Archive for May, 2007

Brad Childress has perfected the fine art of using arcane football lingo to make incredibly simple stuff seem really complicated, thereby making himself seem really smart. A case in point – Childress’s rundown of the Vikings’ mini-camp schedule (via Star-Tribune.com ): We’ll go morning and afternoon and have an installation in between. There are many similar plays but the volume is there and we accelerate the pace. There is an install before Friday’s morning practice, before Friday’s afternoon, the same for Saturday, and then we usually work in the red area on Sunday, but it happens faster. Inside Childress’s own [...]

Adrian Peterson has admitted to using video games as a means of venting his frustration after a loss. Said Peterson to SportsGamer.com : I did that with the Oregon game. After the way that game worked out in Eugene, I went back on NCAA Football 07 and replayed it and got some payback. It made me feel a little better. The “Oregon game,” of course, featured a pair of infamous blown calls by the refs late, allowing the Ducks to come back on Peterson’s Oklahoma Sooners. And Peterson got some measure of pay-back by beating the Ducks on NCAA ’07? [...]

Almost everyone has been positive about the Vikings drafting RB Adrian Peterson with the number 7 pick. The consensus seems to be that Peterson will be not only a good back but a great one – one prognosticator even has him making the Hall-of-Fame. There are, however, a few people willing to toss a bit of cold water over Viking fans who are stoked about Peterson’s potential – like Fox Sports “football outsider” Ned Macey, who says the following in his NFC North off-season review: When Adrian Peterson fell to the seventh spot, the Vikings snatched up one of the [...]

ESPN.com has a Madden ’08 preview up (okay, it’s been up there for awhile, but I only just discovered it – so sue me). It looks real pretty, but even if I had an Xbox 360, I don’t know if I’d buy it. The Madden games are fun to play but have always infuriated me in certain of their details. Like, for instance, the fact that when I play Franchise Mode, my entire offensive line always ends up making the Pro-Bowl. I know it’s a quibble but still – these games sell themselves on their realism, yet there are these [...]

Randy Hill of FoxSports.com has graced us with his list of rookies he thinks will make an immediate impact in the NFL. Among these is the Minnesota Vikings‘ very own Adrian Peterson, about whom Hill says the following (the superstitious may now want to avert their eyes): If the Vikes can use the pass to keep defenses even reasonably honest and if his health isn’t a future concern, this guy should run all the way to Canton. And he doesn’t mean run all the way to Canton as part of some charity fund-raising marathon – he means run all the [...]

Mock drafts seem to be all the rage right now. At the rate we’re going I fully expect them to start looking ahead 10 years or more, to guess which grade schoolers will have a huge impact down the road. “Little Timmy could be a beast at defensive end if he improves his footwork. He has a tendency to poop his pants in the third quarter which could put some teams off.” Sort of an odd preface to my own 2008 mock draft, isn’t it? It’s almost as if I’m not taking the whole thing seriously… 2008 Mock Draft Presented [...]

Charlie Walters aka The Bullshooter reports in the St. Paul Pioneer-Press that Adrian Peterson wants to buy his mom a house as soon as he signs with the Vikings. In other news, I just saw this basket of kittens and they were so cute I almost died… The goofs over at Rube Chat debate the merits of potentially giving Kansas City a 5th round pick for Trent Green. It won’t happen because Brad Childress is behind Tarvaris Jackson, but I honestly wouldn’t mind if it did. I think Trent would be a nice one- or two-year place-holder until Tarvaris is [...]

OTAs are over and mini-camp is right around the corner. So now seems a perfect time to prematurely and almost entirely speculatively take stock of where the team stands, position-by-position. QB – It looks like Tarvaris Jackson is solidly your number one at this point, given that he played first-team throughout OTAs. He would have to slip dramatically in the coming months not to be the starter, I have to believe. Brooks Bollinger is number two until further notice. Drew Henson is still around for no apparent reason, and then there’s Tyler Thigpen, who as far as I know is [...]

The Minnesota Vikings held their last OTA session for the week today, with a concentration on two-minute drills. The big news was that Kenechi Udeze (working with the first-team today) actually recorded a sack – meaning he now has as many sacks in two-minute drills this off-season as he had the last two regular seasons put together. Meanwhile, FB Tony Richardson says that QB Tarvaris Jackson had his best day of the week today, declaring, “He’s getting more and more comfortable.” Does this mean he gets a gold-star on his chart? The Star-Trib‘s Kevin Seifert also reports that presumptive O-line [...]