UNNAMED WILF FAMILY MEMBER PREDICTS NFC NORTH TITLE
Posted by Mike Florio on October 30, 2008, 11:36 a.m.
A member of the Wilf family who asked to remain nameless has spoken with Sid Hartman of the
Minneapolis Star Tribune regarding the current state of the franchise.
To the likely dismay of many Vikings fan, the unnamed Wilf family member said that ownership is “
very happy” with the performance of coach Brad Childress, who is 17-22 in nearly two-and-a-half seasons on the job.
The unnamed Wilf family member explained that it takes time to build a solid, winning team. (Given that the Vikings were 26-22 in the three seasons before Childress was hired, isn’t the more accurate observation that it takes time to turn a solid, winning team into a mediocre one?)
But there’s hope. The unnamed Wilf family member says that the Vikings will win their division. Even though the Vikings have not won it a single time since the NFC Central became the NFC North in 2002.
Though the 3-4 Vikings are only a game behind the 4-3 Bears and 4-3 Packers, we think an NFC North crown is highly unlikely. Why?
Chillyball.
The Childress philosophy entails shortening the game with those plodding West Coast drives and a Tampa Two defense that forces opponents to do the same thing. And then the hope is that, with the score close in the fourth quarter, the Vikings will find a way to win.
But since the other team is trying to do the same damn thing, the reality is that Chillyball is a recipe for a .500 record.
Hartman, who seems to be deep in the tank for Childress and ”his fine staff” (we think/hope that Hartman is talking about Coach Chilly’s assistants), essentially acknowledges this dynamic in making excuses for the team’s current record.
“This team had possession of the football at the end of the game, with a chance to win, in three of their four losses,” Hartman writes.
And he’s right. But, under Chillyball, what’ll happen is that the Vikes will lose three or four for every three or four that they win.
Besides, this game of ifs and buts cuts both ways. Hartman could just have easily written that Chillyball could have caused the Vikings to lose two of the three games that they won. But for a phantom pass interference call against the Lions and a missed field goal by the Saints, the Vikings could be 1-6 right now.
And so Chillyball seems to be more about preserving the coach’s employment by creating the perception that the team is consistently competitive, even if the end result each year is a coin-flip chance at a playoff berth and a won-loss record that’s never quite bad enough to force the fan base to abandon all hope for the next season.
It’s not, in our view, the way to build a truly great team. A truly greats teams doesn’t play three-and-a-half quarters of footsie with its foes. It overpower them.
And a truly great team doesn’t win half of the close games in which its periodically finds itself; a truly great team finds a way to prevail in most if not all of them.
At a time when the Dolphins and Falcons have shown that bringing in the right guy(s) to reshape the team can have a dramatic – and immediate — impact on performance, we’re frankly amazed that the Wilfs are opting to stay the course.
Then again, the problem might be that they lack the confidence to identify the right guy to come in and take the thing over. And thus they likely fear that, if they pick the wrong guy, the results will be far worse than the seven-win minimum that Chillyball guarantees.
So it’s on the fans and the media to rise up and demand more. This is a franchise that was continuously competitive for all of the ’70s, much of the ’80s, and most of the ’90s. But the Vikings have now gone nearly eight years without hosting a playoff game.
Given that one of the Wilfs’ goals is to get a gleaming new stadium in which all games can be played, a key ingredient would seem to be not a team that’s able to tread water, but a team that’s equipped to kick ***.
10-30-2008, 09:25 PM
