I was living, as it happens, in the city of Falcon Heights. You know about Falcon Heights, very likely, even if you don’t know you do. Ever heard of the Great Minnesota Get Together, a.k.a., the Minnesota State Fair? It is held in Falcon Heights. Ever hear of the University of Minnesota? The smaller of the two Twin Cities campuses, the one with the ecology and organismic biology, and agriculture and forestry and stuff, is in Falcon Heights. Ever hear of the police killing of Philandro Castile, the one where the cop was ascared of the scary black man so he pumped him full of bullets in front of his girlfriend and a small child? That was in Falcon Heights too.

But Falcon Heights is obscured and obscure.

Even though the Saint Paul Campus and the Minnesota State Fair held in Saint Paul are actually physically within the boundaries of the independent city of Falcon Heights, nobody seems to notice. When Castile was killed, he was killed by the Saint Anthony-Lauderdale-Falcon Heights Police Department. A.k.a., the Saint Anthony Police Department for short. At every turn, Falcon Heights is obscured by something.

That year that the Vikings and the Falcons met, in Minneapolis, during the playoffs, Falcon Heights was obscured again when hubris-filled Vikings fans, knowing they would win the game, went to Falcon Heights (nowhere near the stadium, by the way) and changed the signs at the entrances to the city from “Falcon Heights” to “Vikings Heights.”

The next day the game was played. I understand that at the time the Vikings were considered a pretty good team. People still remmebered the famous Purple People Eaters. Even though the Vikings had not been anywhere near a Super Bowl in a while, they did get into the playoffs now and then, and people took them pretty seriously. Now, this particular year, the team was ready to go all the way. They should have had no problem beating the Falcons and moving ahead. There was really no way they could lose that game.

The Vikings had the coach they need to win, the players they needed to win, and importantly, they were psyched. They had the psychology of victory going in their favor.

Then this happened:

Ever since then here his how every Vikings game I’ve ever seen has gone, until recently.

1) The vikings play very well and score early.

2) Something bad happens to the Vikings. They get a bad call on pass interference. A turnover. A minor injury that takes a key player out for part of the game. A baby goat bleats in the distance. Something. The kind of thing that normally happens, that every team faces a few times a game and then just moves on.

3) No matter how far ahead the Vikings are, and no matter how well they’ve been playing, they take a step backwards on nearly every play until the end of the game.

4) Vikings lose.

That is the psychology of defeat. No matter how good a team is, if this is the way the mind turns at those small and insignificant moments, the team can never get into the playoffs.

This year, the defeat thing started to happen before the season started, when a baby goat bleated somewhere in Bloomington, Minnesota, and the star quarter back, Teddy Bridgewater, took a sudden turn on his knee while standing there during practice, and almost lost his leg. Seriously, the surgeons almost had to cut off his freakin’ leg. But they had a backup, a quarterback who could hold the fort while Bridgewater was out. Then, soon after he started to play, he got an injury, right at the start of the season, and was out. A similar thing happened to the Vikings’ star catcher-guy, so both the thrower-guy and the catcher-guy were out. The season was over, the Vikings were done, so early in the season that it wasn’t even disappointing. It was just, like, we don’t really even have a football team in this town. Just a really nice and new stadium. No team, though, really.

So the team was stuck with a thrower-guy and a catcher-guy who had not even been picked up in the draft. I don’t know what that means, but apparently these two guys just showed up, like for a pickup game or something, and now they are the main players on the team.

And ever since then, the Vikings have been mopping up the floor of with each of the teams they’ve played, one after the other, and are now something like tied for the second best in terms of winning vs. losing, in the whole world of Football.

This weekend, the Vikings play the Falcons. The Falcons are not doing too well, and the Vikings are. The Vikings are expected to beat the Falcons. They can’t lose, really.

I’ll just leave you with this, from a Vikings-Bears game in 2013:

Except in two areas: Gayness and football.

First, the gayness. It is not entirely clear to me why gayosity and all things related is so far down on the list of things to stop officially hating in American society. Yes, yes, there are post-hoc explanations aplenty but I’m not sure if anything really holds up. The thing is, that which is being “granted” to gays today, over the last year and a half and presumably over the next year or so, should have been granted to everyone ever a long time ago, and was in fact officially, legally, granted to almost everyone in the spirit of law and society if not everywhere always on the ground. Forty and nine years have passed from the passage of the Civil Rights Act to the year in which the tide turned and state after state started abrogating absurd anti-gay laws or enacting same sex marriage fairness. I quickly add that a turned tied does not equal an empty harbor; it is just the point at which things begin to flow mostly in a direction opposite, more or less, they were flowing before.

For those of you who don’t know, Minnesota experienced a major fight last year over same sex marriage and I find this deeply embarrassing as a resident here. If there was a state that could be pointed to as the state that gave our country the Civil Rights Act, it is Minnesota. It was the mayor of Minneapolis later elected as a federal representative and eventually Vice President who made that act happen. We are the Civil Rights State, dammit. And we almost passed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage! That election day this amendment, along with another bone-headed constitutional amendment that would have favored Republicans in subsequent elections statewide, as well as the Republican control of the state legislature, were swept away like the stinking offal that it was. But the issue should have never come up. General equality should have been something we had legally in this state decades ago. Making inequality part of our constitution would have been a heinous act by people I can only describe as social criminals. Kidnappers of rights, robbers of freedom, aggravated assaulters of the already repressed, punchers down. They even tried to argue that they were good people doing things that other people simply disagreed with. I think not.

But then there is football. When I moved to Minnesota, the football stadium was named the Hubert H. Humphrey Metro-dome, but most people called it the Metrodome, and only rarely the Humphrey Dome, as though they were embarrassed about Humphrey, the afore mentioned champion of civil rights. When I asked various long-time or born and bred Minnesotans about this, they denied that there was anything going on here. They just call it the “Dome” or the “Metrodome” because that’s easier to say. No anti-Humphrey stuff going on here. No implicit indirect passive aggressive resistance to civil rights going on here. Just easier to say. Dome. Metrodome. Nothing else.

Then, they added another name to the Metrodome. They couldn’t get rid of the Humphrey name but the added “Mall of America” to the name by calling the turf on which the play happened “Mall of America Field” so now the big ugly out of date sports stadium has a name that sounds like the full name of one of those British Counts or something: “The Hubert. H. Humphrey Metrodome, Mall of America Field, Also Known as the Thunderdome the Homerdome and The Dome. At your service.”

And I swear to you that as soon as the thing was called “Mall of America Field” the press stopped calling it conveniently “The Metrodome” (leaving off any mention of Humphrey) and started calling it the Mall of America Field. All the time.

Now, I’m sure that there is an excuse for this. The deal was made, the Mall of America invested in naming rights and thereafter the Free Press was required to use that name because they are required to attend to corporate interests. Nothing anti-civil rights, anti-DFL, anti-Humphrey going on here. Just the press being bought off by a major corporation. Go on home, folks, nothing to see here. Business as usual.

And all that is the subtle, nuanced, unspoken context in which the Vikings fired Chris Kluwe. Kluwe, one of the world’s greatest punters ever and in his prime, was one of those players who allowed people like me, who are marginally interested in football but unhappy about certain aspects of the game, to see hope. Kluwe tweeted, and his tweets were often … well, smart, and even progressive. He was also repressed. He once tweeted about how dangerous it might be to play on a solid-frozen open field not prepped for winter play (after the HHH Metrodome collapsed under snow one day). He was told to shut up. He tweeted that too. Eventually he tweeted about the gay marriage amendment, and in fact joined the political movement to defeat the amendment. In short, Kluwe did things that football players were not supposed to do: Think, speak, opinionate, not be a right wing bible-thumping shit.

Chris Kluwe was fired by the vikings because of his gay rights activism. He posted about it in a piece called “I Was An NFL Player Until I Was Fired By Two Cowards And A Bigot“:

In May 2013, the Vikings released me from the team. At the time, quite a few people asked me if I thought it was because of my recent activism for same-sex marriage rights, and I was very careful in how I answered the question. My answer, verbatim, was always, “I honestly don’t know, because I’m not in those meetings with the coaches and administrative people.”

This is a true answer. I honestly don’t know if my activism was the reason I got fired.

However, I’m pretty confident it was.

Go read the entire piece. It is rather amazing. This is not a simple situation. The owner of the team seems to have been supportive of Kluwe’s activism. The coach seems to have been swayed to ask Kluwe to STFU, but reluctantly (he is, after all, one of the few African American coaches in the NFL and does not seem like a “pull the ladder up” kind of guy). The real bad guy in this scenario may be Mike Preifer, the special teams coach and thus punter Kluwe’s immediate boss. Preifer is painted by Kluwe as a real dick, telling the player that he’ll burn in hell with the gays and once stating “We should round up all the gays, send them to an island, and then nuke it until it glows.” Kluwe notes:

It’s my belief, based on everything that happened over the course of 2012, that I was fired by Mike Priefer, a bigot who didn’t agree with the cause I was working for, and two cowards, Leslie Frazier and Rick Spielman, both of whom knew I was a good punter and would remain a good punter for the foreseeable future, as my numbers over my eight-year career had shown, but who lacked the fortitude to disagree with Mike Priefer on a touchy subject matter.

Also, the Vikings suck. A year or so ago one might have hope that they’d move out of state and we could be rid of them but a new stadium is being built as we speak and they are here to stay. Therefore, they have to change. Hopefully the firing of Chris Kluwe will serve a positive purpose as a turning point. Next, we need to see the firing of Mike Priefer. A person in any management position in any profession in the United States who told his employees the things he said to the Vikings players would be fired. Except in sports, especially football. Sports teams, players, coaches, and owners seem to live in a world where they can be freely racist, anti-gay, and religious bigots. That really has to end.

I do not appreciate the fact that the New Orleans Saints defense, when playing the superior Minnesota Vikings, clearly designed, practiced, and successfully implemented a strategy that if adopted by other teams and not stopped by new rules, will change the way the sport is played forever. During the playoff game with the Vikings, the Saints’ defense got through the Vikings’ defensive line and knocked down the quarterback something like 19 times. Not sacked. They knocked him down after he had thrown or passed off the ball. One time there was a penalty, and the commentators covering the game claimed that penalty was not appropriate.

In other words, the Saints figured out a way of physically hitting the QB after he let go of the ball without it being a penalty. They did it enough times to injure and disorient Brett Favre. In my view, two or three of the plays late in the game would likely not have gone the way they went had Favre not been injured in this way. The Saints probably won the game by using this new technique.

Ethan Siegel disagreed. He said:

The Colts have a much better O-line than the Vikes. You might not like your QB getting hit after the ball is thrown, but it’s your linemen’s jobs to protect him, not the officials’.

José said:

It’s not some new strategy developed by the Saints. It’s the strategy that’s used by every single team in every single game. The Vikings were trying to do the exact same thing to Drew Brees. They just weren’t as successful. There’s even a stat called “knockdowns” which records legal hits on a quarterback made after he’s released the ball.

…

No one is saying the strategy doesn’t exist. We’re saying that it is the strategy that is always used. It’s just a normal part of a brutal sport. Try and find an article that suggests that the Saints tactics could change the way the game will be played.

Jared said:

How closely, exactly, did you watch the game?
Favre got rid of the ball early many times because he was about to be tackled. The Saints didn’t get sacks because he’s a good quarterback and was throwing the ball before someone got to him (often away). It’s not a “new strategy.”

Brian said:

Greg, apparently in your rush to expose the “virtually unprecedented” strategy of the Saints by linking to a news story wherein they promise to give Peyton some “remember-me” shots, you failed to read just one paragraph further.
[i]”We hear it all the time,” left guard Ryan Lilja said Friday. “The teams in our division go out and draft guys for that reason. You hear rumors about bounties and that kind of stuff, so it’s nothing new.”[/i]
Whether wrong or right, it’s not something unprecedented.
And knockdowns are an unofficial stat, but they are considered by many when ranking defensive players (considered with sacks, hurries, etc.).

And there were other naysayers. Some commented here.

And they were all wrong. And I was all right.

From The Washington Post:

The NFL suspended New Orleans Saints Coach Sean Payton, General Manager Mickey Loomis and former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams Wednesday for their roles in a bounty system that provided the team’s players payments for hits that injured opponents.

Williams was suspended indefinitely. Payton was suspended for one year, and Loomis was suspended for eight games…

The Saints were fined $500,000 and lose two second-round draft choices, one in this year’s draft and one in 2013…

…

Saints assistant head coach Joe Vitt also was suspended for six games. …

The penalties are among the harshest in the sport’s history. …

…

“A combination of elements made this matter particularly unusual and egregious,” Goodell added. “When there is targeting of players for injury and cash rewards over a three-year period, the involvement of the coaching staff and three years of denials and willful disrespect of the rules, a strong and lasting message must be sent that such conduct is totally unacceptable and has no place in the game.”

…

According to the NFL’s investigation, the fund reached as much as $50,000 or more and players were paid $1,500 for a hit that knocked an opponent from a game and $1,000 for a hit that led to an opposing player being helped off the field. Those amounts doubled or tripled for playoff games, according to the league’s investigation.

…

From MPR:

We knew it!

In the franchise-changing NFL National Conference championship game in 2010, many thought the New Orleans Saints were playing dirty and out to injure people, particularly then-Vikings-QB Brett Favre. Now we know the truth. They were.

Today, the National Football League revealed results of an investigation into a “bounty program” the Saints had that paid players for injuring the competition.

It said between 22 and 27 defensive players and at least one assistant coach were involved and that the payouts to players reached a high of $50,000 during the playoffs that year.

What needs to happen now is obvious, isn’t it? The Saints need to give up their Superbowl win. They cheated. They need to turn in their rings, and they need to be removed from play for a couple of years. Let the franchise die on the vine if that’s how it happens to turn out.

As I once said:

I did not appreciate the sentiment that the New York Yankees had to win the World Series because Osama Bin Laden blew up the World Trade Center. I do not appreciate the sentiment that the New Orleans Saints have to win the Super Bowl because George Bush let poor New Orleans residents die in the Super Dome. …

I do not appreciate the idea that gay-dating ads will be banned from the Super Bowl but anti-abortion ads, I hear, will be shown.

Maybe we should just skip football entirely this year. Forever even.

Which is more likely: That the Detroit Lions would beat the Minnesota Vikings, or that all the O₂ molecules in a conference room would all go to one corner so that everyone suffocates? Today we found out. With the Vikings maintaining their losing streak and the Twins falling out of contention for any kind of playoff or whatever they do in Baseball, we have an interesting result: Apparently, it does not matter if you have the worst stadium in the world (the Viking’s stadium) or the coolest bestest newest stadium in the world (The Twin’s new stadium). You can still totally suck either way. Personally, I’m fine with all of our local teams being the worst in the country. Except of course, they are not. The Minnesota Lynx are apparently kicking butt and are doing really well. After all, as a blogger, Lynx are very important to me.

Somebody just told me about Lizard Lick Towing. I did not believe them. But it’s real. It’s a bunch of guys named bubba towing things during a reality show. Here, look:

No point in looking for an explanation for that. Kinda like Repo Man done by the Tea Party.

OMG

Anyway, back to football: As a fair weather fan, it appears I’m free for Sundays for the rest of the season if anybody wants to do anything. Let me know.

On today’s radio show, Steve Borsch was talking about the way in which social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is playing out — as an extension of social interaction more than as a new form of shopping mall or marketing environment — and an observation I made a couple of weeks ago during the Vikings game congealed like mucus in the back of your throat when you are getting over a cold (See Pandemonium Looms in Minneapolis). So, since I have a blog, I thought I’d hack it up for you.

Chris Kluwe is the beloved kicker for the Vikings. I don’t really understand football at this level, but in between “possession” the “special” teams come on the field and a kicker kicks the ball so that it lands in a certain spot to the disadvantage of the other team. Apparently, entire games can be won on the basis of this single act, and our man, Kluwe, is widely appreciated as a kicker by vikings fans. So, when he stepped for the first time onto the field during a game being played in inclement Minnesota weather in the University’s open air stadium (the NFL stadium having collapsed under the weight of a 17 inch snow storm), it seemed out of place to hear the fans booing him.

Why were Minnesota fans booing Chris Klewe? Because earlier in the day, he tweeted something that the fans did not want to hear. In fact, what he tweeted was so bad that the NFL overlords demanded that he stop talking about the issue on Twitter, presumably with a threat of being fined, which apparently they can do. The NFL shut him down because of two or three 140 character comments and the fans boo’ed him for what he said. It must have been awful.

In fact, what Chris Klewe said was that the bitter cold of the open air stadium was going to freeze the ground solid, significantly increasing the chances of someone hitting the ground hard and getting a concussion or other serious head injury.

He tweeted:

… all respect to the people that cleared the field and got it ready, you did an amazing job. That being said, its unplayable.

The field is as hard as concrete … and anyone that hits their head is going to get a concussion.

then ..

I’ve been asked not to tweet anymore about the field so as not to distract teammates … and I will honor that.

Then they played the game, and during the first drive, Bret Favre, the Vikings Quarterback, was knocked down, hit his head, got a concussion, and his career ended at that moment.¹

Kluwe was right. And, he was right about something important, and about something that the fans should have been concerned with. And, he was right about a major Minnesota Vikings player getting injured, and the fans had just witnessed the predicted injury before their very eyes, and prior to Kluwe stepping out onto the field for the first time that day.

But, Chris Kluwe apparently also said something negative, though also accurate, about the TCF Bank Stadium, and the stadium was full of fans who were happy to have the stadium available to them, who were enjoying themselves showing off as fans braving the game in horrible weather. They were all dumb-asses, of course. The original stadium, the one that had collapsed, held some 60 thousand people, and as is usually the case with football games, most or all of those seats were sold. The TCF Bank stadium holds some 40 thousand. And, there were only about 25 to 30 thousand at this game. The other fans stayed away, while a subset of them went to see a losing team in a part of town with zero parking at a stadium with no beer (the U does not allow it) in near zero temperatures and snow. So they were the dumbasses. Nonetheless, when the Vikings Quarterback got a concussion by hitting his head on the frozen stadium surface, even the dumbasses should have put two and two together and cheered Chris Kluwe for having spoken truth to power. But no. All they could see was Kluwe dissing the open air stadium, and thus, the fans who were at the game boo’ed him.

So, MY take on social networking: It’s an amplifier and a new venue. Social networking is a place where technology can facilitate additional opportunities for people to be morons in a very public and spectacular way. Like the men who can’t back down from a misogynist argument in which they advocate for rape (we’ve had a couple of those idiotic conversations recently in my Facebook community), the special subset of sports fans who are, well, “special” I guess, are able to make asses of themselves in new and spectacular ways.

I hope they name a helmet after Chris Kluwe.

¹Probably. That may or may not have been his last game anyway, but the concussion put him off the field for the rest of that game, he’s not been back, and as I write this the Vikings are playing the last game of the season without him.