Murphy: Motown Meltdown
Write a new volume in Vikings history, because this team is
By Brian Murphy
I love the smell of dread on Sunday mornings. Smells like … Vikings.
Minnesota’s tortured NFL history of untimely faceplants lent a keen sense of foreboding to its annual trip to Ford Field. Nothing tangible like a DNA match or Vegas tarring them as underdogs. Just the bone-deep malaise that has metastasized into an undeniable truth and inexorable conclusion.
The Vikings are frauds. Everything else is just conversation.
Losing 29-27 to the previously winless Detroit Lions will be in the opening paragraph of Mike Zimmer’s coaching obituary, which is being chiseled right now on granite harder than his head. The exact time and date will be backfilled.
Zimmer is coaching against fear. Coaching not to lose, a fatal flaw that is undefeated in professional football’s alpha male jungle. Preparing to air his tired grievances to a bored bartender. The corner stool is plenty warm after this pathetic performance, in which Zimmer’s vaunted defense literally backpedaled to another defeat as the clock struck zeros.
Oh, there will be plenty of “In The Hunt” graphics to parse as the Vikings push that Sisyphean boulder up the playoff hill for the next five weeks. They will tease and torment, scripting more fantastic and infuriating finishes for the ages.
But you do not overcome getting whipped on the playground by the underclassmen who eat their boogers. Jared Goff’s career was smoldering on the ash heap after his fumble gift-wrapped Minnesota’s go-ahead touchdown with less than two minutes remaining.
Then he knifed 75 yards without any timeouts through Minnesota’s gooey secondary until he simply played pitch and catch with Amon-Ra St. Brown 5 yards deep in the end zone, leaving the Vikings thunderstruck and their fans resigned as usual.
The Vikings sagged eight defenders in coverage and didn’t bother pressuring Goff, daring the checkdown charlatan to beat them on the game’s final snap. He plunged the dagger deep into Minnesota’s smug ego.
“We weren’t covering that great, so everything’s hindsight, I guess,” Zimmer lamented.
His martyr act is getting tired, but is anyone even listening anymore?
Meanwhile, offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak deserves familiar scorn for retrograde play calling, especially in the first half, when the Vikings fell behind 20-6 and had to settle for redzone field goals against an inferior opponent.
That left them chasing points in the second half, when Minnesota scored 16 in the first 18 minutes. The pitiful result was negative yardage on consecutive 2-point conversion attempts, up-the-gut runs that left little to the imagination or much work for the Lions to stop.
“They weren’t very good, I didn’t think,” Zimmer said. “We tried to run it in, smash it down their throats from the 1-yard line. Those weren’t the best.”
Norv Turner and John DeFilippo are feathering a nest for Kubiak in the scapegoat lounge.
Sigh.
The Vikings (5-7) were favored by a touchdown and positioned to strengthen their grip on an NFC wild-card spot that literally is theirs for the taking. The schedule allegedly set up well for a wounded unit that refuses to take the path of least resistance anywhere.
The sad-sack Lions had lost 15 straight games and not won in 364 days as the franchise with one playoff victory since 1957 continues to polish its reputation for fiduciary folly. The Lions may be a joke. But the Vikings proved criminally negligent.
There is no dignity to salvage, no plausible deniability, no credibility to preach amnesia and resilience for the quick turnaround and Thursday’s penance against suddenly relevant Pittsburgh. The fire sale for tickets will leave U.S. Bank Stadium awash in black-and-gold terrible towels.
The die-hards who reflexively shuffle into the venue will treat the nationally televised audience to an Irish wake. Blind drunk, tear soaked and vengeful. This is an overpriced product that has passed its expiration date in a buyer’s market.
The triangle of reckoning is coming for Zimmer, general manager Rick Spielman and quarterback Kirk Cousins, who are only capable of producing the same unsatisfying results week after week, year after year.
Zygi and Mark Wilf have to sense the impatience and angst that is boiling beneath their franchise. Too much overconfidence in underperforming talent, too many snake-eye draft bets and overreliance on stale schemes lashed to a regressive roster.
Mediocrity is the cruelest of all football conditions. It peddles false hope, builds velvet coffins of security and tantalizes fans with visions of what might be – with one more first-down completion, one more replay reversal, one more defensive stop, one more splashy acquisition.
It merely buys time to cover up a rotting football operation that has stifled innovation and progress.
The 2021 Vikings are dead. Cousins is a serviceable stats muncher who means well but the Super Bowl is perennially out of reach. Zimmer’s reign of defensive terror is over. Spielman’s smartest-guy-in-the-room regime has failed.
The Motown Meltdown is the sorry bookend to the Minneapolis Miracle.
Close the leather-bound book, put it on the mahogany shelf in the Vikings library and crack the spine on a new volume of team history.
Because this one is.
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Well said, Murph…. We suck. We sucketh badly…
But you do not overcome getting whipped on the playground by the underclassmen who eat their boogers.
Lol. Awesomely true.