The Skolney Blog

Vikings 24 Packahs 17 Games don't get a whole lot more life or death in the regular season than this. The disparity in what the Vikings season would be depending on a win or a loss was gargantuan. A win and the path to the playoffs remains very clear(and a shot at the division is still at least there). A loss damn near kills the season, plus you breathe all sorts of new life into the Packahs. So this game, this win, is one of the most satisfying and relieving wins of recent years. They saved their season, all but killed the Packers, and nuked those annoying primetime game narratives. It sure looked bleak early. The offense came out sloppy and stupid. Our run game got gashed. Rhodes had a bad penalty. And the Packahs were in the endzone. It looked like Chicago all over again. But then the offense got hot. The next 2 drives were simply splendid. We got explosive passes downfield, including another one of those insane Thielen grabs. I couldn't believe we ran that amazing Dalv...

Gophers 37 Stinkin Badgers 15 The Gophers had not beaten Wisconsin since 2003. They had not won in Wisconsin since 1994(Jim Wacker!). So naturally the team to end those streaks was this collection that gave up 55 points to Illinois just 3 weeks ago. What a weird season. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this win was how the Gophers were never really NOT in control. They never trailed, and once they had that big sequence late in the 1st half where Wisconsin dropped a 3rd down pass, then punted, and we ran it back for a TD and 17-0 lead, it was never really scary again. Sure they let Wisconsin go right down the field in 50 seconds to cut it to 17-7, and I was sure that would be the beginning of the end, but the end never came. The defense clamped down in the 2nd half big time. Hard to believe this defense is the same bunch that got run over week after week earlier in the season. They have been solid to great the last 3 weeks, against better competition than some of the teams t...

Bears over Lions Well, I can't say I was surprised. Trubisky for Daniel isn't even much of a downgrade tbh. The game was very winnable for Detroit until Stafford became an interception machine. It puts the NFC North just that much further out of reach. Cowboys over Redskins Dallas now fully takes over as the east favorite. The Skins officially fall a half game behind the Vikings, which may or may not matter ultimately. Saints over Falcons Saints barely broke a sweat. The interesting Saints game arrive in December. Last 3 week they have a game against Pittsburgh sandwiched around 2 Panthers games. If they get to 15-1 they'll have earned it. And the Falcons can look ahead to the draft. With Atlanta and Detroit both more or less finished now, the wild card race is down to 6 teams for 2 spots. If the Vikings can get it done Sunday night that will all but knock out Green Bay 

Creed and Rocky 4 Two movies, same franchise, that couldn't be more different. One a very grounded, gritty boxing film. The other a gloriously over the top, cheesy to the max boxing film. Rocky 4 might be the most 80s movie ever. These 2 movies smash together for Creed 2, while more or less lifting the plot structure from Rocky 3, and damn if this isn't one of the best sequels in recent years. It's not quite as food as the 1st one. This one has some hammy dialogue of the "what are you fighting for" variety, and I actually wish there had been more stuff showing the life of the Dragos. They did dig up Bridgette Nielsen though, and wow have the years not been kind to her. Michael B Jordan remains a charisma machine. Stallone slips back into the Rocky role so smoothly once again that he's bound to be overlooked(I doubt he gets Oscar nominated again bc this time he doesn't have any of those BIG scenes). Tessa Thompson is glorious. The franchise will surely...

Who knew that every single bad thing that happens in this world is Kirk Cousins's fault. Wildfires? Kirk set em.   Mass shootings? Kirk sold the guns. Stubbed your foot? Yep, that was all Kirk too. Or you sure would think so given the absurd amount of bile and hatred being thrown his way yet again after the SNF debacle. I'm so fucking sick of this shit. Kirk Cousins is not infallable. He played poorly in Chicago, no doubt. You can debate how much of it was Kirk, and how much of it was the offensive line  But good god, so much of this fucking fanbase has gone nuclear against this guy. After 10 games, most of which have been good to great. I know that for years the Joe Mauer haters would simply throw out his contract as their sole argument on all things Joe, like mentioning $23 million or $184 million instantly won all debates and instantly would discredit all valid attempts to praise him. Well now it's assholes saying $28 million or $84 million in every Cousins discuss...

There's a reason that for years my least anticipated game on any Vikings schedule is at Chicago. Call it a hex, a curse, a fluke or whatever you want. These games have been torturous for damn near 2 decades now. And after a reddit convo I figured I'd do a deeper dive into this whole thing. The results...may shock you!⚡ So we start in 2001. Prior to this the Vikings actually did fairly well in Chicago. They actually had a 5 game win streak there from 1996-2000. One more reason to retroactively love Dennis Green's tenure more. But starting in 2001, in the 1st game after 9/11, oddly, all that changed. 18 seasons. The Vikings are 3-15 in Chicago(one game, also a loss, was at the University of Illinois). Now, in that time, the Bears only have 4 wins here in 17 tries themselves. I didn't check every single division rivalry, but I feel safe assuming this is the single most home friendly rivalry in the league. There are matchups like Buffalo at New England, or Detroit at Gr...

BEARS 25 VIKINGS 20 So they made the final score look respectable. La dee freakin da! They only lost by 5 points, but has there ever been a 1 score loss that felt less close than this? It was a complete domination. Trubisky gave us a couple picks. We got a fumble. But there was never a moment in that 2nd half where I felt even the slightest shred of hope. It was never a game. My god, even the Bears kicker suddenly couldn't miss. I suppose you can look at it that the defense did settle down in the 2nd half, and that at least the offense moved the ball a little. So maybe they at least can take some solace from that. This wasn't the Buffalo game. That's the best you can say about this. It wasn't the Buffalo game. Biggest game of the year, and the best you can say about it is that at least it wasn't one of the 2 or 3 worst losses suffered by any NFL team all year.

I'm not even waiting til this game ends. The Vikings, who after a rough September had rebuilt their season into something not only salvageable, but potentially special, apparently spent their bye week deciding that, nah, we want to be also rans in 2018. We don't really want to defend our division title from the upstart Bears. We would rather just let ourselves be relegated to a cluttered wild card race. I have no other real explanation for this complete and utter embarrassment that this Sunday Night game is. You have your biggest game of the season, with 2 weeks to prepare for it, and these jackasses look like they have never played the sport of football before. The defense, which even with those September struggles, came in one of the league's best, being made to look positively amateurish by Mitchell Fucking Trubisky. Okay he runs around. Is that something new? Have we never seen a scrambling QB before?  This fucking guy was allowed to run all over the damn field the w...

Can't say this was surprising. Last week a Gophers club that had been godawful for all of Big Ten play suddenly became a totally different team and destroyed Purdue. So with a good, ranked Northwestern team in next they at least renewed some interest, and hope of being a bowl team. Nnnnnnope As usual, when faced with a big game(relatively speaking), a Gopher football team peed down their collective legs and gagged in their last home game of the year. The defensive turnaround from last week sort of carried over. They at least did their best to keep the team in the game. They are not why they lost. That blame lands squarely on the offense, which had by far its worst performance of the year. They were in great starting field position basically the entire day. And they made virtually nothing of it. One touchdown until they got a 2nd against a prevent defense late. Northwestern tried over and over to let the Gophers win and they just refused. So only a win at Wisconsin gets them in...

I was pretty worried for a while, between the Hawks not playing well and the refs as usual letting the Packers OL hold whatever they wanted. But in the end the Packahs lose again. And now the Vikings are at least TWO games up in the loss column on the entire NFC field. They can stick the dagger into Green Bay next week, and now if we simply go 4-3 the rest of the way, the odds of making the playoffs in some capacity have to be astronomical.

With the Vikings resting this week, it was a full on Redzone Sunday. And it was actually a surprisingly dull day, with only 2 of 11 games not more or less decided by the 4th quarter. It was not a good day for the Vikings as far as the north race, although it wasn't expected to be. The Lions got thumped yet again by the Bears, while the Dolphins were simply pathetic in getting clobbered by the Packers. The Packahs in particular HAD to win, since their next 2 are at Seattle on a short week, and then at the purple palace. It was a decent day for the Vikings as far as the plan B of being a wild card. With the exception of the Packers, all the teams right behind them in the WC hunt(pending SNF) lost. Seattle hung with the Rams but their comeback fell short. And the Falcons, who had been red hot, completely laid an egg in Cleveland. And also, that game at New England in a few weeks may not be quite the impossible task anymore. The Pats got manhandled in Tennessee 34-10. These are not...

Butler to the Sixers, for a couple of players I don't know of but who the Wolves redditers seem to think are pretty solid. So it looks like they got SOMETHING. And this is major addition by subtraction anyway. The season may already be finished after that appalling west coast road trip, but for this franchise to have any future the diva had to go. Now at least we won't have a player arbitrarily deciding to sit out games for fake injuries and fake rest. I'm actually pretty amazed that a Wolves player ever managed to top the disgusting crap Stephon Marbury pulled almost 20 years ago, but the Butler did it. Now Fire Thibs and lets fully move on from this failed experiment.

I have been threatened by 2 of these Twitter lunatics that they are going to call the police on me. For READING tweets. For reading PUBLIC tweets. It's not like I hacked an account or something. If you call the cops please record the call, cause I would love to hear them laugh their asses off. You have NOTHING. You don't like having tweets.deleted or accounts suspended? Take it up with twitter, like I had to do after YOU PEOPLE stalked MY tweets and did the EXACT SAME SHIT, cause you retards DO understand *I* do not have the power to do any of that?

-I don't wear glasses -I don't use a desktop -I would never allow my remaining hair to get so ungainly long and messy. -I haven't had acne since I was like 15 -My posture is WAY better -This fellow looks to be at least 75-100 pounds beefier than me. 

When people who, in some cases, spent YEARS attacking me on twitter, and bragged about getting me reported and then banned, turn around and act all indignant about me giving them a taste of their own medicine....oh please bathe me in your tears. Don't lie and accuse me of having sent you a death threat that I never sent, cause I had never even interacted with you ONCE at that point. I have a fucking looooooong memory. Oh what, you think I forgot? 😂 I have about as much sympathy for you assholes as I do for any other Nazis. And seriously, it takes maybe 10 minutes max out of my day to scroll around on there a little bit and report shit. Meanwhile you circle jerk fucknuts have stalked this blog since day one. Get a fucking clue, clowns!

Not quite as satisfying as getting that lunatic Jess Aryan Nation suspended, but that's coming 😁

Well that all turned out pretty solid after all. Around 7 or so it was looking like catastrophe. That was about the same time of night 2 years ago that that horror began to really take shape.  No....it can't be happening again. It didn't. We got the house back. We won a whole bunch of big governorships(Kansas gettin all blue!). The senate didn't work out, but that was always a long shot this year, and Beto nearly winning in crappy ass Texas sets him up for big things. Florida screwed us as usual(time to just give up on that state). And Minnesota, after coming a whole lot closer to turning red in 2016 than I could stomach, swung overwhelmingly back to blue. I am SO glad that the insane barrage of negative ads against Dean Phillips failed. I am very relieved that the unjust ousting of Al Franken didn't cost us. Nothing at all against Tina Smith, but that could have been a disaster. The smear campaigns against Keith Ellison and Ilhan Omar failed. A lot of other places i...

DEMS HOUSE! Democracy's hand bursts out of the ground just in time!

Seriously! How is that fucking limp dick shaped state always the one that's fucking us????

It's election eve, which has never before been a day I even really noticed. Election DAY, sure. But this is the 1st time that an election is quite simply going to mean the difference between the first chance we have had to roll back the disaster of two years ago, and what will be the moment that ends any semblance of democracy in this country. If the Republicans keep control of Congress tomorrow, it's over. Finished. Done. There will be no more elections, at least not ones that aren't there just for show. The Kavanaugh court can officially start its systematic teardown of every rights we have. Voter suppression will only get worse. More tax cuts for the billionaires will be passed, and this time the GOP demons will combine it with the gutting of social security and Medicare. There will quite literally be nothing left to stop them short of an all out civil war. I gotta say, I'm not at all confident. Oh sure, the polls are favorable. The early voting numbers are off the...

Vikings 24 Lions 9 The Vikings finally reached their bye. After 9 weeks filled with crazy kicker drama, a meltdown by one of their stars, a slew of major injuries on both sides of the ball, and a lot of bad luck at times, the team sits at 5-3-1, and even now sit in one of the NFC's 6 playoff spots. The last hurdle was their pesky nemesis the Lions. The Lions who have handed us some of our most crushing defeats in recent years. The Lions who came in 2-0 at the purple palace. Games against them are like pulling teeth. But the dominant, dynamic Vikings defense showed up today with gusto. They turned a pretty solid QB in Matthew Stafford into a deer in headlights. They completely controlled this game. 10 sacks, something even the Purple People Eaters never did(although the NFL didn't officially track sacks for some of that era, so maybe they did). Once again the Vikings offense came right out and scored, with a nice mix of run and pass, and a nice mix of targets(Chad Beebe was...