All the early signs of team collapse were visible: top cornerback out for several weeks with a broken arm, top receiver out for at least a week with an ankle injury, team morale fading after two ugly losses… and in spite of all that, the Vikings managed to pull a quite convincing win out of the hat. The top performance for the Vikings was Adrian Peterson’s 171 yards on 27 carries, while Detroit’s Megatron (Calvin Johnson) tallied 207 yards receiving on 12 catches. The most pleasant surprise of the day was the very impressive debut of wide receiver Jarius Wright, whose first NFL reception went for 54 yards and his second reception was the first TD of the game.
Christopher Gates at the Daily Norseman:
Had I told you earlier on in the day that not only would the Minnesota Vikings not have Percy Harvin for their game this afternoon against the Detroit Lions, but they would complement that by allowing Calvin Johnson to go over 200 yards receiving and to get just his second touchdown reception of the year (and his first from Matthew Stafford) … how many points would you have told me the Vikings would lose by?
Well, it turns out that they didn’t lose at all. In fact, they won the game by ten points, with the Lions getting a touchdown towards the end of the game for purely cosmetic purposes. Sure, Stafford got over 300 yards passing, and Johnson went berzerk as I mentioned … but in the end, it didn’t matter. The Minnesota Vikings did what they had to do when they needed to do it, and they swept a divisional opponent for the first time since 2009 as a result. So how did it happen?
