Oh wait. You don’t remember do you. Because neither of you actually follows sports. You depend on a team of low-paid lackeys to prep you and apparently they suck at their jobs because none of them realized the Vikings sealed their stadium deal months ago and are no longer candidates to move to L.A. Well it’s a tough job working up show prep for a major national radio program. If only there were a tool that could make life easier for these folks. Some means of quickly gathering large amounts of information from various sources? Something that feeds directly into a PC or phone and can be accessed at relatively low cost 24 hours a day?

Get on that, science. And when you’re done with that, you need to do a study of this Skip Bayless guy. I think he might be an alien or some kind of freakish mutant.

Seriously though, this is truly embarrassing. But at the same time, is it really surprising? I mean this is ESPN we’re talking about. The same people who think it’s worthwhile putting Stephen A. Smith, Chris Berman and Woody Paige on television. Probably shouldn’t expect much in the way of competence from them. Then again, it’s not like anyone really cares about the Vikings. They’re not important like the Jets, Knicks or Yankees. Or Tiger Woods. Or that Tebow guy. They’re just an NFL team with a fairly sizable and very loyal international following.

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What we don’t know is who the Saints will be matched up with in that game.  According to Mike Florio, who would know such a thing because he is a football blogging genius, the potential other teams for that game are the Falcons, Panthers, Bucs, Seahawks, Rams, Browns, Steelers and Vikings.

Because the NFL enjoys creating big-hype match-ups for its opening night, the logical choice among those 8 would be the Vikings.  The second choice would be the Vikings.  And the third choice would be the Vikings.

That makes it almost a lock that the Vikings will be playing the Saints on opening night, in the Superdome, the site of their latest NFC Championship Game belly-flop.

Of course, this match-up becomes slightly less intriguing if Sage Rosenfels is starting for the Vikes instead of Brett Favre.  Maybe the league could offer Brett a piece of the gate in exchange for his assurance that he will suit up.

Hell, maybe the league should just offer Brett a piece of the league.  Better yet, maybe ESPN should offer Brett a piece of ESPN.  How much money do you think they’ve made off him the last couple of years?

I don’t even bother watching ESPN to keep up on Brett’s status anymore.  We’ll know he has retired when CNN reports on the tragic mass-suicide at Bristol.

Well, we’ve been down this road a few times already, haven’t we?  And it always leads to some kind of denial or refutation.  But, you have to admire ESPN – they are nothing if not persistent.  Doesn’t matter how many times they’re wrong, they’ll keep digging up more stories, and defending them even in the face of direct contradictory statements by Brad Childress.