SKÖLIOSIS WEEK 16: 13 Timers Club — Vikings 27 Seattle 24
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.
13 Wins Club
Martin Short, the longtime Saturday Night Live Legend, entered the Five Timers Club this past Saturday. Which if you didn’t know, is an exclusive club for those that have hosted SNL five times or more. It is an SNL evening where the inductee is greeted by the other members of the five timers club and given a Masters style smoking jacket with the number 5 emblem on it. Saturday also happened to be the Winter Solstice, the “shortest” day of the year. Well, the day with the least daylight anyway. We aren’t sure if SNL meant to celebrate Mr. Short on the shortest day of the year, but if they did we applaud them for it.
Meanwhile, the very next day our own Kevin O’Connell entered an exclusive club of his own, so exclusive in fact that thus far he is the first and only member of it. On Sunday, KOC became the first and only coach of the Minnesota Vikings to have two 13+ win seasons. Denny Green brought us the 15 win season in ‘98. Mike Zimmer a 13 winner in 2017, the Minnesota Miracle season. Now KOC has brought us two of them in the last three years. Not bad for a guy only in his Junior Year here in the Purple State. (For what it's worth, Bud Grant had four 12 win seasons back in the 14 game era, which factoring for inflation would clearly put him on top of this list otherwise…)
The 13th Man
For Sunday's game, perhaps taking a note from SNL’s sense of poetic symbolism, the NFL scheduled Coach O’Connell and the Vikings to travel to Seattle, the Home of the 12s, to earn their 13th win. Yep, Seattle, a city filled with corporate yuppy soldiers from Starbucks, Amazon, and Microsoft somehow prides itself on being a home crowd so loud and intimidating that they effectively become the 12th Man (hence referring to themselves as the 12s, cough, cough, dorks) on the field for their hometown Seahawks. Which they believe gives them a competitive advantage over anyone that dares play in front of them as they sip their venti coffees and order beard oils off of Amazon from their android phones that ruin text threads everywhere.
Which, come to think of it, is that why Seattle dons the blue and bright (action) green color scheme? Is it because they take pride in ruining family and corporate text threads across the world? That is diabolical. Maybe the 12s indeed are a force to be reckoned with after all.
Credit where credit is due though, it was indeed loud at Lumen Field Sunday. It felt like a playoff game, which the Purple barely squeaked out, and if we don’t win out and capture that number one seed, there is a decent chance we could be travelling right back to Seattle for an actual playoff game in a few weeks…
But maybe it's time we stop worrying about who and where we play. Because KOC is proving to be a force to be reckoned with, propelling himself to the front of the COY (Coach of the Year) list with his second 13 win season. We hope Kevin wears size 13 shoes because Coach O’Connell now owns a pair of 13’s for life. Actually, for a guy with the third highest winning percentage all time in one score games, it’s probably safe to assume the guy has size 13 feet among other things. Does Coach K also now get a custom 13 Oz Starbucks size when he orders his coffees? It looks like they have one named after Martin Short already after all. Can we officially call the 13oz size the Skoli, somewhere between the Tall and the Venti size? Perhaps, but let’s not stop at 13 wins Coach. Let’s add a fourteener or even better another fifteen-er to the list. Getting another 15 win season would be another cool way to honor Randy Moss to boot, the catalyst for our only 15 win season in history thus far. (BTW - We are only talking about regular season accomplishments here…)
Regardless where we go from here, 13 wins is an accomplishment. Kudos to KOC and Purple Sunshine Gang.
Optimism Mafia
O’Connell’s winning recipe is proving to be pretty reliable at this point. So much so, that after years of expecting heartbreak, we find ourselves suddenly, dare I say, expecting to win. Especially when games are close, where Coach K’s teams excel, now with a 25-9 record in one score games, second only to John Madden and Guy Chamberlin. As a result, there is a new Purple optimism that seems to be spreading like a new Covid variant amongst the Purple faithful. Sunday, I watched the game with a Gustavus College buddy and his Motley Crew of derelict friends, affectionately known as the Hopkins Mafia, a group not traditionally known for their overt optimism over my years of knowing them. In fact, usually it’s recommended to babyproof your Ego before hanging with this gang of dirtballs who prey on any emotional outlet left unguarded. But Sunday I was surprised to see most of them lobbing positive proclamations into the air throughout the game like some sort of snowball fight with snowballs packed with affirmations. Things like “Oh we got this, the Vikes are a 2nd Half Team” or “Sammy Darnold has ice in his veins, he only needs two minutes” before another added “sounds like Taylor”.. Dammit. Forgot to babyproof the basement. Point being, Coach Kevin seems to be harvesting a new strain of positivity we haven’t seen in these parts before. One a little more resistant to the deep cold winter of doom and gloom we are used to.
J.J McJefferberry doing the McCringleberry, Camp Rock and the Nutcracker
Can we talk about seeing Justin Jefferson do a Gritty Staredown. This was the evolution of the gritty we didn’t know we needed. It must be like having the guy in the urinal next to you just staring at you in the eyes as he pee’s, a weird sort of alpha move that makes you use the stalls next time.
Full confession, I usually have no idea what the Defensive celebrations are until I see them later on the TikToks. But do we need to know what Disney kids movie they reference to still enjoy them? The answer is no. We do not. I thought the Camp Rock dance was the Nutcracker.
Speaking of the Nutcracker, did anyone else notice what looked like an apparent assault on Jason Myers nether parts after his missed 60 yard field goal?
At the 15 second mark it appears he topples over in pain and looks at a Viking defender running away. Perhaps it was just an extremely delayed flop attempt in hopes of getting an unsportsmanlike penalty, who knows.
A Complete Unknown
Ultimately, we aren’t sure where this season will end of course. Another one and done in the playoffs would certainly not be surprising for us Viking fans who have already built purple doomsday bunkers down into the depths of our souls. Most have us have been trained to remove our icehouses off the frozen lakes early, not trusting the depth of the Viking success to last through the playoffs.
Call us suckers though, but it feels a little like it could be Minnesota’s year. Hell, we have a Bob Dylan bio pick steamrolling for Oscar contention. Albeit one starring a noodle boy as Bob Dylan.
But that’s the fun of each season, right? The ending is a mystery. A Complete Unknown. But if KOC keeps doing what he’s doing, we may see a lot of icehouses staying out on the ice deep into the season.
SKOL!!!
Epilogue: Donate to a Good Cause
Please don’t forget to join us in donating to the National Skoliosis Foundation after each Viking win.
Visit https://www.scoliosis.org/donate/
SKOL!!
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