Quarterback Sam Darnold’s lone season as Minnesota’s starter was magical, until it wasn’t.
At 14-2 and with one game in Detroit with the No. 1 seed on the line, Darnold’s chariot became pumpkinized. Then, in the wild-card round, the orange menace spread to the rest of the team.
“For lack of a better term, we laid an egg as an offense,” Darnold recently told Mike Silver of TheAthletic.com. “And I think, for me personally, that sucks. I felt like we were a really good team, but at the end of the day — and this is gonna sound a little pessimistic — but when you get to the end of it and you don’t win the whole thing, you failed.”
He’s right. There’s only one trophy. And the better a team performs in the regular season, the more prominent the failure seems when it happens.
“I feel like I could have played way better, to be completely honest with you,” Darnold said. “I feel I didn’t play up to my standard. I truly feel that way. I feel like if I would have just played better, I would’ve been able to give the team a chance.”
Darnold’s play was more conspicuous in Week 18, when the Vikings repeatedly had chances and Darnold repeatedly misfired. By the time the playoffs started, the Vikings were simply overmatched and overpowered.
So what happened in those two losses that turned a 14-2 start into an 0-2 finish?
“I feel like L.A. did very similar things on third down to what Detroit did to us,” Darnold said. “They played man and tried to play some ‘robber’ stuff, and that just gave us some troubles. It gave me some troubles, personally.”
As Darnold tries to learn from that experience, it sounds as if he’ll be more committed to running with the ball in 2025 if/when his options are stymied in the passing game.
“[Kevin O’Connell] and those guys in Minnesota did such a good job — and we do a great job here as well — of giving me answers if they take options away,” Darnold told Silver. “Like, just go through your progressions and work your feet and if it’s not there take off and run — because there’s no one accounting for the quarterback, unless they play a spy or whatever.”
Whatever happens in 2025, the gains Darnold made in the first 16 games of the 2024 season were undermined by the regressions of the final two. And even if he gets off to a great start again this year, the real question will be whether he shows up when the lights are the brightest and the stakes are the highest.
Someone actually had the nerve to get into a fistfight with former NFL running back Adrian Peterson over a game of poker.
Via TMZ.com, it happened on May 27 in Houston.
The video can be seen here.
Apparently, everything was resolved.
“Me and the guy, we’re cool,” Peterson told TMZ.com. “We’ve known each other. It was literally like a brother situation. We agreed to disagree, we had our words, and we threw blows -- and that was it. . . .
“I felt really bad,” Peterson added. “It’s a situation where I kind of regret it.”
Police weren’t called, and the club at which the incident happened took no action against either Peterson or the man he fought.
A 15-year veteran and future Hall of Famer, Peterson ranks fifth in career rushing yards, with 14,918 yards. He spent 10 years with the Vikings before finishing his career in New Orleans. And Washington. And Detroit. And Tennessee. And Seattle.
The Vikings have set their schedule for this summer’s training camp.
The team announced on Tuesday that there will be 12 practices open to the public while the team prepares for the 2025 season. The first of them will be held on Saturday, July 26.
All but one of the practices will be held at the team’s usual practice fields. The exception is a night practice on August 4, which will be held at TCO Stadium on the campus of the team’s facility.
The practices on August 13 and 14 will be joint sessions with the Patriots. The rest of the open practices will be held on July 29-31, August 1-2, August 6-7, and August 11.
People interested in buying tickets for the first NFL game in Ireland are finding themselves frustrated by the process.
A reader of PFT sent us a screenshot showing that there were more than 639,000 prospective buyers ahead of them in a virtual queue to purchase tickets for the September 28 game between the Steelers and Vikings at Croke Park in Dublin. The message from Ticketmaster says to expect a wait of more than an hour before a chance to buy tickets will be available.
Social media is filled with similar messages as well as screenshots that show there was an error once the wait was over. The Irish Times features a quote from the Ticketmaster website saying that “there are still tickets available” and that “your place in the queue is secure.”
Ticket sales for other events around the world have been plagued by online bots deployed by resellers looking to garner blocks of tickets. It’s unclear if that’s the case here or if the NFL has found a larger than anticipated market of ticket buyers for this year and the future in Ireland.
Vikings receiver Jordan Addison has a trial date arising from July 2024 a DUI citation.
Via Kevin Seifert of ESPN.com, a jury trial will commence on July 15, in a California court.
In July 2024, Addison was found asleep at the wheel at LAX airport. He is accused of driving under the influence of alcohol and driving with a blood-alcohol concentration in excess of the legal limit of .08 percent.
Both are misdemeanors. The related complication comes from the NFL’s substance-abuse policy. Baseline punishment for first offense DUI is a three-game suspension.
The NFL’s procedure becomes activated by resolution of the criminal case. Either a conviction or an admission within the context of, for example, entering a diversion program, accepting deferred adjudication, or pleading no contest triggers a suspension.
The timeline for the NFL’s in-house justice system can be fuzzy. If Addison is convicted next month, there’s a decent chance the suspension will be served during the 2025 season.
Addison had 911 receiving yards and 10 touchdowns as a rookie in 2023. Last season, he generated 875 receiving yards and 10 total touchdowns.
