... what's the question?
Two weeks ago, Sam Darnold and the Vikings were 14-2 going into a showdown at Ford Field in Detroit for all the proverbial marbles — not only in the NFC North, but in the NFC as a whole.
The game was flexed into the Sunday night time slot to accentuate its importance.
What happened?
Darnold went a Tim Tebow-like 18-for-41 for 166 yards as Minnesota lost 31-9, sending the Vikings to a wild card game at Arizona — moved there from Los Angeles due to the Southern California wildfires. The retractable roof was closed — in contrast to Rams home games played at SoFi Stadium, where the roof is virtually always open (SoFi's other tenant, the Chargers, generally prefers to keep the roof closed).
Last night, Darnold completed 25-of-40 for 163 yards — 6.5 yards per completion — and was sacked 9 times (allowing a touchdown on one of those sacks, a la Jalen Hurts in Super Bowl LVII) in another blowout loss, this time 27-9.
At least, unlike in the Detroit game, the Vikings scored a touchdown last night, followed by a missed two-point conversion that would have made it a two-score game.
As a result, look for the Vikings to get J.J. McCarthy, who missed his entire rookie season due to a torn meniscus, sustained in one of those lovely exhibition games, ready to become the starter in 2025 and beyond — and don't forget that Minnesota now has Daniel Jones, as well (I'm sure that what Darnold did do in 2024 has earned him a backup job somewhere; Cleveland sounds about right).
Maybe if each team played only two such games each year instead of three, there would be fewer catastrophic injuries of this sort — as there would be once the NFL has an 18-game regular-season schedule?
Another change that the "plight" of the Vikings might cause is a change in the league's playoff seeding format.
What's wrong with giving a team that wins their division an "automatic bid" into the playoffs, but no more — as is done in college basketball?
And since seven teams in each conference make the playoffs, there would be no possibility for a wild card team to get a first-round bye, which could have happened when only six teams in each conference made it.
Another thing that should be discussed is to use division finish as the first tiebreaker: if two teams finish tied and one of them won their division and the other did not, the division winner is seeded higher. This can also be extended to include a tie involving a second-place team in one division and a third-place team in another division.
Make Division Rivalries Great Again ... up to a point.
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