REVIEW: The Weirdest NFL Playoff Game Ever

The Rams blew out the Vikings; I predicted the opposite

The Los Angeles Rams upset the Minnesota Vikings because they are, like everything else in the city, on fire. After starting the year a putrid 1-4, they rallied after their bye week, winning nine of their last 12 to finish 10-7.

By contrast, the Vikings entered Monday night’s game sitting at the threshold of a slide. They’d won two of their last three games, but those two wins were by the skin of their teeth, and the defeat was a demolishing at the hands of a Detroit Lions defense that realized they could makeup for their lack of physical talent by being extremely mean-spirited. Matthew Stafford and the Rams then shoved them straight down a great big helter skelter that would make Paul McCartney go “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

In my preview, I applied the Plagens Heuristic for Predicting Things in the 21st Century (“the funniest and/or most-ironic outcome possible is also the likeliest outcome possible”) to the game and predicted the Vikings would pave the Rams because it would be funny. The broadcast would make a big deal about the Rams “winning this one for the city” in the wake of immense tragedy only for the Rams to beaten to the pulp. I was thinking of the South Park episode where a hockey team of small children pledge to beat the Colorado Avalanche in the name of a cancer patient (because there’s nothing you can’t do if you believe in yourself), only for them to lose life and limb and the game.

I was right that the tragedy of the Los Angeles wildfires would take center stage. There was a moment where the announcers said, and I’m quoting this verbatim, “we hope we can provide the people of Los Angeles with a moment of respite” while the director sat in the booth cuing shots of people in the crowd holding up signs saying things like “WE’RE WITH YOU L.A.” Shortly thereafter (or perhaps before), the broadcast did a Red Cross donation segment where they politely cajoled the viewing audience into donating funds by texting the number on their screens, which also just so happened to be showing the most salacious images of burning and burnt out buildings then available. The cognitive dissonance caused by the stated intention of offering respite followed by these images meant that I momentarily suffered a psychotic break.

Once my teeth stopped receiving radio transmissions from the Chinese Communist Party about how to steal American TikTok data and I stopped singing David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” at a wall that I thought was an adoring audience at the Las Vegas Sphere, I realized I was wrong about the outcome of the game. I began to evaluate the Plagens Heuristic for Predicting Things in the 21st Century. Perhaps looking for comedy wasn’t the most reliable way to evaluate football games. I stroked my chin like Principal Skinner wondering if he is out of touch or is it the children who are wrong.

And I concluded that, no, my heuristic got this one right, I just did not account for the history of the Minnesota Vikings while using it.

See, they are less a football franchise and more of a performance art initiative, the central theme of which is “so close yet so very far.” It is only fitting that their best team in recent memory would be detonated by a statistically inferior opponent.

Of the 15 teams with the most playoff appearances in NFL history, the Vikings are the only one to have never won the Super Bowl. They rank 7th overall in playoff appearances but are also the undisputed champions of playoff losses, having experienced 32 of them since 1968. To my knowledge they are the only NFL franchise to have had a player run the wrong way, have had a player referenced in a pop song as being “too boring,” and been the subject as a joke in Pokémon: The First Movie that’s been stuck in my head for around 25 years.

For the uninitiated, Pokémon is a Japanese multimedia franchise about animal abuse. Its TV shows, movies, and video games take place in a universe where preteens roam the countryside without adult supervision, capturing superpowered animals with science fiction devices and training them to fight one another as part of a ritualized but secular pilgrimage. How monumentally fucked up this premise is somehow escaped everybody’s notice except the purveyors of a rival and significantly less successful Japanese multimedia franchise that spent an entire season of a TV show satirizing it.

Standing in the way of the children are a man, a woman, and a talking cat. They call themselves “Team Rocket.” They wish to steal the children’s superpowered animals and sell them to the highest bidder. The bidders are implied to also want the animals to fight one another, but it’s bad when they do it because they won’t pet the animals like the children do.

In The First Movie (they’ve since made 22 more of them), three children are trying to get to a big animal fighting tournament on an island that can only be reached by ferry. They arrive at a seaside port but the ferry isn’t running because of a humongous rain storm. The children are crestfallen. They were so looking forward to the competitive animal abuse. One of the children, though, has a Jim Harbaugh-esque moment where he declares nothing will stand between him and the tournament. Come rain, sleet, or hail, he is going to prove he is the best animal fighter ever, goddamn it.

Enter Team Rocket, disguised as Vikings and piloting a skeiðar-styled longboat. The man and woman are fully decked out with the goofy horned hats and leather armor while the talking cat is strapped to the head of the ship as a figurehead. This makes sense. Only an idiot would believe a talking cat could be a viking.

Using the goofiest bad Scandinavian accent imaginable, they offer to take the children across to the tournament, with it implied this is part of a ploy to steal the children’s animals. Being cartoon characters and colossal morons, the children fail to see through the ruse and accept the offer.

Midway through the ride across seas rough enough to wreck the Edmund Fitzgerald, one of the children says, “I didn’t know Vikings still existed,” and another quips, “they mostly live in Minnesota.”

This epitomizes the Minnesota Vikings football franchise. It is what they are: a throwaway joke. Something that sticks in your head for multiple decades and disappoints you every time you remember it. That is their essence.

For a moment it looked as though fatalism would not win the day, but of course Minnesota’s best team in recent memory would be decimated by a statistically abysmal defense. Of course Sam Darnold, their ascendent quarterback, would revert to the mean and get sacked 10 times.

The Vikings were The Coyote chasing after The Roadrunner, running past a cliff’s precipice, and going farther and farther from the edge until they looked down and realized there was nothing beneath their feet. They looked to camera, gulped, and then fell back to Earth. There was a silence as the dust settled and then, from the coyote shaped hole in the ground, came the voice of Sam Darnold wearily, and only just audibly, going, “owwwww.”

That joke is an oldie but a goodie, and I would argue is slightly better than a violent and South Park-ian beating of a sacred figure.

The funniest possible outcome of the game came to pass. I’m only sorry I didn’t see the vision earlier.