Gross Football Lunch – Week 10, 2026 NFL Season

The 2026 Minnesota Vikings Brainworm Bloodletting Extravaganza: Frick Me Up Kirk, My Body Is Ready

As you know, as a valued member of my loyal readership, I preach the virtues of practicing emotionally healthy and sustainable sports fandom. At the end of the day, both football in general and the NFL in specific are quasi-organized versions of that game from the one episode of The Simpsons in which Homer and Bart charge straight at each other with pots on their heads. It’s not worth getting too worked up about. Getting worked up about it a little bit is a healthy reminder that you’re alive and you have feelings and you’re watching this crap for a reason, but getting so worked up that you find yourself pissed off and depressed about your actual life because your team still sucks is bad for yourself and everyone around you (except in the playoffs). 32 teams enter every season, and every season, 31 teams leave disappointed. Your team will be one of those 31, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Accept it, enjoy the big plays and the wins in whatever quantity they are available, and live a full life regardless.

Unless, of course, you’re a fan of the Minnesota Vikings. I mean, yes, ideally you would be able to keep your shit together and be normal enough to actually enjoy the team’s hot start, but fuck me if I’ve been able to do that, so double fuck me if I’m gonna give anyone shit for similar emotional failures. This team is now and has been maddening all season long, and it’s ruining my season, if not my life. Fortunately, I barely need to explain why this should be the case. We all saw Monday night’s shameful display of anti-offense, in which Carson Wentz sucked so much at quarterback that the team was forced to bring back Kirk Cousins in a trade with the Raiders.

Cousins, as you may recall, was the team’s starting quarterback for six seasons, and during those six seasons, I routinely regarded him as the bane of my very existence. The thing that is often lost in positive discussions of Cousins is that, while he is often statistically impressive in the aggregate, his week-to-week performances are often wildly inconsistent. One week he’s throwing exactly on time 40 yards downfield precisely where Justin Jefferson, Adam Thielen, or Stefon Diggs’ have placed their outstretched hands, and the next week – which invariably was a more important game than the one the week before – he takes all of his dropbacks like a 15-year-old driving on a learner’s permit for the first time. In these games, late throws, fucked up timings, surrender checkdowns, and sacks become the norm.

After a couple of years of this clockwork unreliability, it was plainly obvious that the Vikings weren’t going to be winning any Super Bowls with Cousins leading the offense. That’s true of most teams and most quarterbacks, of course, but this is where his first tenure with the team requires context. The Vikings signed Cousins in the 2018 off-season to a gaudy, fully-guaranteed contract as the final piece of a Super Bowl-worthy roster on the heels of their run to the NFC Championship the season prior, and the team never got that far again. They only even made the playoffs twice in those six seasons, and only won one playoff game. If your team signed a quarterback as The Final Piece, and to a contract that reflects that level of esteem, only to win one playoff game in six years, you’d be mad at that quarterback, too.

And so, once Cousins finally left to sign with the Atlanta Falcons for entirely too much money, I was relieved. At last, that dude was someone else’s problem. At last, it was time to see what Kevin O’Connell could do with one of those cheap rookie contract quarterbacks I had heard so many great things about. We all know what happened next, and I don’t care to recount any of it here. Suffice to say, all of us Vikings fans were given a harsh reminder that, in football as in life, things can always get worse. I have been humbled by one and a half seasons of completely futile passing offense, and I’m ready to settle for a half-season of aggregate competence.

Make no mistake, I harbor no illusions about what this does for the Vikings’ season. While the defense may be of championship caliber, the offense has merely been upgraded to potentially watchable. If I am trying to model emotionally healthy sports fandom, I must concede that this is a huge upgrade. I’ll get to see pretty passes to talented receivers again to go along with the infuriating bozo nonsense dropbacks that I’ve become so accustomed to. My wife has given me a lot of shit for reacting to all of the Vikings’ wins this season with a sad, resigned shrug, but how was I supposed to be all that happy about them? I may not Know Ball as such, but I know enough to recognize that this exact crisis was coming to wreck the team eventually.

This upgrade does not make the Vikings Super Bowl shortlisters, but that’s ok. Whatever boneheaded bullshit quarterbacking may be in my near future will still hit like cool water from a fresh spring oasis after a year and a half of wandering the desert. With any luck (and good health on Cousins’ part), I’ll be able to watch my favorite team remain in the playoff chase for most if not all of the rest of the season before the inevitable letdown comes, which means I’ll be able to spend most if not all of the rest of the season telling myself that while the Vikings might not be real contenders, they could still make the playoffs, and once they make the playoffs, who knows? Seeing anyone who knows anything about football knows for a fact that if this team were to ever win a Super Bowl, they would have by now. All we have as Vikings fans is the easy lie of Of Course Not, But Maybe. That’s all I can ask of them.

* * * * *

Now that the revolting little love-in of short-term optimism is done, it’s time for me to turn to the absolute nightmare of the Vikings’ prospects beyond this season. First and foremost, I need to admit that part of what depressed me about this team even when they were winning is the fact that I am forced to assume Brian Flores will get a head coaching job elsewhere this off-season. His unprecedented success with this defense is a direct result of his unprecedented aggression with the blitz, which is itself a direct result of his total mastery of defense. What he has done with the Vikings cannot be ignored, and seeing what Flores has done with the Vikings is a constant reminder of how impressive his stint as head coach of the the Dolphins really was. And, with Tua Tagovailoa’s fall from stardom, no plausibly deniable explanation for Flores’ blackballing remains. So what if he’s suing the league for racial discrimination? Leave him unhired in this next coaching cycle, and you will prove Flores’ case for him.

But in the unlikely and fucking depressing event that Flores remains as defensive coordinator, the offense will still need to improve just for the Vikings to stay afloat in their division. And, of course, no offensive improvement will be possible without a quarterback. Kirk Cousins is a free agent after this season, and at 38 years old, it would be foolish to pencil him in for another season of good health and starting-caliber quarterback play even with another year on his contract. Needless to say, even having accepted that Kirk Cousins is the best this team can do right now, it would also be foolish to bring Cousins back for an age-39 season at a veteran starting quarterback price.

The Vikings will need to figure out something at quarterback, and their paths for doing so will be limited. Even if extending Cousins is their best option in a vacuum, they might not have the cap space to do so anyway, and they can only save so much money from cuts. And, of course, bringing Cousins back without drafting a quarterback in is merely kicking the can down the road. There must be an actual plan at quarterback, and I don’t know what such a plan looks like because I’m not paid the big bucks to figure these things out. Perhaps they will be in position to draft a rookie quarterback in the first round, and perhaps they will not.

(In any Vikings examination, this is the time that most of the commentariat loves to get smug and smarmy about the Vikings’ continued refusal to blow up the team, bottom out, and start over like a “normal” franchise does. And, in response, I am compelled to provide the same response I always provide: please name a time that strategy has actually worked. When was the last time an NFL team undertook a large-scale tear down and emerged better off than they were before everyone who was around for the tear down got fired? The only recent example I can think of is the Taylor/Burrow/Chase Bengals, who have had an up-and-down decade, and even if you can come up with more, the fact remains that most teardowns fail, and the few that succeed did so because they were further along than most people realized. Why should I accept any amount of disgusting Vikings football in pursuit of a slim chance of future watchability?)

Regardless of who serves as the nominal starting quarterback for the Vikings next season, my other questions about the team’s future also lack easy answers. If I were to start examining all of those questions in this space, I would never finish, so instead I will wrap up by asking the single biggest question the franchise faces: What is to be done with Kevin O’Connell?

Every aspect of this team is built around O’Connell’s perceived ability to get the most out of his offense no matter who is playing quarterback, and in the past season and a half the reality of the Vikings’ offense has been completely unacceptable. Perhaps not even Bill Walsh could get much production out of J.J. McCarthy, Kyler Murray, or Carson Wentz, but even so, the responsibility for the unit’s dire play must rest with O’Connell. He is in charge of the offense, and the offense isn’t good enough. He is in charge of the team, and being in charge of the team means accepting responsibility for it’s shortcomings, whether that’s fair or not.

And, for what it’s worth, there are plenty of reasons to believe this assignment of blame is as fair as football gets. The offense is designed to get receivers open deep downfield on long-developing plays, often requiring the quarterback to take a long dropback (with or without play action) and wait for the route to develop before delivering a laser beam throw to the intended target, quite possibly with the quarterback fully aware they will get creamed as soon as the ball comes out. Even by the standards of NFL offense, this strategy features lots of points of error and is only optimal for a select few quarterbacks, and one of them happens to be Kirk Cousins. They brought him back for a reason.

His playcalls are always 15 words long because they are always two seven-word plays packaged together and bridged with a Can (first seven-word play CAN second seven-word play) that the quarterback can check to at his discretion at the line; combine this with O’Connell’s tendency to use every microsecond of headset time to give the quarterback additional instructions ($), and you have a ready-made recipe for overloading a quarterback’s already stressed mental stack. And, of course, the Vikings cannot run the ball to save their lives and haven’t been able to since O’Connell came to town.

Yet! The team wins football games. They have made the playoffs twice in O’Connell’s four complete seasons, and in those other two seasons, I would argue the Vikings overachieved. In 2023, they won only won three games after Cousins was lost for the season with an Achilles tendon tear, but that’s three more games than they should’ve won. Even in last year’s disastrous campaign, the team won five straight games to end the season with a 9-8 record. As tempting as it is to assign all of this success to Brian Flores, the fact of the matter is that if a head coach shoulders the blame for anything that goes wrong, they must necessarily be able to claim credit for anything that goes right. Anything else is a rhetorical shell game being run by a charlatan, and if you don’t believe me, think of how many offense-minded head coaches have failed to field even passable defenses, and not for lack of trying. He also gives speeches that make me – a life-long fat kid with abominably weak upper arms – feel like I could suplex a Land Rover. Emotionally healthy sports fandom requires gratitude for success and an understanding that it can always get worse. As much as O’Connell has been pissing me off lately, I still want him to work out.

Nevertheless, O’Connell is coaching for his job right now, and the team has yet another harrowing, fraught off-season ahead whether he keeps it or not. The very real possibility of a 6-0 start resulting in an off-season of total house cleaning is whiplash-inducing, and a reminder of why I’ve chosen to seek out emotionally sustainable Vikings fandom in the first place. I have no control over any of this; all I can do is watch the games and hope that in doing so, I get to see some cool things that make me feel nice. And if the Vikings don’t give me those pleasures, at least I’ll be able to resume shit-talking Kirk Cousins at every opportunity. Sometimes, you need ways to create your own happiness.

Week 10 NFL Confidence Pool

Bye: Bears, Broncos, Buccaneers, Battlestar Galactica, Eagles

I have long been skeptical of the true value of a quarterback on a rookie contract, and I think this skepticism is rooted in my belief that the speculative value of a quarterback on a rookie contract makes those quarterbacks especially prone to magical thinking, and becoming a dumping ground for the hopes and dreams of the franchise and its fans. Yes, the fixed wage scale of rookie contracts eases the burden of planning the rest of the team-building operation, but it does not and cannot constitute any sort of market inefficiency when no fewer than 25 of 32 teams are pursuing it at all times.

In practice, the rookie quarterback deal is a 3-year long game of “Smash or Pass?”, and the overexposure of the NFL in general and young quarterbacks in particular makes those three years longer and more maddening than they would be otherwise. I’m still recovering emotionally from Justin Fields Discourse, and I’m not even a Bears fan. I say this so that you keep it in mind for next week, when the Fernando Mendoza concern trolling is guaranteed to be both enervating and inescapable. Can you even imagine a worse defense to face in your first NFL start? I’d sooner face the Steel Curtain itself. Some of those guys must be dead by now.

Seven games later on, it strikes me that the Vikings’ Week 1 home game against the Packers was an inversion of their formula. Instead of of the defense playing lights out and either helping the offense out with field position or scoring outright, the Vikings’ spent most of the first three quarters getting shelled by bomb after bomb, until all the blitzing and ineffective running game broke the pass protection in half.

I point this out because last week, the Packers did the same to the Patriots, who were unable to mount any sort of comeback, and who suffered the further indignity of seeing top cornerback Christian Gonzalez get broiled again and again. This is instructive for this rematch because it highlights two things. First, Jordan Love does an excellent job of throwing deep, and you can bet they’ll look to do so early and often. Second, their offensive line has been shuffled some in the intervening weeks, and has become slightly but noticeably more effective. Don’t let the final score from week 1 fool you; this strategy almost worked, and blitzing 80% of the time will leave receivers open deep. Also, to the extent I am willing to eat shit and acknowledge Kirk Cousins is a better quarterback than I ever gave him credit for, winning in Lambeau was never one of his strengths.

I am rolling with Ravens here, because I fear humiliation more than I fear being wrong, and there’s no shit-talk I wouldn’t deserve should I pick the Chargers and lose. I can’t pick them, even though the Ravens are also disintegrating and the Chargers’ opportunities to win a game this season are dwindling. They have to win one eventually, right? Right?

1 Point: Dolphins over Colts

Enjoy the games, everyone!