wadE and Wade have teamed up to give you the most indepth analysis of the upcoming 2009 NFL Wild Card Weekend… well… the most indepth analysis you’ll find on simpleprop.com at least…
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Quite the big day for the Vikings yesterday. 487 total yards on offense. Only 181 yards given up on defense.

These totals weren’t surprising. The Vikings played a New York Giants team that was out of the playoff picture and couldn’t even be bothered to show up in their last game at Giants Stadium ever. In a game that mattered against Carolina the Giants gave up 41 points. In a game that didn’t matter the Giants gave up 44 points, and it could have been worse.
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29-37
20-48
34-10
14-35
7-47
34-21

Those are the final scores of the last 6 games of the 2008 season for the Arizona Cardinals. I bring this up to illustrate that all hope isn’t lost for the 2009 Vikings. Although I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I already have one foot off of the bandwagon.
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Sports Illustrated ran an article this week about former NFL players who, frankly, aren’t doing very well. Carson Palmer, earlier this year, stated that his opinion was that someone would eventually die on the field. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about the alarming rate of concussions among football players, and a link from that to dementia. Gladwell, in a recent chat with ESPN’s Bill Simmons, also had this to say about the NFL:

“Yes, football has kind of been ruined for me, I’m afraid. Understand that I live for the game. But I’m increasingly of the opinion that it is screwed up — on a moral level — in a way that no other professional sport is.

Think about it. The league has a salary cap (which limits players’ pay), minimal health insurance for retirees and no guaranteed contracts. In other words, the owners reserve the right to limit the pool of money available to players, to walk away from contracts whenever they please and then hold no long-term responsibility for the health of the players whose contracts they have limited and declined to honor. Coal miners aren’t treated this badly. And now we strongly suspect a fourth fact: that some significant percentage of ex-players, as a direct result of playing professional football, will suffer from dementia in their 40s and 50s, in addition to all the known and significant other health risks of the game (severe arthritis, substantially elevated risk of heart disease, etc.).”

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