SportsCenter just showed the stupidest “sketch” (I don’t know what else to call it, because it wasn’t a report or news), detailing the Vikings draft day problems throughout their history. You’ll hear about this at least a half-dozen times during ESPN’s coverage of the draft this weekend, as well.
Particularly bad moments:
1) having Bud Grant explain why he chose a mounted fish instead of Dan Marino in 1983
2) showing a fictional equipment manager with some random Scandinavian name like “Johan Jurgenson” explain that he had been employed in that position with the team for 57 years–while wearing a jacket that said “Vikings 1961″–the year the team first existed.
3) Mike Tice discussing his surprise at the opportunity to choose from hundreds of college football players every year
4) another random guy with another random Scandinavian name talking with pride about the year they didn’t pick anybody, and won two whole games.
As I’ve said before, the failure to pick last year didn’t hurt the Vikings at all, as they got the guy they wanted, anyway. And the year before, it was the Dallas Cowboys who let the clock run out–the Vikings rushed to claim the next pick, but were denied–and yet they get blamed for poor clock management.
Take a look at part of my post from last year:
The Vikes got screwed from each end of similar situations in successive years, and the short memories of football pundits led them to talk about Minnesota’s “history” of screwing up the actual process of making picks. It took me less than a minute to find this article and this article (link now broken), both of which explain that last year’s problems were Dallas’ fault, and yet it seems that none of the “experts” can be forced to take that much time to do some basic research. You wanna talk about screwed up Viking drafts? Talk about Dimitrius “God told me to quit football–no–kill myself–twice” Underwood.
