Skol-Blooded: The Aftermath, and Images From the Minneapolis Miracle

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MINNEAPOLIS, MN - JANUARY 14: Stefon Diggs #14 of the Minnesota Vikings leaps to catch the ball in the fourth quarter of the NFC Divisional Playoff game against the New Orleans Saints on January 14, 2018 at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Diggs scored a 61-yard touchdown to win the game 29-24. (Photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images)

If you want as many hi-resolution images of the play, then Sporting News has you covered here. If the Vikings make the Super Bowl, there will no doubt be one of these shots hanging in every Vikings fan’s woodpanelled basement mancave.

Here’s the best multiple-angle reel of the play. Note how one killjoy ref actually threw a flag at Diggs for the helmet celebration. Which, sure. Is *technically* a celebration penalty, un-sportsmanlike conduct. Funny though, they never actually assessed it, which is weird given the obsession with the fake extra point.

A super-slow-mo NFL Films version of the play. Pure football porn. Or, if you are a Saints fan, it’s football porn that you find out stars your teenage daughter. The kind that will make you vomit.

This was the explanation from Pereira about the utterly stupid exercise of fake-not-kicking-an-extra-point-you-didn’t-need-or-want. It’s a rule that is easily fixed. “Any team which scores a touchdown, can decline their try for two, or decline to attempt an XP, for any reason, at any time, with no penalty.” Boom done. Who in the flying fuck cares if some team gets “screwed” by a single point on the 7th tiebreaker? I mean, really. (Oh wait, excuse me. It’s the NINTH fucking tiebreaker. My bad!) True story: when I was in elementary school, we had a band teacher named “Mr. Engle.” Bless his heart. Listening to awful elementary band “music” for a living. Probably drove him mad. He had a helmet of jet black, dapper-dan slicked 50’s hair, and didn’t put up with any bullshit. When my buddy Donnie Riegle would forget his snare drum on band day, Mr. Engle made him walk around the cafeteria where we practiced “looking for it.” No matter how many times Donnie pleaded that he LEFT IT AT HOME, Mr. Engle’s punishment was for him to do something utterly pointless. Goodell and Mr. Engle would hit it off great. Change this fucking rule. Now.

The play has already been “Tecmo-Bowled.” I am skeptical that this was actually done via the game’s authentic software, or rather a “controllable software” type of “hack” that allows you to script any play you want. Either way. I dig it.

Was Jon Gruden an eerie sooth-sayer about Keenum? Or does he say this about every QB prospect he ran through the Gruden QB Camp?

Sean Payton is, uh, honest with his feelings toward the men in stripes.

Here’s a video clip from my afternoon drive show on ESPN980 in Washington, D.C. If you go to Redskins.com and/or download the Redskins mobile app, you can watch me flail around like this for the 1st hour each day, from 4-7 p.m.

And lest anybody forget, here’s your matchup for Sunday night. Get horny for it, people. If only Jeff Fisher was available for the coin toss!

It all makes perfect sense.

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2 COMMENTS

  1. Great slow mo. As soon as I heard the Vikings pxp guy I recognized the voices from the NFC game when Farve threw int to Tracy Porter. Paul Allen: “This is not Detroit man, this is the Super Bowl!”.

  2. Steve you were talking about what makes the NFL great over the other professional sports, and obviously endings like these make their case. But a couple of other things that you didn’t mention or touched on a little bit that i think make it great are:

    1) The 16 game season- As a fan you are fully vested in your team from Week 1. Until your team is completely eliminated from the playoff picture, you emotions hinge on every game week to week. In other sports you can wait until the All Star break before getting into the season.
    2) The spectacle of the NFL Draft- Sure in basketball getting that one star player can change the dynamic of your team but if you know that you have no shot at that player, you could care less about the draft. In the NFL, you never know which player a team drafts that is going make it go over the top. Every year you think if we could just get a player or two, we can go all the way.
    3) The anonymity of the players- What I mean is that in the other sports you see you teams players faces but in football because of the helmets, it’s easy for the casual fan to root for team as opposed to the players themselves. Plus because there are 53 players, you don’t have to know them all, your just a fan of the helmet (home team) and people understand. I bet that there are thousands of Viking fans who couldn’t pick Diggs out of a police line-up before he made that catch and ripped his helmet off.

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