If anyone knows what it’s like to be a loyal fan of the Purple, it’s the readers of SKÖLIOSIS — your weekly reminder that being a Vikings fan is bad for your health.

Happy New Year and welcome to the future Viking fans!! Rejoice, 2024 is here. Thankfully we have leaped forward a year since our annual end of the year drubbing at the hands of the Green Bay Packers. Which apparently is a New Year’s tradition now with this latest beating being our THIRD consecutive year of getting trounced by the Packers in Week 17. For those of you that don’t remember, or that are choosing to employ your selective memory option and have buried these memories deep in your mental castle attic, those losses included the following.

2021 Season – Week 17: Packers 37, Vikings 10. (Sean Mannion subbing for Covid Kirk Cousins)

2022 Season – Week 17: Packers 41, Vikings 17. (Kirk Cousins actually played)

2023 Season – Week 17: Packers 33, Vikings 10. (Jared Hall AND Nate Mullens)

Fortunately, we got this loss out of the way officially in 2023 so we can officially bury it under the rug of LAST YEAR, with the rest of the purple horrors 2023 had to offer. And lucky for us, 2023 is now officially in the past. Let bygones be bygones.

In fact, let it be known that two of those three losses actually occurred in 2023. As the 2022 Season butt kicking technically took place on January 1st of 2023. Which means we got to START 2023 on the very first day of the year with a Packer beat down, and we got to FINISH 2023 with a nearly identical beat down on the very last day of the year, December 31st, New Year’s Eve. A 23-point loss to finish 2023. It’s safe to say the year 2023 has been taunting us. Or the Packers have been taunting us. Probably both.

Clearly, Green Bay losses to begin and end the year are not exactly the bookend set to a year that any of us purple fans want.

Maybe we are meant to learn from this though. Maybe 2023 and the Packers were trying to teach us something. One thing we know for sure is that when the 2024 season schedule comes out, if we see the Vikings and Packers playing week 17, perhaps we should all take a lesson from Biff Tannen’s Sports Almanac ploy and bet big on the Packers. That much should be obvious. Especially after last week’s New Year’s game debacle where we got a glimpse of the future, and it did not look promising for those of us that are lactose intolerant.

Perhaps however, these bookend Packer beatdowns in 2023 were meant to be the Universe hitting us with the proverbial sledgehammer, telling us to take notice. Showing us the road map to success we need to follow. Telling us that we should be looking at our perpetually overachieving brothers to our East for the roadmap to success we should be following.

Yep, it seems 2023 was trying to tell us that we need to look at the Pack for our Future.

Decision 2024

2024 is an election year after all. A year when a lot of big decisions about our future need to be made. Both for our country, and perhaps more importantly, for our Purple. Who is going to be our leader going forward? Are we going to stick with the OLD guy, or bring in some fresh blood? Or maybe try one of the other guys we already tried before and see if we have better luck next time?

2023 offered us a glimpse of a future without Captain Kirk at the helm of our Viking ship and the results were not pretty. Sure, it had its moments with the Passtronaut leading us to a couple exciting wins before crashing back to earth. After which we had Nick Mullens step in which turned out to feel a lot like seeing Biff Tannen’s alternative future or not unlike watching a horse running loose in a hospital.

After watching a horse run loose in a hospital felt like too much chaos, we briefly tried something new, the Jaren Hall-way of Horrors that inexplicably quickly made us actually miss the excitement of watching the horse run loose in the hospital.

All of which seemed to exacerbate why these Packer whoopings are so painful. Why they were so especially frustrating. They are like getting beaten up by your bigger more accomplished sibling that your parents always seem to ask why your not more like. Because they remind us of what we have struggled with over our history, what we are not. Which is “consistent”. The Purple struggle with being consistent. Well, unless you count being consistently frustrating. Or consistently disappointing. Over our team history’s the Packers have won FOUR Superbowls to our ZERO. And even more frustatingly, over the last 30 years they have had extremely consistent Quarterback play, employing 3 starters over that time. Brett Farve from 1992 to 2007 with 2 Super Bowl Wins. Aaron Rodgers from 2007 to to 2022 with another Super Bowl win. And now Jordan Love, who while this was his first year as a starter and who started the year slow, has shown to enough to likely be a force to be reckoned with the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile during that same time frame, previous to Kirk Cousins arrival, the Vikings have started 20+ Quarterbacks with again, zero Super Bowls to show for it.

Utlimately, what I think 2023 was meant to show us is that we NEED Kirk. It’s helped us appreciate what we got. It’s helped us realize that we need to get Back to Kirk for our Future. For now anyway. Yes, we should also 100% draft a young QB stud in the upcoming draft. Whether it be Michael Penix (who already looks good in Purple) or Caleb Williams or Drake Maye or J.J. McCarthy or Bo Nix or Jayden Daniels. We should absolutely draft one of those guys, and similar to the Packers strategy, sit them on the bench behind their current starter and let them learn. As Rodgers did behind Favre and now Love did behind Rodgers. Lets get our guy, but lets keep Kirk. Lets support him for 2 to 3 more years to see if he can win one for us. I believe he can. But not alone. Ideally he is smart enough to recognize he can’t do it without some help and he is willing to come down on his contract, much like Tom Brady did many times late in his career. Then we can use that money to strengthen our D and fill all our other needs.