Go Vikings

Life is pretty sweet right now for Vikings fans. At 5-1, the team holds the second best record in the NFC. The quarterback is having a season for the ages, we keep producing new star running backs on a weekly basis, and no players have been arrested for DWI or assaulting a traffic cop with their Lexus for many, many months.

Even the compound fracture to our souls, suffered during last year's excruciating season ending collapse to the Cardinals, is beginning to heal. It looks like all systems are go for a playoff run, and maybe, just maybe a Super Bowl victory, to finally banish the ghosts of post season failures past. Hey, the formerly pathetic Red Sox can do it, why can't the Vikings?

Yep, everything seems to be sunshine and happiness for Vikings fans. Right?

Wrong. According to Sports Illustrated, the guy that owns the team hates you:

... if McCombs had his druthers, he'd be getting ready to move the Vikings to Los Angeles. "Let's face it. I would love to be in L.A.," McCombs said in an interview before the Vikings' 20-3 victory against the Tennessee Titans at the Metrodome on Sunday.

No, he's not singing a Randy Newman tune. He's upset that the people of Minnesota won't build him a new football stadium. And he admits, if it were up to him, he would have already moved the team to the second largest media market in the country, which happens to be without an NFL team. Except:

I just can't pick up and go to L.A.; that's a league issue. I'm a team player, so I'm not going to test the courts and run off in the middle of the night.

Yes, that's what he is, a team player. Unfortunately, Vikings fans are on a different team than he is. McCombs's loyalty belongs to his fellow owners. And, god love them, they're holding Red to the terms of the NFL's agreement with the Minnesota Legislature back in 1977, that they'd keep a team here until at least 2011, if we succumbed their last stadium demand, resulting in the much reviled Metrodome.

So it looks like Red and us are stuck with each other for a while. Which is fine. Maybe we can still win it all, despite him. And we haven't had the consensus necessary to chant that the owner of a local team "sucks" since Norm Green and the North Stars left town.

(Ed note: The title of Saint Paul's post should actually have been "Skol Vikings")