NFL Preseason Week 1 - Minnesota Vikings vs Denver Broncos
Todd Swank's Diary Entry for August 15, 2021
On Friday night, Avery and I went to the driving range to work some kinks out of our games. Avery seems to have made progress, but my kinks run pretty deep and never seem to improve much. Beautiful day, though.
On Saturday, Luke & I went to Downtown Minneapolis to US Bank Stadium. It was a nice day for a stroll through the city.
We were there to see the highly anticipated preseason battle between our beloved hometown Vikings and those crazy horses, the Broncos. A mighty battle was expected.
I've been wanting to buy Vikings Season Tickets for awhile and finally added myself to the waiting list in early July. On Friday, I received the call that a pair of seats became available so I jumped at the chance. I'm really happy with our seats!
Olympic gold medalist and Minnesota Golden Gophers NCAA National Champion wrestler Gable Steveson opened the game by blowing the Gjallarhorn. We all cheered Louder as he requested.
Preseason games are typically brutal, but we were excited for this one since it was our first opportunity to attend a football game since the pandemic began. We were excited to participate regardless of what kind of game it was.
Of course we're still a little Covid paranoid, so I decided to buy out all the seats around us as well. Good technique for social distancing.
The Vikings decided to rest 30 players for the game leaving Defensive End, Stephen Weatherly, as the only projected starter making an appearance for the Purple & Gold. It's nice of the team to still charge full price for preseason games even when it's barely the second string that is there to play.
Former Texas A&M Quarterback & 3rd Round Draft Pick, Kellen Mond, made his first appearance as a Viking during the game.
He almost ran in a touchdown and almost threw a pass for a touchdown, but it's still a work in progress. I think Kirk Cousins' job is safe for a little while yet.
We also cheered for former Viking, Teddy Bridgewater, who is trying to win the starting job for his team. Teddy had a tragic injury during training camp in 2016 and never became our starting quarterback again. He was such a good guy, though, that we still like to cheer for him as he tries to make his way back to success in the NFL.
We didn't get to cheer for our stars this week but did get to see many of them including running back, Dalvin Cook. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out his fashion choice with the hat. At first I thought it was a play on a chef's hat with his last name being Cook, but later figured it's a style thing. He has a lot of hair that needs to be contained to keep it looking fancy like.
We also saw former Viking, Brian Robison, working the stands. He was a superstar defensive end for us for 11 seasons and still looked pretty good doing his sack celebration. One of these days, I'm going to come up with my own sack celebration.
In the 4th quarter, I was shooting pictures with my phone and suddenly saw we made it on the big screen. I always have the desire to do something really clever when this happens, but by the time I snapped this photo they'd moved on to other people. However, one of these years I'm going to be dancing on that thing.
Our old buddy, Troy Brown, saw us on the big screen and sent me a text which led to this picture. It's always good to see him and Rhonda even from a distance.
The game ended up being a blow-out with Denver crushing Minnesota 33-6. I tried not to worry much about it since the Vikings used almost none of their starters. Hopefully we'll get to see more of the first team during their next preseason game against the Colts next week.
Coach Zimmer didn't looked very pleased about the results. I'm pretty sure he knew he wasn't playing his starters, so he'll just have to figure out a way to get rid of the grumpies and focus on the positives in life.
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