SKÖLIOSIS WEEK 9—Movember Reign—Vikings 31 Atlanta 28
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.
Reign.// (rein) / noun. The period during which a monarch is the official ruler of a country or nation. A period during which a person or thing is dominant, influential, or powerful: the reign of violence is over.
Sunday was a weird day. A transitional day, marked by being the first day after Day Light Savings, or was it Day Light Endings? I always forget which is which. Maybe it just depends on whether you’re an optimist or pessimist, a cup half full half or empty kind of thing. But either way, Day Light Savings was the perfect metaphor for the end of an era (get well soon, Kirk), the false start to another (you too, Jaren), and the possible birth of a third (welcome to Minnesota, Mr. Dobbs). Sunday marked the first weekend after Halloween, when people were taking down their ghosts, goblins and skeleton Halloween decorations and the unofficial signal for Targets and Walmarts to immediately begin stocking their shelves with Christmas decorations.
Halloween = a holiday celebrating death, or the end of things.
Christmas = a holiday celebrating birth, the start of new things.
Hmm. Maybe there’s something to this.
Sunday was a fitting day to mark the official end of Kirk Cousins reign at QB1 for the Purple (for this season anyway). A reign that lasted over 5 years and provided us stability at a position we had lacked for nearly two decades previously. Consider the list of names filling the position over the previous 20 years included Sean Mannion, Shaun Hill, Josh Freeman, Spergon Wynn, Kelly Holcomb, Brooks Bollinger, Joe Webb, Todd Bouman, Donovan McNabb, Matt Cassel, Gus Frerotte, Tarvaris Jackson, Case Keenum, Sam Bradford, Christian Ponder, Teddy Bridgewater, Brett Favre, Brad Johnson, and Daunte Culpepper. That’s 20 different names in 20 years! Names that as most of you read aloud probably elicited a momentary nervous tick, or possibly caused your emotional support pet to perk up and make sure you were okay as they sensed an elevated heart rate or shortness of breath.
Sunday also marked the end of the first week of Movember. An annual movement that involves men growing mustaches during the month of November to raise awareness of men’s health issues such as prostrate cancer, testicular cancer and men’s suicide. The goal of Movember is to “change the face of men’s health” one whisker at a time. Which is sort of ironic as the real epidemic facing men’s health, as we’ve learned here at Sköliosis, is being a Minnesota Vikings fan. This purple affliction is most often a hereditary ailment passed down to generations by older Vikings fans, but also has proven to be contagious if too much time is spent hanging out in Minnesota. It’s an ailment marked by occasional victorious extreme highs resulting in intermittent states of euphoria, only to ultimately and inevitably, without fail, abruptly pull the rug out, leaving its victims in a state of extreme disappointment.
So to recap, Monday was the first day after day light savings. The first weekend between holidays celebrating death and life. And the first week of Movember, a month signifying “re-growth.” Damn, this column is turning into an episode of True Detective. You’re welcome!
What does it mean then, that the new face of this team’s transition is Joshua Dobbs, a man with Alopecia Areata, a condition that causes hair loss or prevents hair growth from some or all of his body? How do we process our new QB1 admirably battling an autoimmune disease defined by hairlessness joining our team whose mascot is a literal hairy man, in the month of Movember!!!
And what does it mean, that the month Movember, with the word MOVE in it, can literally be a trigger for Josh, a “suitcase” NFL player who has MOVED so many times in the last few years that he is probably spending Thanksgiving with his 2 Guys and Truck team, and that his career history page over the same amount of time as Kirk has been QB1 in Minnesota, looks like its own concert tour t-shirt.
And what does it mean that a week ago Josh was playing in Arizona, the only state that does not acknowledge day light savings?
Okay, we’ve moved past True Detective, we’re into The X-Files now.
We don’t know what it means in the long run, but we can tell you what it meant this past Sunday.
It meant . . .
Utter Dobbination
Well, dobbination might be a little strong. Maybe “Defying all Dobbs” would be more appropriate? All we know is it was something to behold. A truly epic performance by a guy whose November had been No-Practice November, because he hadn’t even taken a snap or a rep with the team since arriving. He didn’t throw a pass to any of the guys all week. He didn’t even know the names of most of the guys in the huddle.
It's hard to emphasize how impressive his performance was Sunday. Especially for those that have never played any organized football. But it’s a little like a reoccurring dream I sometimes have that I am late to a Spanish test and I show up only to realize I haven’t been to any classes yet and haven’t studied at all. I’ve had similar dreams about football actually, that I’m suddenly in a game but I don’t know any of the plays the team is calling. It’s panic inducing. This feeling of total lack of preparation catching up with you. And Joshua Dobbs, our beautiful astronaut quarterback, had to live that dream in real life because of no fault of his own. He showed up for a test he never got to study for and somehow aced it, leading his team to 31 points, a season high this year we may add, with a motley crew of a supporting cast.
Red Zone / Red Wedding
But let’s back up a little. So far this Viking season has been proving to be a lot like a Game of Thrones season. We don’t know who the main character is. We have no idea who the hero is going to be. Right when we like a guy, and we think he’s the guy, he gets killed (a.k.a. carted) off. Sunday’s game in particular felt like the Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones, where nearly everyone we’d started to like were all written off the show in one fell swoop. After already losing Kirk and JJ2K, We lost K.J. Osborn to a nasty looking motionless concussion and Cam Akers to yet another Achilles injury. Even T.J. Hockenson teetered on the edge of trouble with an apparent rib injury. All week, and early in the game we rallied ourselves around Jalen Hall, the rookie with a relaxed vibe and maturity beyond his years. We hoped Hall might be our next Tom Brady or Brock Purdy. Getting more excited as we watched him lead the Vikings on a scoring drive on their second possession only to get knocked out of the game with a concussion on the goal line of that drive.
When Josh came in and looked lost and confused, Kevin O’Connell paced the sidelines with a look of exasperation and hopeless in his eyes that had me assuming we were going to be treated to 3 hours of a comedy of errors. I admittedly couldn’t bear to watch, feeling like watching Dobbs go out there was going to be like watching a bad beginner improv comedy class or watching a third understudy have to fill in for a play performance without knowing any of the lines. I flipped to NFL Redzone, entrusting them to let me know if anything important was transpiring. For a while the cuts were just more disaster. Safeties and turnovers, injuries and various other horrors. Every cut back to the Vikings had the feeling of seeing the military guys coming to your door with a postal letter and folded flag, knowing bad news was on the way.
Man of Many Faces
As a result of all the injuries, it’s been hard to figure out the identify of this team. Who are we? Hell, who can blame Josh Dobbs for not knowing the names of his teammates, most of us have been following the team all year and I have no idea who most of them are. With new guys like Brandon Powell and Trishton Jackson stepping in after injuries, and new arrivals like Cam Akers arriving each week, it’s been a season of rotating faces in new positions. The 2023 Vikings are like a snake shedding its skin weekly, a fluid face shifting entity. Like the man of many faces in Game of Thrones, morphing or becoming something different every week.
The other frequent nightmare I’m probably not alone in having is one where I can’t move, or I move like molasses. Each step feeling like it’s in quicksand as someone is chasing you or you are trying to hurry to something but it feels like each of your legs weighs 200 lbs and is a chore to lift. Despite Kirk Cousins impressive stats, watching him play in a collapsing pocket often felt like those nightmares and could be challenging to watch. It was the biggest glaring weakness of Kirk’s game, and the one thing many of us craved when we’d watch Pat Mahomes skitter around behind his line of scrimmage buying time to find receivers or taking off to scramble for a first down, single handedly taking over games when needed. Kirk has never had that that gear. If his offensive line collapsed, there was not much he could do. And at $50 million a year, Kirk’s contract has made it restrictive to surround him with enough talent to buy him that kind of time. It’s the biggest grievance many of us Purple fans have carried against him. We have fantasized of having someone mobile, that could buy a little extra time and make plays with their legs. A desire only amplified with the anemic running game we’ve had this year. So who better to fill that gap, than a guy who is good at MOVING. Yes, moving is something Josh Dobbs has proved to be adept at throughout his career and he proved it in spades on Sunday.
Terminator 2
So maybe just maybe Josh is the perfect guy to be the new face of a faceless team. A shape shifting team in transition. Maybe Josh is our Terminator 2. Our liquid metal smooth criminal with moves like Jagger, sent back in daylight savings time to stop our misery.
Maybe it’s time we do a reverse Movember, in solidarity with our new leader. And go anti-hairy Viking. Pull out our razors and embrace our liquid killer. Smooth like Jagger.
Its time for a new identity. A new Face.
Vikings Smooth.
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