My Thoughts on the Vikings - One of the best seasons in 30+ years, impact of injuries, my wish list for the coming weeks & how one gutsy call would’ve guaranteed no overtime vs. the Bears

These are my thoughts, and you have no obligation to agree, but even if you disagree, they will still be my thoughts…

 

Once Brett Favre was on board, before this season started, I predicted a 12-4 record for the Minnesota Vikings, assuming no major injuries. They are currently 11-4, so a win vs. the Giants in the friendly confines of the Metrodome (I’m not saying Mall of America Field) would give them that record, and they have had some major injuries, which would put them ahead of what I would’ve expected.

 

Antoine Winfield’s foot issues have been huge, both due to all the games he missed, and while playing the past 2 weeks, when he clearly has been far below 100% (or even 70%). The loss of EJ Henderson has been very mentally painful to fans, while quite physically painful to him. The Arizona game was already decided when he was injured, but in the 3 games without Henderson, the team is 1-2. Plus there have been all of the week to week injuries, which are commonplace in the NFL, but exist nonetheless.

 

Everyone knows that injuries are a part of the game in football (or any sport for that matter), but I think these two injuries have made the defense much more vulnerable, and while I wouldn’t have predicted the offensive issues for 10 of the last 16 quarters, it will take adjusting to play w/o Henderson, and Winfield needs to figure out if he is hurting the team in 1-on-1 coverage if he is not healthy enough now. Pittsburgh Steelers are a great example of what can happen when a great defensive player is out. For the season, the Steelers are 8-7 and are one of a handful of AFC teams with a shot at one of the last 2 playoff spots.  Troy Polamalu has only played in 4 full games this season (playing only the opening series vs. the Bengals before being injured again doesn’t really count). In those 4 games, the Steelers are 4-0, including the win over the Vikings. This makes them 4-7 without him. Talk about a huge impact on the team!

 

The Vikings have only had 5 games this season with both Antoine Winfield & EJ Henderson playing for the whole game. In those 5 games, the Vikings are 5-0. In all games with EJ Henderson, Vikings are 10-2, and in games with a healthy Antoine Winfield (last two weeks seemed to show he was not healthy, and he went out halfway through the Ravens win, after which QB Joe Flacco ripped through the MN pass defense & nearly led his team to a win), the Vikings are 6-0. So while teams need to adjust to injury losses, there are solid stats showing what that has done to the team.

 

That being said, EJ Henderson will not be returning this season, and with the looming possibility of no bye week in the playoffs, Antoine Winfield has no extra time coming up to heal, so if the Vikings want to make an impact in the postseason, they need to play around these injuries…and even if both were suddenly & magically healed, they don’t play on the offensive line or in special teams.

 

However, with all this gloom & doom, the Vikings are going to finish the season 12-4 or at worst, 11-5, which would be their best record since being 11-5 in 2000, or 15-1 in 1998. If they do beat the Giants and get that 12-4 record, the last time they had 4 or fewer losses other than 1998, was 1976 when they finished 11-2-1 (back when the seasons were still 14 games, before the switch to 16 in 1978).  12-4 would be their 2^nd best record in the 32 seasons of a 16-game schedule, and 11-5 would be 2^nd as well, but tied with 2000, 1992 & 1988. Everyone would love to be finishing the season on a higher note, but the 2^nd best record in 32 years would be a solid accomplishment regardless.

 

The back-to-back division championships are something special for the Vikings too. ESPN analyst/former Super Bowl Winning Coach Jon Gruden pointed out before Monday Night Football that this was the first time the Vikings had pulled that off in over 30 years. They had that solid era in the 70’s, where they won the division each year from 1973-1978 (and they won 11 of 13 division titles from 1968-1980), but in modern history, that just hasn’t happened. Prior to last year’s NFC North title, their last one had been back in 2000, when they were still in the Central division, so even standalone titles had been rare lately.

 

While 3 of the last 4 weeks have been less than pretty on the field (minus the 2^nd half of this Bears game…only the 1^st half & OT were ugly), this is still a regular season that will go down as one of the best since the reign of the Purple People Eaters. I have only been able to enjoy that wining era through books, since it took place before I was born, up until I was starting preschool. Hence, I am going to try to look at this season as a whole, rather than just the last month. If the Vikings go on to the Super Bowl, no one will care how they did in December. On the other hand, if they had won all these December games & lost early in the playoffs, all the talk would be about why they didn’t rest their players. I’ll cross my fingers that these “learning experiences” will carry over to the post-season, as a reminder of what they need to do to win those games when it counts!

 

My hope for the weeks ahead, aside from the obvious wish for the Vikings to win any other games they play, includes the following things:

• A Cowboys win over the Eagles (along with the Vikings win), to get the Vikings that first round bye. The bye honestly doesn’t matter to me; in recent Super Bowls, it has not increased the odds of winning it all, but this team clearly plays better indoors, and that would guarantee starting off with a home game.
• If the Eagles win next week, and get the #2 spot, then I will be cheering for them to lose so Minnesota could avoid playing there. Preferable locations to play of the teams in the playoffs, in my opinion, in order (this is based on the location alone, not the team) – Dome, New Orleans, Dallas, Arizona, Green Bay & Philadelphia
• The defensive secondary covering the receivers like TMZ covers Tiger Woods’ other women.
• Offensive line playing a complete game, with pass protection & run blocking. Of course no game can ever be perfect, but if they protect for Favre, he’s shown repeatedly (and in the 2^nd half vs. the Bears) that he will find open receivers. Plus, I couldn’t write about the Vikings without mentioning that Favre is 40 years old, so they need to keep him from being plowed onto his backside repeatedly; he is almost old enough to be at risk for breaking a hip with each fall. As for run blocking, look at what Adrian Peterson did vs. the Bears once he got past the line of scrimmage. It seemed like if he could get ½ yard, he was getting at least 6 yards.
• Peterson should go ahead & give up that one last yard in exchange for holding on to the ball (though a facemask call would’ve been nice, as the neck swiveling might make it harder to hold on), but I wouldn’t harp on that play too much. Sure, the Bears won the game after that, but a better hold by Kluwe on the extra point, a better punt by Kluwe early on, a catch by Berrian early in the 2^nd half when the ball hit him on the hands, 1 or 2 interceptions by Ben Leber when the throw was to him (though 1 can be canceled out by the Bears dropped INT) or a tackle on multiple kick returns, would’ve eliminated the need for that OT altogether. AD drops the ball too often, but he also has that special explosive game that no one wants to take away, and sometimes that risk-taking & reward goes hand-in-hand. Go check out Walter Payton’s first 3 years in the league, and you just might discover that he fumbled even more often than Peterson. The point here though, is to make the plays that are right there for you. Hold the ball, catch the ball, turn the ball the right direction, kick the ball or hit the runner with the ball.
• Jared Allen and Kevin Williams’ (and Ray Edwards for that matter) pictures being removed from milk boxes. It seems like, in terms of a pass rush, that they have been non-existent. The Bears have had a shaky o-line this season, yet they looked Pro Bowl worthy for much of Monday night. That’s a problem, considering the talent that was lined up against them.
• Special Teams tackling. Defensive tackling.
• Brett Favre running the offense. No, I don’t think I’m a coach, and I don’t have a better plan than Childress does, but maybe Favre does…it seemed like in the 2^nd half, when Favre was allowed to open up and play his style of game, things moved along much nicer in the offense. And this didn’t mean that the run was abandoned; it just worked better, as the pass opened it up more. Old school football knowledge says you run to open up the pass, but this season, when the Vikings have been successful, they’ve passed to open up the run.

 

That’s almost all for now; congratulations if you’ve managed to make it this far!  One final head-scratching thought: if Brad Childress wanted to take a chance that if they lost, would’ve taken the heat off his team and moved it all to him, or could’ve made him a hero if they won, he could’ve gone for two after Sidney Rice’s TD catch with under 20 seconds left. If they were successful and came out with the win, the talk would’ve been about how gutsy he was, and what a tremendous comeback was led by #4. If they had failed, the talk would’ve been about what a dumb decision he made, and how it ruined the great comeback by #4, rather than focusing on all the other issues the Vikings had throughout the game. Just an interesting option to ponder after the fact…

Posted via web from trueliz's posterous

Perhaps I should've waited a day

I was quite proud of myself for managing to write the Urban Meyer blog just hours after the news, but now it just becomes a tribute of sorts to a current coach, who happens to be on a leave of absence. At least I enjoyed writing it!

Posted via email from trueliz's posterous

Urban Meyer...

I was sitting with my parents & aunt on Saturday night, discussing all the knee-jerk reactions the airline industry was already having to the attempted terrorist attack on the NWA flight in Detroit (which deserves a complete post of its own), when I looked to my phone & saw a new AP news alert text message out of Gainesville, FL "Urban Meyer is stepping down as coach of the University of Florida football team." I did a double, or possibly quadruple take on this text, and quickly switched to my ESPN text feed, to see that they had already posted two messages about Coach Meyer's decision. I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say that I would’ve been less surprised to see a leprechaun next to a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

 

I have always been a fan of both Florida St. & Florida football. I realize if I lived in Florida, that this could get me killed, but as a Minnesota resident, I felt I had the right to cheer for both (behind my favorite hometown Gophers, of course). Florida St. was usually my favorite of the two, especially when former Cretin Derham Hall QB Chris Weinke was there, even though the Gators were my favorite basketball team of the two (still bummed that Teddy Dupay & company did not pull out the 2000 Championship over Michigan St., but just reaching the finals helped me win multiple March Madness pools). That shifted when Urban Meyer arrived in Gainesville. Being a fan of the underdog, I was quite excited about Utah’s big BCS win (see the next paragraph), which somehow led to me becoming a big fan of a dynasty. Go figure. Tim Tebow’s arrival merely cemented the Gators position as 2^nd on my list of teams, ahead of the Seminoles, but Urban Meyer is why they would stay in the spot for me next year & beyond.

 

This is the same Urban Meyer, who brought an undefeated Utah Utes team to a BCS bowl game, in his 4^th year of being a head coach of college football (2^nd year at Utah following 2 years at Bowling Green). Utah is in the Mountain West conference, which makes them an outsider in the BCS conference party. Lead by QB Alex Smith & Meyer’s spread offense, the Utes pounded the Pitt Panthers (out of the BCS member Big East conference) to win the Fiesta Bowl & finish their season with no losses on their record, becoming the first non-BCS team to win one of these bowls. They joined Auburn & Boise St. as three teams undefeated before the bowl games that had no chance to compete for a National Championship, but that would take a few books to write about, not just a blog entry. (USC ended the 2004 season as the “National Champion” with their crushing of Oklahoma, and Boise St. lose their bowl game, leaving Utah, Auburn & USC as the only teams with no blemishes/e)

 

The once feared Florida Gators had been stumbling (especially by their standards) since legendary Coach Steve Spurrier had stepped down (and been humbled in the NFL), being replaced by Ron Zook, whose qualifications included something like being a high school gym teacher, if I remember correctly. The Gators parted ways with Zook after the end of the 2004 bowl season (which is actually in early 2005, which sometimes gets confusing), and courted the hot young Urban Meyer to move east to Gainesville. Meyer was barely 41 yrs old by the time he coached his first Gator football game, but he showed that age was not what mattered for coaching success, nor was a lot of time as a Division I head coach. The Gators finished 9-3 in his first season there, ranked #12 in the AP poll. This still isn’t a successful season in the eyes of Florida fans, but after not even being in the AP poll at the end of the 2004 season (and falling behind rivals Georgia & Florida St., as well as in-state school Miami), this was a leap in the right direction.

 

The 2006 season showed everyone why Florida President Dr. Bernie Machen had wanted Urban Meyer at Florida (Dr. Machen was the Utah president from 1998-2003, so he was very familiar with Meyer already). Behind the solid, but not superstar, senior quarterback Chris Leak, the 12-1 Florida Gators became a surprise contestant in the BCS National Championship game vs. Ohio St. Many thought that the 12-1 Buckeyes should’ve been playing Louisville (12-1), LSU (11-2), USC (11-2), Michigan (12-1, but their only loss had been weeks earlier to Ohio St.) or even the underdog Boise St. Broncos, who once again stood at 13-0 before the bowls, but the BCS computers chose Florida. Oh, I forgot to mention that besides that senior QB Leak, there was a highly recruited freshman out of Nease High School’s football team (he was home schooled for classes), Tim Tebow, who came in to play QB for some plays, including goal-line situations where he could plow through the line, or try one of his never-seen-before jump passes. Tebow would go on to be a decent QB after Leak’s eligibility was exhausted.

 

9 ½ out of every 10 “experts” predicted that Ohio St. would crush the “overrated” Gators. Perhaps Boise St. set the stage for Florida the week before. In the Fiesta Bowl, taking place in the same Glendale, AZ stadium where the National Championship would soon be played, the Broncos somehow found a way to beat the mighty Oklahoma Sooners, who even had the return of their injured running back, Adrian Peterson. Boise outplayed the Sooners, then fell behind late, before some of the most incredible plays in college football led them to an improbable win. Many sports fans would agree that was one of the most fun games (in any sport) that they had ever witnessed. Perhaps it was not merely a coincidence that the underdog wearing blue & orange uniforms pulled out the win.

 

I was lucky enough to be in Florida for a work trip for that National Championship, wearing my blue Gators sweatshirt as I watched the game with my co-workers from our hotel bar. If I believed in gambling of any sort, I might have placed a $5 online bet for the Gators to win, which might have paid out a whopping $20…if I’d ever done that sort of thing. After all the talk about if Florida even belonged in this game, they left everybody with the impression that perhaps Ohio St. didn’t belong in that game. As I recall, Buckeyes kick returner/wr Ted Ginn ran the opening kickoff back for a TD (and injured his foot in the celebration), but Florida didn’t blink, and just set out from there to win the game & finish #1. As a side note, this championship was sandwiched nicely between Billy Donovan’s men’s basketball team winning back-to-back National Championships. It certainly was good to be a Gator!

 

To avoid turning this into a full book, I’ll skip the play-by-play of the following seasons, but Urban Meyer definitely made his mark in college football. Sophomore QB Tim Tebow won the 2007 Heisman Trophy, becoming the first sophomore to win the award, and later became the first player to finish in the top 5 in Heisman voting in 3 different seasons. Urban Meyer has just had a standing flight to New York every year lately for the Heisman Trophy ceremony. They only finished the 2007 season as the #13 team, but they bounced back rather nicely in 2008, winning the National Championship over Oklahoma. This championship was part of an amazing 22-game win streak, started after Tim Tebow’s “Promise” following the loss to Ole Miss (“I’m sorry…I promise you one thing…you will never see a team play harder than we will play the rest of this season. God bless.”) Along with being a fantastic Head Coach & Quarterback combination, Urban Meyer & Tim Tebow had possibly the best bromance in the country! Perhaps this could be explored in a later blog as well.

 

Unfortunately for Gator fans, that 22-game win streak came to an end a few weeks ago in the SEC championship game vs. Alabama, relegating the Gators to the Sugar Bowl, rather than the storybook ending of Tim Tebow riding off into the sunset after a 3^rd National Championship. But while everyone knew that the Sugar Bowl would be the send-off of Tebow, no one thought it would be the last college football game for Urban Meyer. Sure, there were people who thought Urban (named for Pope Urban) would take the Notre Dame job, but he’d turned it down once before, and I had no concerns about that. I had no doubt that the Gators would re-load again next year, even if Coach Meyer was going through Tebow withdrawal (something I am trying to prepare for as well).

 

We have heard that Meyer has health issues, and wants to spend more time with his family, and while it is not life-threatening, the 27 hr a day/8 day a week head coach of football job, is one that provides enough stress to continually put his health at risk. So the man with 2 National Champions (& 3 BCS bowl game wins, hopefully 4 soon), winner of 6 different National Coach of the year awards in 2003 & 2004, and just named Sporting News Magazine’s Coach of the Decade, will be retiring now, at age 45. After the shock has gone away, I will just miss Urban Meyer being a part of college football. I am glad to see him putting his health, faith & family first though, as all too often, we sacrifice all of the above for the job, and somehow the job never shows the same dedication to us when the situation changes. His college-student daughter has already commented that she will be happy to get her daddy back. I wish him & his family nothing but the best, as he goes through this healing process, which will be both physically & mentally difficult. I have a feeling his players might be a little extra inspired for his final game on January 1, against the Cincinnati Bearcats, who already lost their head coach to Notre Dame. Go Gators!

Posted via web from trueliz's posterous

"Strandom" Thoughts - College Basketball edition: WCC, Zags, Trey Thompkins, Wesleyan School & more

I (once again) have neglected this blog for awhile, so I am just going to jot down some college basketball thoughts that are on my mind, just to get back into the swing of it!

• In the first month of this men's college basketball season, there was a lot of talk about the West Coast Conference (WCC) possibly sending more teams to the NCAA tourney than the Pac-10, due to all the solid wins from the conference, including Gonzaga winning the Maui Invitational, San Diego over Stanford & Oklahoma, Portland over Oregon, UCLA & Minnesota, St. Mary's over Oregon (& crushing San Diego St.), and even last year's 3 total wins team, Loyola Marymount, winning at USC (& now at Notre Dame just a few days ago). Even though Portland cooled off after Anaheim with some weak losses, the WCC has still looked strong. My favorite conference might want to erase today from the calendars though...Gonzaga played the 2nd worst game I've seen them play (@Virginia a few yrs ago was the worst in my opinion even though the point totals made today's the worst in over 20 years) in Madison Square Garden vs. Duke, losing 41-76 while shooting 28% overall, 10% on 3's & even a pathetic 48% on free throws. The Portland Pilots were taking on Washington in the evening, with a chance to redeem the conference, a yr after knocking off Washington in Oregon. The Huskies annihilated them though, 89-54 (both Zags & Pilots only had 17 1st half points). University of San Francisco lost the green & gold "USF' battle vs University of South Florida by 20 pts. San Diego lost a lead vs. Southern Illinois to fall by 2 points...but at least Loyola Marymount gave the conference one win for the day (and already their 5th on the season) over Cal State Baskersfield. Yikes.
• Speaking of the Zags & Duke...I am trying to find something redeeming out of the absolutely pathetic game they played in almost all aspects (they actually weren't terrible on defense for much of the game). Here's all I can come up with: They have made a habit of falling behind early this season, and coming back to win (or having a chance to win, such as their 2 pt loss vs. Wake Forest). Perhaps this absolute butt-kicking will hammer home the message that falling behind by double digits & coming back is not the way to have a successful season. It's good to be able to do that, but it's not a best practice to try to make a habit. To keep myself sane, I'm just comparing this game to the Vikings vs. Cardinals 2 weeks ago. Gonzaga just wasn't "there," but hopefully they will show in their next few games that it was an aberration, and not a sign of things to come.
• One final WCC related thought: When Notre Dame looked at their schedule earlier this year and saw they were playing two Los Angeles teams in one week, if you had told them they would be 1-1 in those games, I'm guessing the entire team (& 98% of fans) would've assumed a win over Loyola Marymount & a loss vs. UCLA. Again, this is the LMU team that was one of the worst in the country last year, with those three wins, during the season in which they got a new head coach, who took a medical leave a few wks into the season, quit 2 months later w/o ever returning from that medical leave and then took a Portland Trailblazers asst job the very next week. Yet when the final buzzer sounded in South Bend, Indiana last Saturday night (12/12), the final score was Lions 87, Fighting Irish 85, thanks to a Notre Dame 5-second violation and a game-winning 3 by Jarred DuBois. I was very happy (and surprised) to see LMU get that win, and was even more disappointed that it was not televised anywhere on my 100 DirecTV sports channels, than I had been when I discovered that before the game...yet somehow, I could find a game like Northern Iowa at North Dakota in Grand Forks today (not the North Dakota St. team from Fargo that was in the NCAA tourney last season, the UND team that regularly loses by 40 points in their slow process of acclimating to D1 basketball). Go figure.
• I figure the job of the analyst in a college basketball game is to research stuff about the teams/players, and be able to speak quasi-intelligently about that throughout the game. I realize this often doesn't happen, but the ESPNU team for Saturday's Illinois at Georgia game were selling a local school a little short. Georgia's leading scorer is sophomore F Trey Thompkins (given name Howard Thompkins III, hence "Trey"). Analyst/Former Alabama head coach Mark Gottfried, twice mentioned that Thompkins had gone to high school at Oak Hill Academy (the basketball "factory" school in Virginia that has a long list of former players including Carmelo Anthony, Michael Beasley, Kevin Durant, Brandon Jennings & Rajon Rondo, to name a few), and that Thompkins wanted to be closer to home, so he chose Georgia. While it is true that he went to Oak Hill & he chose Georgia, he skipped a step. Trey had been a student at the Wesleyan School in Norcross, GA, before transferring to Oak Hill for his junior year. After one year in VA, he came back to Wesleyan for his senior year, where he, along with Clemson sophomore G Tanner Smith, led their team to a Class A Georgia State championship. This game was even being played in Duluth, GA rather than on campus in Athens. Duluth is just a few minutes from Norcross (and Duluth is also where Gophers Soph Ralph Sampson III is from, but I digress...). Since my aunt Margaret works at Wesleyan, I know how much fun it is for the school (employees & students) when this is mentioned! Heck, it's fun for me when this is mentioned.
• While on the subject of Norcross, and the Wesleyan School, one other note is on Al-Farouq Aminu, the Soph star for Wake Forest/future NBA lottery picks. Aminu graduated from Norcross High School, immediately across the street from Wesleyan, where he won two 5A state titles. But before he transferred to Norcross his sophomore year of high school, he too was at Wesleyan. So if you look at the freshman on the basketball team in '04-'05 , one is a starter at an SEC school, and two others at ACC schools. Not bad for the little Christian school with barely over 1000 total students, K-12. They also have had many other athletes playing division one sports including former Air Force star RB/WR/KR Chad Hall, Georgia women's basketball player Anna Marie Armstrong & Colorado St. basketball player Chantel Kennedy, just to name a few. When Aunt Margaret told me a few years back that they had some really good basketball players, I was thinking of my high school, which was about the same size, who during my years had some D3 basketball players, and one D1 walk-on player. I soon realized that when she said they were really good, she meant D1 college star athlete type good!

That's all for now. I have many more thoughts stored away on subjects other than college basketball, but it is time to rest the brain once again!