they got, a poor rookie, forced to run for his life behind a washed-up offensive line that at times could've been booked for assault on a good day and attempted murder on a bad.
(Please note that this is not a write-off of Ponder, which would be hugely premature. Plenty of good NFL QBs have looked as bad or worse as rookies. The point is, any way you slice it, drafting him was a poorly timed move. The day after they made the horrendous reach to grab him with the 12th pick in the 1st round, I wrote about my concerns, and the implications for the long-term future of the franchise. Eight months and ten games later, I stand by every word. It just didn’t make sense, given where the team was at. Chances were, they would end up with what they got, a banged up rookie who got worse as the season wore on.)
Success in sports is a combination of talent and timing; unfortunately if it weren’t for bad timing, the Vikings would have none at all. Poor timing explains how you find yourself outbidding your biggest rival for a coach during the same offseason they hire the one that leads them to a championship. It’s how you find yourself with a questionable rookie QB you reached for in the 1st round, when entering a draft with the 3rd overall pick and potential franchise talents on the board.
Some of that bad timing can be chalked up to moves that looked good on paper, but didn’t work out for various reasons (Childress), and some to knee-jerk reactions that came a few years too late (Ponder). Sadly, for us fans, it doesn’t matter what led up to the mistake, just that it was made. And when you make enough of them, it amounts to 3-13, with little chance of a quick turnaround.
Which brings us back to Spielman, the first true Vikings GM in a very long time. Many fans have felt for years that the Vikings needed a clearer power structure, but it’s doubtful that this is what they had in mind. It’s nothing personal; in fact it’s impossible to know exactly how much influence he wielded in the team’s convoluted power structure. But being so prominently involved with a team that's been going the wrong direction for a few years now, makes this move feel like asking the drunk guy in the passenger seat who just puked out the window to slide over and take the wheel.
Most Vikings fans were probably hoping that this was some kind of reward for being the voice of dissention on years of bad personnel moves. That this guy was the one guy saying "bad idea", when bring Brett Favre back or drafting Ponder was on the table. That would at least make sense in Costanza-like fashion, when you're making all the wrong moves, go with the guy who wanted to do the opposite!
Unfortunately, today’s press conference made it very clear that was not the case, and we're sticking with the status quo: Spielman was on board with the major moves, Fraizer is the coach, Ponder is the QB, things move forward on that basis. Understanding that it won't work to have heads rolling every year, how does it makes sense to go 180 degrees in the other direction and offer a member of the current brain trust a promotion? This perplexes me more than people who shop on Black Friday.
Among fans, the most ringing endorsements today have been along the lines of “well, at least now we’ll know who’s to blame when things go poorly”. That inspires about as much confidence as “I’m not ready to write Ponder off until I see him play behind a decent offensive line”. A hint of positivity remains, but just a hint. For further hints, you can cherry-pick the successes of a Spielman-led front office in drafting some exceptional (if almost exclusively 1st-round) talents. But taking a look at the current roster makes it very clear that that the successes further down the draftboard were pretty much nonexistent.
It does of course have to be admitted that some of the current state of affairs is cyclical, and not everything can be blamed on those currently in charge. It’s just the natural ebb and flow of sports that every decade or so, a down year comes along. The team bottoms out, rebuilds, makes it’s run, gets older and more expensive, before you know it, you’re back to square one.
The sell-out to win it all with Favre is part of what put us here, and it’s really no different than the 5-11 record of 2001 that marked the end of the Vertical Vikes era, or the down years of the early-90s that ushered in Dennis Green. But between each of those troughs were also periods of great success, strings of playoff appearances, and even a couple legitimately great teams. While this franchise has at times been inept, it has never seemed hopelessly so. My favorite cliché about the NFL is that it stands for Not For Long, regardless of where you find yourself currently, don’t get too used to it.
But with all that said, this is literally as bad as things have ever been, and if the current regime screws up this pivotal offseason, they could remain that way for some time. I’d like to think that things can be turned on a dime, and the Vikes will be back to blowing conference championships before we know it, but today's developments aren't very reassuring.
Where we are: Rock f*cking bottom.
2012 Ceiling:
They don't blow the draft, Ponder stays alive and they show reasonable improvement (5-6 wins) against a weak schedule - 50% chance.
They blow the draft, Ponder takes more hits than Sam Hurd's address book and our favorite football team descends into a state of Lionesque football purgatory for the next half-decade - 50% chance.
Long-term prognosis: Superbowl homeboy!!!
Because if you don't have faith, Vikings football just isn't for you.
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