Minnesota Vikings News and Links, 1/2

Hopefully everybody made it through New Year's Day unscathed. There was some pretty good college football played yesterday, which is nice, and we're just a couple of days from the NFL playoffs getting underway.

Since the last time we brought you an Open Thread. . .

-We have a couple more names of coaches that the Minnesota Vikings will interview for their head coaching vacancy, those being Bengals defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer and Seahawks defensive coordinator Dan Quinn.

-The Vikings play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers next season, and it looks like we'll be seeing a couple of familiar faces there.

-We found out some things about what, exactly, was going on with "quarterback" Josh Freeman during the season.

From some other sources around the internet. . .

-Wide receiver Jerome SImpson is set to make another appearance in court relating to his DWI this past November.

-Patrick Reusse of 1500 ESPN has a timeline for when things went wrong between Leslie Frazier and general manager Rick Spielman.

-Remember when the Vikings made the 2008 playoffs on the final day of the season and had trouble selling tickets to the subsequent playoff game, meaning that Viking fans were the most terrible, awful, horrible fans in the NFL (something that many people of lesser intelligence still cite today to attempt to reinforce that "fact?") Well. . .it isn't just them any more.

The rules of the Open Thread are the same as they've ever been, ladies and gentlemen. . .no politics, no religion, no feeding of the trolls, and keep the bad language to a minimum/use the spoiler tags if you feel you absolutely must curse.

Here is your musical selection for today.

Such a great song. . .by Deep Purple, no less.

With that, the beer light is on and the bar is open for this Thursday, ladies and gentlemen. Enjoy your day, and hopefully there will be some more headway made on the Vikings' coaching front at some point for us to bring to you.