MVN - Most Valuable Network

Happy Trails, Kevin Seifert

*Sad news, Vikings rubes: Kevin Seifert is leaving the Star Tribune. The longtime beat writer has accepted a job with ESPN.com, where he’ll blog about the NFC North.

I’m betting Patrick Reusse, our favorite old codger, isn’t going to take this news too well — last week, he wrote a column moaning and groaning about the rise of internet media and the decline of print media. Mere days after that column appeared in the Strib, the paper’s most prominent beat writer announces he’s leaving for — uh huh — a website.

Anyways, happy trails to Seifert…he’s always been one of the best beat writers in the Twin Cities (Lavelle’s my favorite, but Seifert was a close second), and he’ll do an excellent job of covering the Black and Blue division for The Worldwide Leader.

*Might the Vikings have a brand new scrimmage partner for training camp? The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that the Rams have selected Concordia University in Mequon, Wisconsin as their new training camp site; it’d be a long drive for Vikings fans (the university is roughly 350 miles away from the Twin Cities metro area), but you’d have to expect that future training camp scrimmages between the Rams and Vikes are a near certainty.

*As always, I wouldn’t suggest actually betting on this stuff, but Bodog already has a bunch of interesting odds listed for the 2008 NFL season: They have 28:1 odds on the Vikes taking home the Lombardi Trophy, 9:1 odds on our squad winning the NFC Championship, and 7:4 odds on the Purple winning the division title. Interestingly, the Packers also have 7:4 odds of winning the NFC North. The Patriots, by the way, are Bodog’s Super Bowl favorite, with 10:3 odds of winning the title.

At the moment, I think I’d put Green Bay a notch above the Vikes in the NFC North race. Believe me, it pains me to say that, but I’ll reserve judgment on the divisional favorite until I see these two squads do battle on Monday, September 8th. On paper, I think the Vikings look like the better team — but that’s why they play the game, right?

If our guys can knock off the Pack at Lambeau, I’ll probably jump aboard the division title bandwagon. For now, though, the Packers are simply the more proven team — with the obvious exception of the Rogers/Brohm tandem of “quarterback saviors.” Green Bay’s gonna be tough to beat, but I think Packers fans are being a tad delusional about their quarterback situation.

Closed-circuit to Cheeseheads: There are going to be much worse growing pains at the quarterback position than you’re currently expecting. Just wanted to bring you guys back down to earth.

*Not sure what bizarre formula Pro Football Focus used to calculate their rankings of offensive tackles, but something must have gone horribly wrong with their formulation of these rankings: There’s no way in hell Ryan Cook is the 17th-best tackle in the NFL. Cook improved as the 2007 season progressed, but c’mon — if I had a dollar for every time I heard an official say the phrase “holding, number 62 of the offense” last season, I would be a happy, happy man.

Since Cook went from being “downright awful” to “mediocre” last season, it would be reasonable to expect him to leap from “mediocre” to “decent” this season. But he racked up a killer amount of penalties last season, and eliminating those from his game is undoubtedly one of the biggest obstacles he faces in becoming a serviceable tackle.

*Finally, I’ll leave you with a seizure-inducing video that I spotted on You Been Blinded of a man who seems to enjoy his Vikings jerseys. I happen to prefer Vikings zubaz over jerseys, but whatever.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.