Brandon Bostick Opens Up About The NFC Championship Game

Just before all the Adrian Peterson news hit, the folks at MMQB put up an outstanding story penned by newly acquired Minnesota Vikings' tight end Brandon Bostick. In the story, he details how he felt at the time his infamous gaffe happened, and how things have gone for him afterwards. It really is an outstanding story, and one that you owe it to yourself to read. . .not necessarily as a Vikings fan, but as a football fan in general.

One of the more disturbing passages of the story comes when Bostick talks about some of the fallout from the game.

I knew it was a big deal. I knew it was a key mistake that cost us a trip to the Super Bowl. But, with all due respect, I think the media kind of took it and ran with it. I became the singular scapegoat. Social media didn't help, either. I don't know how many death threats I received, but there have been a lot. I still haven't read most of the messages that people sent me, but I want to so I can deal with the consequences and use it as motivation. But it is physically impossible for me to read every troll's comment; the volume is simply too much. So their comments sit there, untouched, maybe forever.

Now, I want to state this as plainly as I can. If you're sending death threats to an athlete because of something that happened on the playing field, you're kind of sort of pretty much the lowest form of life on the planet. And I include Vikings fans that pull that sort of garbage in that as well, as we've had our own problems with that sort of thing in the not-so-distant past. But even though Bostick's mistake might have been the one that got the most attention from the NFC Championship Game, it certainly wasn't the only one. A team doesn't lose a game that they had a 99.9% probability of winning with five minutes left on the clock without a full team effort.

On the bright side, as much as there can be one, Bostick appears to be taking everything in stride. And it takes a lot of guts for him to own up to his mistake the way he has in a public forum and make his best attempt to move on.

I still think the chances of him making the Vikings' roster for 2015 are a little on the slim side, but after reading this story from Brandon Bostick today, I'll be pulling for him a lot more than I was prior to today.