Monday Night Shamelessness: Vikings 30 Packers 23

I will never again be able to watch Brett Favre play without the mute button. Nobody without a grudge that touches madness is going to say Number Four is anything but the reason they build halls of fame in the first place, but this shit is too much. It's like Michelle Obama fell out of her dress on a slow news day. Those bastards had a perpetual loop of blind praise going that put pop radio to shame. Say viewer, would you like to watch a highlight reel of the special Brett Monday nights again? No? Too bad.

Football, professional sport, is a product. Ok, fine, but can we as viewers, fans or otherwise, be granted one iota of intelligence, of self respect? We understand what the game meant. This isn't the Superbowl; there's nobody sitting on the couch keen on getting to the commercials. I will bet my left nut that not one viewer watching this game didn't know there was some history for these two teams and these two quarterbacks. So the good folks at ESPN ought to get to work filling the dead air with banter that doesn't make me flip to Kimbo Slice reruns as soon as the play gets called dead. I'm not saying don't milk it, for god's sake, I'm not against pomp, but every one of them sounded like a drooling idiot. I demand a small measure of the sublime be retained in an event that really was special for football. This isn't Temptation Island.

As soon as the clock expired they swarmed the man with a shamelessness the likes of which I have seen only once before, (The cameras following Jordan into the locker room after his championship) and Brett, always a professional but never eloquent, gave them a few polite sound bites that I have reheard about a million times since.

The real story of course is that the Vikings beat the Packers, and it was a team effort that gave the latter a beating much worse than the score lets on in all measures except for those concerning Adrian Peterson, who was dwarfed by his teammates efforts. It's worth mentioning that Jared Allen had maybe the defensive game of the season so far, making the makeshift Packers O-Line look like they didn't belong in the league, but the league loves it's quarterbacks...

And now, the football sun also rises, we move on to week five, where Peyton or Eli or Drew or Mark or whomever will make some new bonehead stat and everybody will shit their pants yet again. There's a point to all of this, Football is a goddamn wonderful thing without the talking heads repeating the fact over and over like orangutans who just learned English. Hows about letting the game do a little bit more of the talking.

The Vikings and their momentum are going to keep on winning next Sunday and unless the Ram's recruit some Mac Trucks for linemen it's going to be very very embarrassing day in St. Louis.

The rudderless Packers get a week off to lick their wounds and think about whether or not mediocrity is going to be acceptable.