Zim Tzu won’t pack it in

ED NOTE: This has bad words. Most of the other things we write on here usually don’t, but this one does. It seems to be a popular bit, so until the law catches up with me, I’m going to keep doing it. Thanks for understanding, and thanks for not reading and not letting your kids read it if bad language isn’t your thing. Hope you enjoy the rest of our articles—Ted

When you’re a warrior poet, sometimes you find yourself in a situation where a campaign hasn’t gone as planned. You’ve lost when you should have won, some of the wins weren’t as convincing as they should have been; hell, sometimes you even have to do a tactical withdrawal after a stalemate. Like seriously, when did trench warfare become en vogue again?

Anyway, if a campaign feels like it’s teetering, and you might be on the verge of full scale retreat, you can do one of two things. You can drop the colors and run for the hills, or you plant the flag and say ‘Here. We stand here, we form up, and we fight. But the retreat ends here.’

And you win, as losing is hateful to warrior poets.

Because you are Zim Tzu, The King In The North, Father Of The Cheese Lands, Emperor of the Motor City Feline Tribe, Grounder of Airplanes, Defrocker of Cardinals, Subduer of Equestrian Excrement Consumers, Nightmare of Clan Fromage, Breaker Of Gold Fever, High Septon Of Eagan, Lord Commander Of The Iron Range And Twin Cities, Master Of Fortress TCO, Honorary Elder Of Mankato and Protector Of The Realm.

And when you discuss your glorious deeds to the Great Unwashed, your words are spoken at a level far above the proletariat so as not to offend, and you need assistance to get the words down to a level that’s understood by all. Your inner dialogue, if you will. That’s where we come in here at The Daily Norseman.* We take most of the elitist words** uttered by Vikings coach Mike ZImmer at his weekly press conference, and strip it down to the blue collar meaning that was originally intended.***

*It’s not ‘we’. I am on an island with this.

**Pretty sure Mike Zimmer has never been called an elitist.

***The law firm of Franklin, Bash, and Bateman reminds you that this is a work of parody, and this is all made up. Also, they’re embarrassed to represent me, but hey, Constitution says they have to, so whatever. Suck it, barrister, and plea this down with no jail time.

As usual, Zim Tzu had an opening statement.

What Zim Tzu said: That was a good team win. I really liked the balance that we had offensively, the things that we were trying to get done, the way we’re spreading the ball around. We were really, really close on breaking probably five or six runs for big, big plays and didn’t quite get the last guy blocked. I thought we did a really nice job there. We made a couple big plays on special teams, we got to get touchdowns in those situations opposed to field goals. I thought defensively, especially after they scored the second touchdown, I thought we played really well. Guys tackled well, they did a great job with the rush plan, the two inside tackles, the three, four, however many played; I thought they did a nice job pushing the pocket and putting some pressure on their quarterback. Other than that, good team win.

What Zim Tzu meant: If we would have executed just a little bit better, we would have jailsexed Green Bay. See ya, McCarthy. Need a reference? Call me.

Q: What made some of the outside runs so effective?

What Zim Tzu said: Well, there was a couple times they were slanting inside that we hit it pretty good. A couple times we kind of out ran them, that’s usually what happens on those jet sweeps.

What Zim Tzu meant: They were not runs to the inside.

Q: Do you have an injury update on Xavier Rhodes?

What Zim Tzu said: Yes, thankfully it’s a very, very mild and as far as the TV doctors that were reporting it’s very erroneous.

What Zim Tzu meant: We had to amputate both of Xavier’s legs this morning. He’ll be questionable for Sunday, might miss a little bit of time.

Q: Why is the three-technique so vital to what you want to do defensively?

What Zim Tzu said: Very good question. Most of the time the three-technique gets a lot of one-on-one situations with the guards. A lot of times the center is going away, the tackles – the way we play our ends have a tendency to sit on the inside just a little bit more, and they get chipped a lot more. The three-technique is the one that if he can be a pass rusher it really helps with the two ends especially because the tackles can’t sit in on him quite so long, because they got to get to the ends or vice versa.

What Zim Tzu meant: Well, if we didn’t put someone there we’d only have ten guys on the field and they’d run through us like shit through a goose, so...

Q: Is it important to change up things that you do or do somethings differently after playing a team once during the season?

What Zim Tzu said: I don’t know that it’s important, but you played them once, so you have an idea how they’re doing things. Then you see like if we did this or we did that, how are they going to change what they’ve done in the past? Sometimes it’s just trying to get them to think on the sideline just as much – get over there and get on that board and draw a little bit and try to get them working on some other things.

What Zim Tzu meant: You know it’s funny you ask that. After our first drive when we went three and out I walked over to Flip and said ‘Hey Flip, whatcha doing?’ And he said ‘Well boss I just rolled out the gameplan from week 2.’ I said ‘Oh, you mean the gameplan where we didn’t do fuck all for three quarters and then lit our ass on fire we got so hot?’ And he said ‘ yeah that’s the one.’ And I said ‘that was a stupid fucking plan. Score touchdowns earlier.’

So we did.

Q: Did you see a reduction in the volume offensively in the way the game was called last night?

What ZIm Tzu said: Yeah. First, I think Flip [John DeFilippo] did an outstanding job last night. I know people have been on his rear end a little bit and they’ve been on my rear end a little bit and that’s fine. But he did a really good job of mixing the game, the flow of the game, trying to keep them off balance. I thought he did a really outstanding job and part of it was most of the plays were called we executed pretty well.

What Zim Tzu meant: Yeah, we took no plays from the chapter in the play book that’s titled ‘Really Stupid Fucking Plays, aka The Two Minute Drill’ until you know, the two minute drill. Except that screen pass to Diggs in the first quarter lol what the fuck was that amirite?

Q: Did you get a sense that the offense took Green Bay by surprise?

What Zim Tzu said: I don’t know. I mean they saw some of the plays prior. Usually what you do is format them a little differently, line up in different formations, show them a different motion and run some of the same plays. We had a couple different ones that we hit good on.

What Zim Tzu meant: Oh, they were quite aware they were getting slowly squeezed to death, and there wasn’t a thing they could do about it. Aaron Rodgers, my achin’ ass...

Q: Did you like that in Kirk Cousins moving his feet more last night?

What Zim Tzu said: I did. I had the opportunity to talk to Kirk. I talked to him two or three times last week about just some of the things that I felt like would help us offensively. When it opens up like that, run. If you have a quarterback, basically what I told him, “If you have a quarterback that’s not going to run, the defenses are going to play extra coverage, they’re not going to worry about that.” You’re playing a guy like [Aaron] Rodgers, you have to worry about it. You have to put an extra guy on him sometimes. I just think that adds to everything that we did last night.

What Zim Tzu meant: It was about goddamn time. I talked to Kirk earlier in the week and said ‘there’s only two guys in NFL history that could stand as still as you are and get away with it. One was Dan Marino. The other was Dan Fouts.

Your name isn’t Dan.

Q: How does it make the offense much more difficult to defend Dalvin Cook on screen plays?

What Zim Tzu said: Really, really. When he gets in space he’s pretty good. He made several guys miss last night with some good runs. We got in space and that is another weapon. They’re really zeroing in on [Adam] Thielen and [Stefon] Diggs and rightfully so. But when you get the ball to [Kyle] Rudolph, you get the ball to Cook, you get the ball to [Laquon] Treadwell or [Aldrick] Robinson, that helps the entire deal. Then you get a better chance to get the ball to the other two guys.

What Zim Tzu meant: It’s so unfair the league office called and said we could only do it twice a game. Fucking Goodell.

Q: Do you take a lot of pride in having a top three ranked defense?

What Zim Tzu said: I take pride in wins. If it helps us win games, I’m good.

What Zim Tzu meant: Sure beats having Leslie Frazier’s broke dick Cover-2 scheme around here, doesn’t it?

Q: What did it mean to you to see your team rebound from the Chicago loss and perform well in a big game?

What Zim Tzu said: That loss in Chicago hurt, and I know a lot of the guys felt that way. I know that they were concerned about the future schedule going on, but we had to focus on one game. You can’t win six games without winning one, and so it was really important. When I was in the locker room before the game with the guys, they were pretty juiced up and ready to go. They were in Chicago too, we just didn’t do well enough. I think we have a pretty smart team, they kind of know and I’m sure they peek at the schedule and know that we got to play on two [opposite] coasts back-to-back and a night game and all the other situations. We just need to continue to do the things we’re doing and play smart football, which I thought we did last night. We played smart in really all three phases, other than the first third down of the game and the 12 guys on the field again, from the week before it was about the same. Other than that I thought we played pretty good. We took care of the ball, we got a couple turnovers basically.

What Zim Tzu meant: It means we’re still in the thick of the playoff hunt and I don’t have to worry about looking for a realtor to put my house on the market, thanks to the Twitter mafia.

Q: How well do you know Bill Belichick?

What Zim Tzu said: I’ve talked to him on the phone one time, I’ve talked to him before we played them last time, but I really don’t talk to him much. Obviously I try to learn as much as I can from him.

What Zim Tzu meant: Never heard of her. See you fuckers around.