41 - Donut

You gotta thing for memorializing failure... 41 donut.. Mike Zimmer.

Focus on better days to come, who gives a flying f*ck about 41-donut.

Weird. Because I haven't talked about Zimmer in months. Memorializing? lol 

And you mean, be optimistic? Do you even know me? Because wait a few months, you'll be whining about how I'm too optimistic, as you usually do. 



It's the offseason. I share dozens of offseason pieces discussing the past. It's part of what the offseason is good for. 

In sum: 

Exactly!
It's a given now, they did in fact cheat. Paytons name sealed that deal. 

Life was a blurr back then and access to the games minimal. I cant help ya. Remember being amazed seeing it on sports center though. Dayuhmn.....

I taped the game and remember the rumors of cheating afterward. The specific rumor I heard was they knew our snap count, so I went back and watched the game. It made sense because their defensive line seemed to have instantaneous reaction time. I remember something about the Eagles complaining about it too in the divisional round. They didn't get to the EZ until garbage time. I think it was all confirmed once they got away from Giants Stadium, at the Super Bowl, where they themselves got blown out. That tends to happen to teams that don't belong there. I forgot that Sean Payton was involved so it makes sense now. Maybe someone needs to take a closer look at his career.

Was it enough to account for a 34-0 halftime deficit though? Probably not. Which is the sad part, the Giants probably didn't need to cheat, the Vikings were going to Viking that day anyway. It's not even the 41-donut that bothers me the most, or even the cheating rumors, it's how the stupid defense got gashed by 27 3 yard runs in the 4th quarter. Most frustrating thing ever. The Giants picked of Culpepper with 13 minutes to go in the game and the Vikings never got the ball back, so we couldn't even score a stupid garbage TD to spoil the shutout. A 19 play, 58 yard drive, that consumed the final 12:53. Nobody Joe Montgomery had 14 carries for 46 yards on that death by a 1000 paper cuts drive. How bad was it? There have been 180,304 drives since 1998 in 7,734 games, and that's still the 3rd longest drive in terms of TOP. It was the 2nd longest until this past year when the 49ers went on a 20 play 13:05 drive against the Jaguars in week 11. The previous longest was also by the Giants in 2010. A 19 play 13:00 drive against the Seahawks. The 2nd longest playoff drive was by the Saints in 2018, against the Eagles at only 11:29.

What else are we going to memorialize? All we have is 61 years of failure.

Ruh-roh, someone touched a sore spot. You'd think Larry Cuozzo started that game or something.

damn. now I want a donut.

The irony is, we had home field advantage with 3 weeks to go at 11-2, but in typical Vikings fashion they had to choke down the stretch losing all of their final 3 games because the defense stopped showing up. Emmitt Thomas was retained as DC going into 2001 for some reason. To be fair, we played Warner, Favre, and Manning in those final 3, but how do you expect to win Super Bowls if you can't beat QB's like that? The Giants were 9-4 at that point, so we had a 2 game lead over them with 3 to go, and blew it. They won their final 3.

We blew HFA in 2009 as well, by losing 2 of our final 3 when the Saints lost their final 3. The Saints did have it wrapped up by week 17 and rested their starters in that final loss however, but still, had we not lost to a bad Bears team or the Panthers, the Saints would have had to play their starters and earn it. The Vikings are never good at controlling their own destiny.