Todd Swank: Minnesota Vikings vs Chicago Bears

January 5, 2020

Minnesota Vikings vs Chicago Bears

Todd Swank's Diary Entry for January 5, 2020

It's been a weird January so far in Minnesota. Although it's felt like we've had plenty of cold weather over the past few weeks, the stream down the street from my house is still wide open and I haven't seen any cars drive on Prior Lake yet. Could we be having a mellow winter this year? Let's hope so.

The warmer weather has brought all sorts of interesting birds to our feeders including this guy who I believe is called a Northern Flicker. I wish I was called a Northern Flicker.

Last Sunday, Avery and I went to the Vikings game. Originally I was going to take the whole family to the Vikings and Broncos game, but Avery couldn't make it so we ended up buying two tickets for each game. The Broncos game was awesome, but I was afraid about the Bears game since it was the last game of the year. I was right to be afraid.

The reason for my fear was the Vikings already had their playoff seeding sealed. Due to their loss against Green Bay, they were set to be the NFC 6th seed team and nothing that happened in this game would change that. This meant they were going to rest all their starters including quarterback Kirk Cousins who we saw for a couple of minutes warming up so he could ride the bench.

But it wasn't just Cousins who was going to be sitting out but almost all the starters including Stephon Diggs, Adam Thielen, Kyle Rudolph and most of their defensive stars.

Therefore we paid $280 for 2 tickets to see Sean Mannion try to throw passes to Laquon Treadwell, Alexander Hollins, and Bisi Johnson against the Bears starters. I'm sure they're all nice guys, but when you're paying those kind of prices for tickets you expect to see more than the 5th preseason game for the team.

At least we got to see the Bears starters play. They beat up the Vikings pretty good early this season, so we were hoping to see some payback when we first bought the tickets. We didn't have much confidence in the backups being able to do that, though.

Ex Minnesota Viking Cordarrelle Patterson is one of our favorite players on the Bears. He had fun before the game throwing the ball back and forth with people in the stands. Although try as I might to catch his attention, he never threw the dang ball to me.

Back in September, there was an incident at the Tennessee Titans stadium where one of their pyrotechnic machines caught fire, so the NFL banned the use of fire in any pre-game celebrations. So now the Vikings come out of the locker room through a bunch of smoke without any flames. Doesn't look quite as cool as it used to.

The first half was pretty ugly, but the second half was much more exciting and the Vikings backups gave Mitch Trubisky and team a good run for the money. But it wasn't meant to be. The Vikings led all the way up to the end of the game before the Bears kicked a field goal to win by a score of 21-19. Oh well. At least the Vikings were going to the playoffs!