Downright Depressing

Football. It's a killer.

Watching the Vikings stumble through their first two weeks of football is almost unbearable. Daunte Culpepper just isn't having the season that we'd all thought he'd have -- 8 interceptions and a few fumbles -- with the only TD of the season so far coming in on a Daunte run late versus the Bengals.

Who's the scapegoat? Ex-owner Red McCombs, who approved the trade of Randy Moss to Oakland? How about Mike Tice while we're at it? He's only got one year left in his contract, and right now, I really do not see him back next year. Changes in the coaching staff? The Vikings have a new offensive coordinator. Seems like Mr. Loney isn't getting it done.

What I cannot figure out is why the first-team offense looked so sharp during pre-season (sure, yes, it was only pre-season), then now during the regular season -- absolute pucky. Maybe Tice should have kept the first-team 'O' in for a few series longer.

Then, there's fantasy football. More will be broken down in another post for my Week 2 update, but again, I've got Culpepper for my main-stay quarterback. You can probably figure out how well I did last weekend.

Lastly, there's my 8th grade team. I really do not know what to say -- I'm literally at a loss for words. We lost our first game BIG, lost our second game close -- but I'm must say that it was that second game that I thought we were turning the corner. We played very aggressive on the line, but our pass defense was suspect. While I was away for a wedding on Saturday, our team went out to South Dakota (ol' Mad-Town, to be specific) to participate in a jamboree, or scrimmage. After playing 2 games out there, apparently we did not score one touchdown and gave up a bunch.

We had a game yesterday, getting ready to play a poe-dunk town. I already had it in my head that we were going to roll over these guys. I mean, we have these solid practices, everything looks sharp, then when it comes to game time, all things go to shit. I just cannot figure it out.

Anyway, the smaller opposing team rolled over us. We managed to score one touchdown. Too many blocking mistakes, too many turnovers. We just may have to go back to the fundamentals.

Can I blame myself? Probably -- I'm a first-year coach. It's my philosophy that at the 8th grade level, everybody should have the opportunity to play. If we would have our "super-team", in which our best players would play both sides of the ball, maybe we'd have the opportunity to win some games. But in that case, we just might get some angry parents, and that's something that I do not want to deal with.

It finally got to the point at the end of the game that our own players started to blame each other, you know, pointing the fingers. The quarterback was complaining that the line was not blocking on pass plays, so the other coach put him on the line. All hell broke loose -- it seemed like I didn't have any control. Then it seemed like they were questioning my play calling, so I just turned it to them.

Their first play without me was a pitch-right, screen pass back to the QB which got us about 35 yards. We scored a couple of plays later on a QB sneak, but after that, it was interception after interception. I could make a long list about the things that went wrong, but I won't list them here.

It's getting to the point where we have a lot of dissention amongst the players. I decided that on Thursday that we're just going to have a team meeting, get it all out in the open and discuss the problems. Maybe it's us, the coaching staff, maybe it's the bickering players, who knows. Like the other coach and I were talking after the game yesterday, we just do not know what we can do to get these kids' minds into the game.