Minnesota Vikings officially activate Teddy Bridgewater

The 2017 NFL season is the twelfth season that this website has spent covering Minnesota Vikings football. As the one member of the staff that has been here since the beginning, I can honestly say that the following might be the finest sequence of words ever put together in this space, and that there certainly aren’t any that have made me happier to type out.

On Wednesday, 8 November 2017, the Minnesota Vikings officially added quarterback Teddy Bridgewater back to the active roster.

We all remember what happened on 30 August 2016 and where we were when it happened. I was still over in Germany, attending a conference, and had not long been finished for the day when I went back to my room, jumped on to social media to see if there was anything to put up on DN. . .and then it happened.

Teddy went down during practice. How did it happen? How bad was it? Nobody knew. There were rumors, there was conjecture, there was irresponsible “journalism” (such as OMG TEDDY WAS SCREAMING AND HIS LEG WAS JUST FLOPPING AROUND AND EVERYONE WAS PUKING EVERYWHERE). But, worst of all, there as despair among the fans of the Minnesota Vikings.

Throughout the 2016 preseason, Bridgewater was a player who appeared poised to take the “next step” in his career and take the Vikings past the disappointment of their last-second playoff loss the previous season. It really appeared that, after years of searching, the Vikings had found a long-term answer at quarterback. But one dropback on that Thursday afternoon threw all of that into question.

Now, after fifteen months of busting his hump and doing everything he needed to do, Teddy Bridgewater is finally back and, at the very least, ready to fight to take back his job as the starting quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings.

With as hard as Teddy Bridgewater has worked, he deserves this opportunity. He most certainly has the support of fans of the team and many other non-Vikings fans across the league. To a lesser degree, Vikings fans deserve this as well. Teddy Bridgewater, in his short time in Minnesota, has truly endeared himself to the Twin Cities community, both on the football field and off of it. This team and its fans deserve to have a player like Teddy Bridgewater lead them into the future.

When will Teddy Bridgewater be starting for the Minnesota Vikings again? Nobody knows.

Will he be the same quarterback that he was before he got injured? Nobody knows that, either.

But we do know that any success that he has will come as the direct result of hard work, and that any failures damn sure won’t come from a lack of trying.

Teddy Bridgewater is back, folks. News certainly doesn’t come a whole lot bigger or better than that.