Thoughts & ruminations on Minnesota football

Would it be possible to get Brad Childress and Glen Mason coaching again?

Football coaches can have a shelf life. It's the entertainment business and the customers get weary of the status quo, when the status quo is something short of a title.

The boomers of Minnesota may be entering uncharted territory with the Vikings. We have always assumed that our purple crew was upper-crust in the league. We grew up with the team inspiring outright awe with its defense.

Even when those standards slipped a little, we always seemed on the threshold - close to the elite. Chronic losing happened in "other places."

We always knew we could roll over the Philadelphia Eagles and their quarterback Pete Liske. We could sack the Chicago Bears' Bobby Douglass. We always knew we could beat Detroit even though the scores were seldom blow-outs.

Del Sarlette once remarked that games against the Lions seemed very boring. It's as if Bud Grant held some sort of spell over them. We'd get a key punt block or interception and come away with a 23-16 win (or something like that).

We fans wrote off the 1984 season as a short-lived departure from the norm. Sarlette says even though he read about bumper stickers reading "Less Steckel," a takeoff on the name "Les Steckel," he never saw any such thing. Come to think of it, I never did either.

We did have a noteworthy bumper sticker out here in western Minnesota: "Where the heck is Cyrus?"

Bumper stickers and T-shirts with local references were rare back then. We have forgotten that. The methods for such things were too limited, just like with "camera film" (Kodak Instamatic?) that you'd take to the drugstore and then maybe wait a week or two to get the pictures. If you did wear a T-shirt with some sort of local reference, it might be a conversation-starter.

Today every summer sports camp in existence gives out a souvenir T-shirt. Likewise with most 5K footraces.

The Cyrus bumper sticker was mirrored at about the same time by Bird Island which came up with more "edgy" wording (LOL): "Where the hell is Bird Island?" There was a little graphic of the state with a star in the appropriate place.

Bud Grant came back to stabilize the Vikings after the Steckel shipwreck. I have always felt the blame couldn't be placed on just one person. The Vikings were perhaps just in a state of flux in '84, and it's not like Grant came back to lead us to the Super Bowl again. His guiding hand seemed comforting to us. It was like the Captain Kirk character in the first of the Star Trek movies, easing aside the younger man for an imposing challenge.

Grant is one of those rare people in the public limelight about whom nothing negative has apparently been said. The boomers gravitated to the Vikings back then and retreated from the Twins and Gophers.

The Twins reached a low point in the late 1970s and early '80s, when boomers were known to make snide remarks - sad when you realize that just ten years earlier, the Twins were a quite prime attraction at the old "Met."

The 1969 season with Billy Martin as manager might have been the last time the Twins seemed grand and glorious, until Billy Gardner led them to a surprising uptick in the mid-1980s. In between we called them the "Twinkies." My friend Art Cruze joked that if you had tickets to a Twins game then, back when Met Stadium was getting rusty and we had outfielders like Rick Sofield, you'd tell your co-workers "well, I won them in a drawing so I figured we better go."

By 1987 the grand and glorious stature was restored. In the meantime, the Vikings never really lost much ground. They never sank to being the butt of jokes.

There's a first time for everything. This year's Vikings won three games, same as in '84, and we nervously wonder if this is an aberration or the start of a long, futile slog.

The owners demand a new stadium. They have the power to scare the heck out of us with such talk. It's working again. Neither political party in Minnesota is going to allow the Vikings to leave on their watch. This kind of leverage seems immoral. I appreciate the Vikings and want them to stay, but I'm willing to risk the flip side.

Sid Hartman coined the famous "cold Omaha" line to create this spectre, presumably horrifying, of what Minnesota would become without big league sports. I suspect we'd be cold with or without the Vikings.
We certainly aren't cold in the Metrodome. We have been spoiled with the dome, assured of quite acceptable conditions regardless of the elements outside. Why can't we all just be happy with that?

Like the redecorating of a restaurant, which business insiders will tell you is necessary periodically, the "new stadium" seems a must every couple decades or so. The Wilfs are holding that symbolic gun to our head now. This is in the wake of a disastrous Vikings season that makes us wonder if we're heading into Detroit Lions territory.

The Lions went into a prolonged funk. Matt Millen was a snakebit general manager. High draft picks were no antidote.

The Lions showed signs of finally gaining vitality this past fall, sort of like Rip Van Winkle waking up. Are schoolkids still required to learn about Rip Van Winkle? I hope so.

The Lions' futility reached such depths, they once had a coach who chose defense when they won the coin flip for overtime. Right now we Vikings fans have to wonder if we're headed into similar territory. In our final game, at our beloved Metrodome, we hosted a Bears team going nowhere, quarterbacked by a backup who earlier this fall was coaching high school football, and lost.

We were supposed to feel excited about Jared Allen's statistical milestone with sacks. Congratulations Jared Allen, but the team's fortunes supersede yours.

Announcers talked excitedly about Joe Webb, but he couldn't rally us to victory. Christian Ponder may be injury-prone. He also may be in over his head. The bottom line is we've reached futility.

Maybe Mike Tice wasn't such a bad coach. Or "Chilly."

One thing is for sure, our Vikings may take on a "chilly" look under Leslie Frazier and their "management by committee," making our neck of the woods seem not so much different from Omaha. Come to think of it, what's wrong with Omaha?

What would it take to get Brad Childress back? Or Glen Mason with the Gophers?
Mason was criticized for only making minor bowl games. We pooh-poohed the likes of El Paso for bowl season. How's the bowling going now, Gophs' fans?
Jerry Kill still seems to be benefiting from a honeymoon. Can't figure that at all.

January is now devoid of football excitement for us folks. At least there are no snowdrifts.

- Brian Williams - morris mn Minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com