As the subject line asks, should we be worried about our Minnesota Vikings in 2010 from a competitive and successful standpoint?  I think that, unfortunately, we may have some very good reasons to be alarmed already.  Reasons after the jump...

I love numbered lists, what can I say?  So here are my concerns:

1. We're not the same team without Favre, I think we can all agree on that.  So if he doesn't return, ouch.

2. If we lose Pat and Kevin for some games this season, how bad would it impact us?  A reasonable amount I'd suspect.  :(

3. The annoying resurgence of Green Bay (who really looked solid last year despite losses to us) could make the division race much more difficult this time around - teams don't sweep other teams multiple seasons in a row.

4. The whole issue that teams don't always post back-to-back successful years in the NFL for a variety of reasons.  I can see us getting whammied by that simple statistical trend alone.  :(

5. The whole team is aging and not really getting any younger.

6. Some underwhelming draft picks (other than Toby) didn't do much to fix any of our problems.

7. Seems like we're still going to have a super suspect secondary (ah, alliteration, is there anything you can't do?).

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I'd love to hear some honest thoughts about just how potentially devastating any of these listed concerns may be.  I want to be wrong, I hope I'm wrong, seriously.  But I suspect I'm not.  In considering our schedule and these potential (or already existing) concerns, I'm not seeing us as the same team we were last year but instead on a lower tier - though I'm sure our Vikings could surprise me, it's happened before.