SKÖLIOSIS WEEK 18: Un-Intentional Grounding —  Vikings 9 Lions 31

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.


Dry January Ruins Everything 

Let us start off by saying . . .Ouch. That one hurt. Yep, welcome to 2025, Vikings fans, a year already kicking off to an inauspicious start. After a season defined by an overindulgence in winning and propitious moments, it appears our beloved Purple are embarking on their own Dry January of sorts to kick off the new year. A time when many of us, after barely surviving the gauntlet of the holiday gluttony, decide to hit the reset button and intentionally ground ourselves via a month of sobriety. Are the Vikings planning to go Victory-Sober in January?  Let’s hope not, although this might explain last week’s premature celebration following the Packers victory where the team hoisted Sammy Darnold upon their shoulders and doused him with non-alcoholic fluids.  

Perhaps they were trying to tell us something.  A harbinger celebration informing us to keep those bottles of champagne locked up because this is the end of the fun part of this season's ride. What a difference a year makes, eh?  Just one week ago we celebrated Sammy D as our Ginger Jesus Savior, the first QB to get 14 wins with a new team. Media pundits were adding his name as a late entry to the MVP ballots and discussing what kind of megabucks contract it was going take to keep him. 

Alas, 2025 rolled in with its inexplicable creepy toxic fog blanketing most of our country and we found ourselves only a week later calling our Dry January sobriety sponsors to talk us down from cracking open a bottle of Jack Daniels (a mere 5 days into the month) to drown our sorrows after a loss so defeating we are all questioning if we were ever actually any good. Maybe a week of sobriety was all we needed for the beer goggles to wear off and to see this team for what it really is: not the gorgeous bombshell we all thought it was.   

To Be Intentional, or Not to Be Intentional

Sunday night's game will likely be remembered by many for Jared Goff’s uncalled intentional grounding in our own end zone, which should have resulted in a safety. But instead reminded us that there is no safety in loving the Minnesota Vikings. Not ever. The Purple are a loaded weapon to be handled with care, bound to eventually blow up in our face. This is what we get for falling in love too fast.  For being too clingy.  It’s as if they sensed we were getting too attached, leaving a toothbrush in their medicine cabinet, taking over a drawer in the bedroom for some of our stuff and they decided to sabotage the relationship before we started going to brunch with their mom. It’s not me, it’s you.  

That’s why what was even more painful than the uncalled Jared Goff intentional grounding was the 23 unintentional groundings Sam Darnold threw. Finishing 18-41, Sam Darnold air mailed so many passes Sunday he may have logged enough hours to get his pilot’s license.  At this rate, if Sammy is going to be tossing more passes to ghosts than actual receivers, we may need to consider luring Dave “the Ghost” Casper to come out of retirement for a few weeks.  

The fact that Sammy’s dud performance came on the biggest stage yet, in what was billed as the biggest regular season NFL game of all time, only made it worse for Vikings fans.  He was like the new boyfriend you finally bring home to meet the family and he proceeds to get too drunk and pukes on your parents' new carpet.  We should have known this was coming when we realized our TikTok and Instagram algorithms were all Viking fanboy fodder and we were gobbling it all up like the Pie Eating Kid in Stand By Me.  We were getting in too deep, high on our own supply, and Detroit was the castor oil that broke the dam. 

While it's easy to blame Sam and the refs for a lot of missed calls, the reality is that everything that could go wrong went wrong Sunday.  We were a step slower, an inch shorter, an IQ point lower, missing one of the g’s in our swagger.  Something was just off, as we missed the spark that’s been there all season. Even in our previous two losses, we at least played with conviction.  But this game we felt… hesitant.  Is it possible that perhaps this crash landing wasn’t an unintentional grounding, but very much an intentional grounding for the Purple?  A throw away game meant to avoid a sack of our over-confident psyche at the wrong time.  We’re not suggesting KOC threw the game by any means, but is it possible they made a conscious effort to fight left-handed, knowing we’ll likely have to see the Lions again on a path to the Super Bowl? Did we decide to save all of our best punches for round 3?  One can only hope.

Let’s Go 1 - 0

Interestingly enough, Kevin O’Connell’s mantra to a Vikings team no one believed in coming into the year, has been “Let’s go 1-0.”  Another way of saying let’s take things one step at a time, which incidentally is the same philosophy most recovery addicts live by and that us fake sober wannabes adopt for January. 

Which is great and all, but also probably debunks our hope that KOC is thinking two games ahead and setting up the Lions for the rematch. Which is the one major flaw in the “Let’s go 1-0” mindset.  When you're playing billiards, you want to make your shot, but also set up your next shot.  As dumb as Dan Campbell sometimes comes off, his Lions clearly have been playing chess all season, planting seeds and traps throughout the year.  Many even speculated their sole reason for playing their starters in last week's 49ers game, a game they didn’t need to win, was to mess with the Vikings heads going into this game.  Like boxers trying to intimidate each other at the weigh-in leading up to a fight, Campbell took his team to San Fran in tight underwear filled with supersized unmentionables.  

Could it be possible that even the Sexy Jake Bates show in last week's game was all a ploy to get in Will Reichard’s head, a space usually reserved for sweet Sydney Sweeney dreams going into this week. If so, well played Detroit. Well played. Because “Will the Thrill” looked like he’s going to need not one, but a few pills to chill after this week's performance.   

J.J. On Deck

Then again, maybe KOC and Kwesi are playing chess. What happens when you have a great plan that's actually sabotaged by having too much success too early?  These guys laid out a solid rebuilding plan going into this year, drafting our new young stud QB of the future and picking up a journeyman QB on the cheap for him to learn behind for one year.  One thing we are learning in the NFL is you have to be careful overpaying QBs.  You need to be able to surround them with talent for them to succeed.  Case in point, look at Joe Burrow who would be the runaway MVP this year if he had a defense, but instead missed the playoffs.  By jettisoning Kirk Cousins and his $25+ million-dollar cap hit the Vikings were able to spend on free agent guys like Jonathan Greenard and Andrew Van Winkel and Sam Darnold, plus others, for the same amount of money they would have paid Kirk. Three Pro-Bowlers and 2 starters in return for a guy that got benched this year once his supporting cast was gone.  

KOC’s and Kwesi’s plan was working well. Too well. Suddenly Sam is 14-2 making it nearly impossible to swap him out for an unproven rookie. Not to mention, what kind of position does this put J.J. in if you want to build his confidence.  Throwing him in as a follow-up act to what Sam just put on will have a fan-base restless quickly if he is anything short of perfect.  Maybe KOC and company needed to neuter Sam in front of us, allowing us to be okay with the original plan they had outlined before going into an offseason feeling the pressure to pay the guy $40-$50 million a year, when they know they can do it without him.  Maybe this game was KOC’s way of reminding Sam, “I made you, and I can unmake you, so don’t get too greedy come negotiations time.”  

Which may also explain why sideline cameras caught a suddenly very handsome J.J. McCarthy looking a lot like OC from Miracle, as if a PR group did a fashion make-over to mold this kid targeted to a fanbase that loves its football with a heavy side dish of hockey.  Did this kid get plastic surgery while they were repairing his knee?  Did they do calf implants?  Where do we get what he is having? 

It was probably no coincidence that we had a USA World Junior Championship going on at the very same time as the Vikings game, subliminally reminding us that we like our QB’s to have flow. And by flow we mean awesome hair, and a tough Brian “Flo”-res Defense that we can afford.  

Timshel

All this is not to say we are giving up on the Ginger Jesus. Not this season anyway.  Nope, we are along for the ride, until the very end.  In John Steinbeck’s classic novel East of Eden, he referenced the word timshel, a Hebrew word from the Cain and Abel story in Genesis that means “thou mayest,” which means that we have a choice versus “thou shalt” which means “we must” do something.  We always have a choice, which is what makes screwing up so hard, especially in these Dry January days, and a life where we are trying to go 1-0 each day.  Sometimes you lose.  Sometimes you fail.  Sometimes you falter.  But we have a choice to get up and try again.  To forget that we went 0-1 yesterday because today is a new day.  We are 0-0.  The slate is clean.   The new season, the playoffs, starts now.  

Let’s go 1-0.  

Timshel!!  

Skol!!!

Epilogue: Donate to a Good Cause   

Please don’t forget to join us in donating after each Viking win.  

Join us in donating @  https://www.scoliosis.org/donate/

SKOL!!  


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