The recent rash of Thursday night blowouts could be attributed in part to the decision of some teams to essentially cry uncle once the game begins to get out of hand. Operating on a short week with a mini-bye looming, there’s a chance that some players simply decide to get it over with and move on.
That may have happened to the Vikings on Thursday night.
“The mood was almost like some people had checked out,” defensive end Brian Robison said Friday of the locker room at halftime, via the St. Paul Pioneer Press. "[A]nd you know what? I’m just going to be blunt and say it: It can never be that way. This is the team I’ve felt like, all along, has fought and scratched no matter what type of adversity we have faced, and I felt like we didn’t have that last night.”
Coach Mike Zimmer disagreed with Robison’s assessment.
“I respect Brian’s opinion, but when I watched the tape, I didn’t see that,” Zimmer said. “And I looked for it, hard. . . . Defensively, I think what he’s talking about is we maybe lost the fire a little bit.”
Regardless of what happened on Thursday night, the Vikings can turn it around, quickly. Each of the teams that lost on Thursday night in the first three weeks of the season (the Packers by 20, the Steelers by 20, and the Bucs by 42) won their next games. While that theory will be tested on Monday night when Washington (which lost by 31 on Thursday night in Week Four) hosts Seattle, the point is that Thursday night losers can recover. For the Vikings, that process will be aided by the expected return of quarterback Teddy Bridgewater.
