About Me
I grew up a Minnesota Vikings fan, which isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s a rough ride, full of ups and downs, and forces you to learn hope, grit, and how to laugh so you don’t cry.
Like most Vikings fans of my vintage, the scars are easy to name. It starts with the Purple People Eaters of the 1960s and 1970s, dominant defenses that reached four Super Bowls and lost them all. Then there was the 1998 NFC Championship: a 15–1 juggernaut, arguably the greatest team in franchise history, undone by a missed 38-yard field goal and an overtime loss to Atlanta. I watched that one at my wife’s friend Little Lori’s brand-new house, which I’ve associated with bad Vikings karma ever since. And later, 2009 in New Orleans, a game filled with turnovers, controversy, Bountygate hits, and a 31–28 overtime defeat that kept a Super Bowl just out of reach. Those are just a few of the heartbreaks. Rest assured, there are many, many more.
Only a true fan understands how overlooked the Vikings have been over the years, largely because they never won that elusive Super Bowl. Had those teams captured even one title—or two, for Bud’s sake!—they would almost certainly be remembered among the best teams ever to play the game. Instead, without those championships, they’ve been flattened by history into something far less than they were, remembered as merely solid squads rather than the dominant, era-defining teams they truly were. It’s a great injustice.
Growing up, our family television couldn’t reliably pick up Vikings games. Since I didn’t want to miss any of the Purple’s games, when Sunday rolled around, I’d hop on my bike and ride about a half mile to my cousin Chris’s house. Chris was a couple years older than me, and we’d watch the game together. (God bless you, Chrispy, and rest in peace. You are missed.)
After the game, we’d sit around playing Mattel’s Talking Football. It was a game where offensive plays were picked by inserting one of 13 small plastic records into a miniature record player, which then announced the result of the play. Chris’s ability to “guess” the play I called bordered on the supernatural. There’s no doubt in my mind that he somehow marked the little records, but I didn’t care. Playing the game was a blast anyway. We laughed, argued, called plays, and lived football long after the final whistle.
Looking back, it’s clear why those memories stuck. Chris and I were Generation Jones kids, growing up in that sweet spot where childhood was still gloriously analog, but the future was arriving fast. We rode bikes everywhere, learned the game by doing, not watching highlight clips, and argued about football face-to-face instead of online. Sundays weren’t optimized or overanalyzed; they were lived. Our love of football was fueled by nostalgia, pretending to be Vikings greats while tossing a football in the backyard, testing gridiron strategy on Aurora’s ABC Monday Night Football computerized electric game, and Avalon Hill’s Statis Pro Football. Imaginations ran rampant.
That’s really what this site is about. Football isn’t just a scoreboard or a box score. It’s emotion, imagination, and the little extra effort that turns something good into something unforgettable. My goal here is to capture that spark and share epic ideas that enhance your game of football—whether that’s through strategy, nostalgia, creativity, or simply remembering why we fell in love with the sport in the first place.
If I can add even a little more passion, fun, or fire to how you experience football, then this site is doing exactly what it set out to do.
As always, run to daylight.
~Randy