Visanthe Shiancoe Takes Exception to His Quarterback Being Targeted

word around mississippi is brett is gonna want to add another year to his deal.

We blow the Saints out of the water on opening night, it won’t do any justice for the NFC-CG. Any Saint fan should really think that we basically shot ourselves in the foot on that one. Even players were surprised on how we were even still in the game on the last offensive play by the Vikings with how many turnovers they had. It was described by players as each player trying too hard to make the big play. For some of the Saints fans saying that the Vikings should of tried harder is a load of crap, considering that if anything they tried so hard they made dumb mistakes.

A lot of the mistakes, in my opinion could of played out differently, but we can’t go back in time. An example would be the muffed hand-off from Favre to AP in the red-zone near the goal line at the end of the 2nd quarter. That would & should of been at least a 3 point field goal if we had not fumbled. There was no Saint player in the mix to cause that fumble. The 12-man huddle penalty is another penalty that could have been avoided, but, once again the Vikings basically shot themselves in the foot… This isn’t your false start or holding call, this is bad personnel calling that caused that issue. Another freebie to the Saints that made the Vikings miss out on a field goal. Even Longwell felt comfortable at hitting the field goal from where we were at after the penalty. Supposedly, he was putting them through the up-rights at an even farther distance before the game. I understand that in a real-game that things change.. Other issues were just bad ball control (A review of Favre’s first interception technically should have been called back after closer review). The last interception would of never happened had the 12-man penalty never happened. Vikings were trying to decide upon two running plays, which caused the confusion upon Tahi entering the huddle.

Would the results of been different if certain things had happened? Well if the Vikings had scored the touchdown prior to half-time, the whole second half could have played out differently. With that being the case, the whole game may have had a different feel to it.
But case in point, lets remove the most variables by looking at the 12-man penalty. If that had never happened, the Vikings would have ran a simple run play to try to maybe gain a few more yards to take the pressure off Longwell to kick the game winning field goal. Vikings use their last time-out at the right time to reduce any time for the Saints to make a play after the final kick-off and Longwell puts it through the uprights as hoped and the game is basically over. With that being said, the Vikings would have won the game that they basically in my opinion nearly wouldn’t have deserved for how they had bad ball control. The point spread should of been completely different.

But as a Vikings fan, and trying to not be biased with this comment, if the situation had been different and the Saints coughed up the ball as many times as they did and we were lucky to win in over-time. I would be calling ourselves very lucky & fortunate. That’s how I would of seen it. And I am very sure many other Vikings fans would agree with that.

i’ll be here you can taunt me mercilessly, if i haven’t been banned by then.

That’s what everyone was saying last year too. Really, their defense isn’t very scary either. They have big-names, yes. Briggs is still an impact linebacker. But we play them twice a year, so I think I can speak with a little more authority when I say that Urlacher is, at this point in his career, living off his past reputation. He just isn’t that impact player anymore. Solid, yes. Freak-on-the-field, no. Their D will be average, especially since their corners are still pretty bad. Basically, the defense is just big-names.

And sure, of course Martz will open it up. Cutler’s probably going to have some gaudy stats this season, not gonna deny that… but the man is careless with the football, and their offensive line still isn’t set to be able to handle all the pass-plays that Martz will call. Cutler will get sacked a ton and get pretty close to last year’s int-total again. Their run-game isn’t very intimidating either, so it’s going to be a pretty one-dimensional offense, and they just don’t have the recievers to make up for it, despite all the smoke Martz is trying to blow up everyone’s ass.