Minnesota Vikings Quotes

It’s a sun lamp. I thought you might be tired of your pasty-pale complexion. (Chris) Christopher, I happen to be a Viking in the middle of winter in Minnesota. Lack of a deep tan goes with the whole Nordic territory. Why do you think we raided Europe anyway? (Wulf) Because it was there? (Chris) No, we wanted to thaw out. (Wulf)

Of course, back then I was crimping my hair and wearing enormous shoulder pads that made me look like I played for the Minnesota Vikings. It’s amazing anybody got laid in 1985, given what passed for fashion!

...[T]here was a new detective in town. From Minnesota. Sammy hoped for his sake he wasn’t a Vikings fan. If so, he’d certainly be in trouble, as the whole town bled green and gold. Green Bay Packers fans practiced their own religion in Wisconsin.

Dungy sees something that no one else does. He sees proof that his plan is starting to work. Tony Dungy had waited an eternity for this job. For seventeen years, he prowled the sidelines as an assistant coach, first at the University of Minnesota, then with the Pittsburgh Steelers, then the Kansas City Chiefs, and then back to Minnesota with the Vikings. Four times in the past decade, he had been invited to interview for head coaching positions with NFL teams. All four times, the interviews hadn’t gone well. Part of the problem was Dungy’s coaching philosophy. In his job interviews, he would patiently explain his belief that the key to winning was changing players’ habits. He wanted to get players to stop making so many decisions during a game, he said. He wanted them to react automatically, habitually. If he could instill the right habits, his team would win. Period. “Champions don’t do extraordinary things,” Dungy would explain. “They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.” How, the owners would ask, are you going to create those new habits? Oh, no, he wasn’t going to create new habits, Dungy would answer. Players spent their lives building the habits that got them to the NFL. No athlete is going to abandon those patterns simply because some new coach says to. So rather than creating new habits, Dungy was going to change players’ old ones. And the secret to changing old habits was using what was already inside players’ heads. Habits are a three-step loop—the cue, the routine, and the reward—but Dungy only wanted to attack the middle step, the routine. He knew from experience that it was easier to convince someone to adopt a new behavior if there was something familiar at the beginning and end.3.5 His coaching strategy embodied an axiom, a Golden Rule of habit change that study after study has shown is among the most powerful tools for creating change. Dungy recognized that you can never truly extinguish bad habits. Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine. That’s the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.

Leati Joseph "Joe" Anoai was born May 25, 1985. American professional wrestler, former professional Canadian football player, and a member of the Anoai family. He is signed to WWE, where he performs under the ring name Roman Reigns, and he is the current WWE World Heavyweight Champion in his third reign. After playing collegiate football for Georgia Tech, Anoai started his professional football career with brief off-season stints with the Minnesota Vikings and Jacksonville Jaguars of the National Football League (NFL) in 2007. He then played a full season for the Canadian Football League's Edmonton Eskimos in 2008 before his release and retirement from football.

starter beginning in his sophomore year and was also one of the team captains as a senior. Anoai was named to the first-team All-Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) after recording twenty-nine tackles for loss and twelve sacks in 2006. After going undrafted in the 2007 NFL Draft, Anoai was signed by the Minnesota Vikings in May 2007, but was released later that month. The Jacksonville Jaguars signed him in August 2007, only to release Anoa'i less than a week later before the start of the 2007 NFL season. In 2008, Anoai was signed by the Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football

Every winter he'd be out here plowing with the big red blade mounted on the Ford, and when he was done opening up his drive, he'd by God get cracking on the neighbors' spreads down the road. Arnie and Ina, good Vikings from Minnesota. The Rays over to the east--they had a kid. Couldn't be trapped out here in snow. That's how America worked. Used to work. That was what made things function. It was all obvious come winter. Some folks wouldn't pitch in with a snow shovel if they saw a naked one-hundred-year-old lady out there struggling with a drift.

I can honestly say by the time I was standing on U.S. Bank Field, I had no doubts that we would win. I had watched a lot of tape, including the previous year’s Super Bowl when the Patriots came back against the Falcons. In fact, I reviewed a lot of games where the Patriots were losing and came back, focusing on their ability to pull it off. What did I learn? It wasn’t about the Patriots as much as it was about the teams they were playing. Their opponents weren’t playing for sixty minutes. They weren’t finishing. They weren’t executing their offense. Play callers became more conservative and stopped being aggressive. A great example was the AFC Championship Game. When the Jacksonville Jaguars had a four-point lead on New England and had the ball with fifty-five seconds left in the first half, they took a knee and ran the clock out. I was watching the game from our locker room at Lincoln Financial Field as we were getting ready to play Minnesota. I sat there thinking, “You have got to be kidding me right now.” They had two time-outs and close to a minute left. They could have at least tried for a field goal. They took it out of their quarterback’s hands, and they didn’t give it to their big back, Leonard Fournette. I thought, “If they lose this game, this is why.” Sure enough, they would go on to lose the game. It made me mad because Jacksonville had New England right where they wanted them. I was screaming at the television in my office. When they knelt right before halftime, inside I was like, “I’ll never do that.” It fueled me. Against the Vikings later that day, we had twenty-nine seconds left in the first half and three time-outs. Instead of taking a knee, I called for a screen pass to Jay Ajayi to the sideline, a pass to Zach Ertz up the sideline, another pass to Ajayi, and then we kicked a field goal to grab three points. All in twenty-nine seconds. That’s how I wanted to play the last minute of a half—with an aggressive mentality.