2005 viking of the year!

In honor of tomorrow's official start to training camp, here is a recap of past Viking of the Year winners and a brief synopsis of how they've fared since. Nominees for the 2005 VOTY will be forthcoming as training camp thins the herd. As before, the committee will listen to any nominations until the end of training camp, but reserves the right to accept all credit for the intellectual property of others.

2004 – Mewelde “Gimme” Moore: For about three weeks in the middle of the season, the committee looked like a bunch of freakin’ geniuses. Then it was realized that “Gimmee” isn’t an ode to greatness; it’s a pun. A Bermanesque pun. As likely to be uttered to Tom Jackson through a wad of masticated Cool Ranch Doritos as “rumblin’, bubmlin’, stumblin’” and “Hey, it’s Glenn Frye!” For future reference, this was when we jumped the shark.

2003 – Kelly “Purple Haze” Campbell: During the off-season, he taught the committee a very valuable lesson about highway safety – when driving with a bag of Mary-Jane and a stolen gun, it’s best to just stay cool and keep it on the right side of the road. No need to give the fuzz any reason to be suspicious. The only truly surprising aspect of his arrest is that no pitbulls were involved. On the bright side for Campbell though, he did keep his #3 receiver job until the start of training camp, and Steve Harvey did credit him for 10 minutes of new material.

2002 – Moe “X-Factor” Williams: The ultimate rarity in today’s NFL - a veteran skills player with a positive attitude, a realistic agent and a cap-friendly contract, meaning that he’ll never get cut. There is nothing the committee appreciates more than an apocryphal statistic, such as the following: the Vikings’ record over the past 4 seasons (including playoffs) in games where Moe scores a touchdown is 29-0; when he doesn’t score it’s 0-37. Stats just don’t come more apocryphal than that.

2001 – Byron “ProBowl” Chamberlain: By far the most under-reported aspect of “Ticketgate” was that it was Chamberlain who ratted out Tice to the NFL. This happened because, after his first season as a Viking, when he was a ProBowl TE and Tice was an offensive line coach, Tice chewed him out for not giving up his Super Bowl tickets, the profits from which would go to the assistant coaches (including Tice). No small coincidence that new head coach Tice was benching him 8 months later and releasing him the next year. Add it all up and we have an NFL head coach taking out a personal vendetta against and effectively ending the career of a ProBowl-caliber player because he was costing the coach a few dollars. Oh, and he got fat… real fat.

2000 – Johnny “Franchise” McWilliams: A Google search of “Johnny Franchise McWilliams” got 549 hits. A search of “Jason Edgar eats rope” got 17,000. The committee thinks that it’s good to know your place in the world.

- the shooter a.k.a. the nuck

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