Speaking of Sports

By John Fragodt, Sports Reporter

•  Vikings sure blew it — Wow, what an up and down season for the Vikings.  I really didn’t pay much attention to the Vikings at the beginning of the season, especially when they started out 1-4.  

However, the Vikings won five-straight games to improve to 6-4 through 10 games and solidify their playoff ranking.

The season ended with a thud though, as Minnesota went 1-5 to end the year, including losses of 1, 2, 3 and 6 points.  Despite all that, the Vikings still clung to a remote playoff possibility heading into the final week of the regular-season.

The Vikings were hurt bigtime by injuries.  Still, I’m not sure why we played a rookie quarterback on New Year’s Eve in possibly the biggest game of the year instead of playing a couple of other guys who had saw extensive action recently.  Sure, they weren’t the best quarterbacks and they struggled at times, but at least we knew what we were getting.

Rookie Jaren Hall’s first pass meanwhile was tipped and his next one was intercepted, although it possibly should have been caught by the Viking receiver.  Things went downhill from there fairly quickly.

It’s really too bad the Vikings didn’t make the playoffs, because the NFL is wide open this year and who knows how far the Vikings could have gone.

•  College football playoffs — The college football playoffs opened up with a bang during the semifinal games on New Year’s Day.

I’ll admit I wasn’t looking forward to watching more football after experiencing the Vikings loss to Green Bay the previous night, but I was hoping the college games would provide a little more entertainment and I certainly wasn’t disappointed.

I haven’t been much of an Alabama fan, especially with all the success they’ve had over the years, and I’m also a Big Ten fan so I was hoping Michigan would be able to beat Alabama.

What a game! Michigan rallied at the end and then held off Alabama in overtime for a 27-20 win.

A little while later, the Washington versus Texas game took place, but after watching the previous game, I wasn’t up for three more hours of football.

My son did watch the game and it also came down to the wire with Texas failing on a fourth-down play in the end zone to lose 37-31.

What a pair of games and the CFP championship game Monday (tonight) should also be a very good game with a pair of undefeated teams.  In fact, only five teams have finished the season 15-0 and one of the final teams will match that record.

•  Oh yeah, the Gophers also made a bowl game despite ending the regular-season with a 5-7 record.  Normally, college teams need to win at least six games to be Bowl-eligible, but with 41 bowl games to be filled, they were short some teams and so, the Gophers were picked from among the 5-7 teams.

The main criteria for picking the teams was grade-point average; yes, that’s right, the Gophers were selected because of their academic excellence; who cares if they actually weren’t very good this year?

Of the 41 college bowl games this year, the Quick Lane Bowl game at Detroit with the Gophers and Bowling Green was selected as the 41st most-exciting bowl game by a panel of sportswriters.  No wonder no one else cared about it.

• Timberwolves looking good this year — The Timberwolves have one of the best records in the NBA this winter and the team is looking like one of the top five or so teams in the entire league.

That’s surprising when you think we basically have the same team we had last year.

Anthony Edwards is playing like a superstar, Karl-Anthony Townes and Rudy Gobert are playing like they were paid to be, and guys like Naz Reid and Mike Conley are doing whatever they need to do to help the Wolves.

Yes, I’d say that three of the top teams in the NBA are in the East (Milwaukee, Boston and Philadelphia), but in the West, the Wolves certainly have a legitimate shot at reaching the NBA Finals this year.  Yes, they are that good!