SKÖLIOSIS Week 7—Cowboys 20, Vikings 16.

We made it. We’ve reached a different level of losing with this Vikings season. 

Stuck In Rush Hour

Last night the Vikings were beaten by something called a Cooper Rush. More specifically, we were beaten by Cooper Rush’s entire family, including his beautiful wife and father. Rush’s dad reached a Caddyshack-gopher level of giddy once the game was firmly in hand.  

Keep in mind, before last night Cooper Rush had started as many NFL games as Cooper Manning. When Dak Prescott was ruled out, the line actually swung to make the Vikings favorites. This was Cooper Rush, after all. Cooper Rush!

Was it just me or did seeing Rush’s attractive wife in the stands, make him seem somehow more virile—more dangerous? Like you wanted to just wave your hand and be all, “Oh, Cooper Rush is going to beat us, I’m so scared,” but then his beautiful wife logged about twenty minutes of screen time on NBC and you were like, “Well, if he figured that out, he might just figure this out too.” 

Sinking To Despondent Depths

In a season filled with amazing lows, last night’s Halloween primetime loss to Cooper Rush’s Dallas Cowboys was serious enough that any Vikings fan should legitimately take inventory. It’s time to look in the mirror and ask yourself where things are at. You can start by answering this multiple-choice question:  

Which statement best describes your personal experience as a Vikings fan this season? 

a)     Like eating a B.L.T. sandwich, but the “T” is tinfoil instead of tomato

b)    Death by a thousand paper cuts 

c)     Like watching paint dry for an entire day, only you end up being 5 yards short on the amount of paint you needed. You don’t find out about the paint shortage until you’ve already spent the entire day watching paint dry   

d)    All of the above. 

Yeah, things have gotten weird with Vikings fans after this particular loss. I had one buddy text our group chat about Cousins:  I FEEL WE ARE WASTING OUR LIVES WITH COUSINS. 

WE’VE ONLY GOT LIKE 40 MORE CHANCES FOR A SUPER BOWL. NEED SOMEONE BETTER. 

The silver lining here is that one of my buddies apparently thinks we’re all going to live to eighty-seven years old—clearly he hasn’t been keeping tabs on how we are choosing to live our lives. He is from San Francisco though, so maybe he knows about some Elon Musk X Terrell Owens electric hyperbaric chamber collaboration that we don’t know about yet. One of the other guys on the thread actually felt the need to reply, 40 SEEMS AMBITIOUS. 30 SEEMS MORE ACCURATE. 

Another Vikings fan sent me a text explaining his need for a total reset: 

I AM STRUGGLING WITH THIS GAME. IT ACTUALLY HAS ME LEGITMATELY UPSET. I FEEL LIKE THEY ARE STARTING TO MESS WITH MY MARRIAGE. THAT GAME MIGHT HAVE BROKEN ME, LIKE I NEED TO DO A CALVIN RIDLEY OR THE OLYMPIC GYMNAST GIRL AND TAKE A BREAK FOR MY MENTAL HEALTH. 

Serving Up A Full-Size Trick On Halloween 

A big part of the pain of this week’s Vikings loss to the Cowboys was that it happened on Halloween night. Halloween night is a time as parents we should all be walking around the crowded neighborhood, pulling a wagon with some chilled IPAs, and having a nice little Pixar style evening that’s as fun for the grown-ups as it is the kids. Nope. The Vikings took care of that. Watching that game was like a razor blade in your Snickers. 

Angry Kirk 

If there’s anyone who best represents this season for the Vikings, it has to be Kirk Cousins. Mr. Mediocre continues to be incapable of getting the job done. He’s more than capable of almost getting the job done, but still consistently chooses the safe five-yard check down on 3rd down over risking something bad happening by trying to actually win the game. It reminds me of that Chris Stapleton lyric, 

“But nobody wins afraid of losing
& the hard roads are the ones worth choosing”

Appropriately, the name of that Stapleton song, “Starting Over.” Now there’s an idea. 

It didn’t help that Prescott’s warmup video, the one where the Cowboys decided he shouldn’t play had more swagger than Cousins did in the entire game, or that NBC quickly flashed a stat reminding us that Cousins quarterback rating was league average and he was something like 4-15 when trailing by a touchdown at the end of a game.

There was something interesting going on with Cousins last night though. One has to wonder if he listened to seemingly every ad on the radio these days and went in to see if he had low testosterone. Cousins was uncharacteristically angry throughout the night. Perhaps a focus group or his pastor told him he should show more emotion? It seemed the only thing Cousins liked more than the check down last night was spiking the ball. Angry Kirk was spiking the ball like Gronk to stop the clock. The only problem was that he was still our quarterback for the next play. Cousins appeared to be jacked up on speed, or at least as Prednisone Z-Pak as he overthrew receivers all night and had back pimple levels of rage we haven’t seen from him since his shoving match with Zimmer. 

On the bright side, At least Cousins ruined another perfectly good Diggs boy, ending Dallas cornerback Trevon Diggs interception string and making him look pretty average all night. It makes sense, this is right in Cousins’ wheel house—as he’s proven to be very effective at not throwing to an open Diggs over the last few years. 

Cooper to Cooper 

Anyone who has spent a lifetime as a Vikings fan heard the news that Cooper Rush was starting at quarterback, and somewhere in the deep recesses of your brain next to all the mixed field goals, you had this thought, “Cooper to Cooper! Cowboys win!” Admit it, you could hear Collinsworth yelling that well before Carrie Underwood and her hoop earrings kicked things off for NBC. And that’s precisely how it went down. 

So Much Cushion 

Looking at the amount of cushion the Vikings defensive backs were giving up to the Cowboys receivers last night you had to wonder if Mike Lindell was running the defense instead of Mike Zimmer. Baushaud Breeland was the prime offender, and he topped it off by not catching in one game as many interceptions as Diggs has had all season. On the positive side, we do like how Breeland rolls up his pants above his knees like shorts. That’s pretty cool. 

Why Do We Keep Doing This? 

Seven games into the season the Vikings have assumed the role of the popular pretty girl in ‘80s movies like Some Kind of Wonderful and Teen Wolf. Every Sunday taking  our attention away from what really matters even though underneath it all they don’t have any substance. They give us just enough to command our attention, as we continue to blow right past all the more productive things we could have been doing. 

It’s bad enough to watch the misery on television, we can only imagine what it must be like if you wasted even more time attending the game in person at US Bank stadium. Although, maybe when you attend in person you just crush edibles and wait for it to be over. This Vikings fan seemed to be dealing with the pain better than most. 

Pec’d to Death 

Watching last night’s loss was like being pecked to death by a duck. Topping it off our pass rush had its worst day of the year compounded by losing Danielle Hunter for the season - from a torn pectoral. Hunter’s pec was most likely torn when the Vikings ripped our hearts out like something from Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. After last night it seems Hunter may be the only Viking getting a trophy this season, if pec muscle atrophy counts. 

Where Do We Go From Here? 

Like many I spent last night wasting several hours watching another Vikings game that was executed on the script for the season: score on the first drive, just get field goals the rest of the time, play prevent defense, mismanage the clock, only to ultimately check-down our way to a loss. It’d be one thing if they lost big, or (can you imagine!) won big—but that’s not the 2021 Vikings script, as each loss is somehow worse because they’re all essentially the exact same game. 

As I arrived upstairs after the game, my wife simply asked a fair question, “Why do you do this? Why do you even watch? You know what’s going to happen. You know what they’re going to do.”

My reply, “They’re the worst.” 

Somehow even if we played the same game it would have been better had we lost to the 5-1 Cowboys with Dak Prescott at quarterback. Which begs another multiple-choice question for Vikings fans:

After the Vikings 3-4 start and another predictable loss, what is your plan for the rest of the season? 

a)    Cheer for Adrian Peterson and the Tennessee Titans

b)    Root for Herschel Walker to get elected to the Georgia senate 

c)    Listen to our wives. Give up, and take back our Sundays. 

d)    All of the above. 

Truth is that’s a false choice. We are Vikings fans, this is what we do. Unlike our neighbors in Wisconsin, the Vikings don’t have Ray Nitschke, we have Nietzsche. And we hope, “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.” So, we will do what Vikings fans do. We will close our chest cavity, taping our one good pectoral up with duct tape and bandages and hope our purple hearts keep beating for at least one more week. 

If you’re feeling the same way we are, we offer you the medication of Gang of Youths’ “The Heart is a Muscle.” With lyrics like these, lead singer David Le’aupepe mine as well be talking about the purple: 

“Cause I wanna overcome
And try to love someone

I will not spend the years depleted of my willingness to try
It won't hurt this way forever, it ain't worth the overtime
I'm not looking for redemption nor some shallow kind of bliss
Lay me down and kiss me deeply, show me everything I missed

I haven't had enough . . .

. . .'Cause the heart, the heart, the heart
The heart is a muscle
And I wanna make it strong”

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