If anyone knows what it’s like to be a loyal fan of the Purple, it’s the readers of SKÖLIOSIS — your weekly reminder that being a Vikings fan is bad for your health.

Ahhhhhh. Sunday Football is finally back.

And Monday Night Football.

And Thursday Night Football.

And apparently Wednesday Night Football now too?

Come on, NFL. This is getting harder and harder to explain to some of our less-football-enthusiastic wives who build our family lives around Google calendars and scheduled weekend activities.

Especially this time of year.

These first few weeks of football season have always been a little complicated for Minnesotans. The Vikings are coming back at precisely the same time summer is leaving. The days are getting shorter. The shorts are being folded up. The pants and sweaters are coming out. Every beautiful Sunday afternoon suddenly feels like one of the last french fries at the bottom of the bag.

Do we really want to waste a day sitting inside on the couch watching a football team we barely know yet?

Shouldn’t we be outside?

Shouldn’t we be squeezing every remaining drop of Vitamin D out of the Minnesota sky before we spend the next five months scrolling on our phones for vacation deals?

Yes. Yes we should.

Here at Pulltab Sports, we’ve decided we’re going to ease into this Vikings season.

The Purple can court us for a change.

Let them woo us.

Let them send the first text.

We don’t need to rush home from our final dates with summer for a football team that’s spent 65 years telling us they’re “just not ready for a serious relationship.”

We’ve heard that one before.

So Sunday, we played a little hard to get. We played it cool. Fast and loose. What would Burt Reynolds do if he was a Vikings fan?

WWBRD. Instead of hunkering down in our living rooms, we listened half-heartedly from old radios on rickety pontoons and underneath the awnings of beachside RV living rooms. One toe in the purple water, waiting to see whether this year’s team was worth jumping all the way in for.

Literally.

Because as longtime Sköliosis readers know, we celebrate Vikings touchdowns by plunging into Minnesota lakes, or surrogate Pacific Oceans (Hey, it almost looks like Lake Superior or Lake Mille Lacs if you squint real hard and ignore the tan bodies everywhere).

And eager as we were to wet our whistles with celebratory plunges - for a while Sunday, it looked like we might stay very, very dry.

MINI-SOTAN

The biggest storyline entering the season, of course, was our newest little guy.

Our newest Mini-sotan.

Kyler Murray.

The latest QB reclamation project in KOC’s attempts to prove he can make even Spam sandwiches seem tasty.

We don’t pretend to speak for all Vikings fans here at Sköliosis, but the Kyler buzz coming into Week 1 wasn’t exactly electric. For most Vikings fans, it was like finding out Bruno Mars was going to be your starting quarterback . . .we knew he was small, had heard of him, and maybe he was good at some point.

It’s hard to get overly excited about a quarterback whose former team was willing to eat approximately the GDP of a small island nation just to make him somebody else’s problem and a guy who probably comes up before Dolly Parton in “9 to 5” search engine responses.

But we’re Minnesotans.

Talking ourselves into things is what we do.

“You know, he was a top 10 guy when healthy”

“At least he doesn’t have an alter ego named Nine, right?”

“Tom Cruise is short too and look how successful he is!!”

We had the worst QBR in football last season and still came within one bad special-teams play of the playoffs. Kevin O’Connell is supposedly a quarterback whisperer. And Minnesota has a proud history of being a halfway house for wayward NFL quarterbacks.

Besides, Murray was literally coming here from Phoenix.

If anybody was positioned to rise from the ashes, this seemed almost too obvious.

So we tuned in Sunday to see our shiny new Mini-Cooper sports-car quarterback.

And then Kyler threw an interception on his very first pass.

Okay.

Maybe it’s a Mini Cooper with a check-engine light.

A few plays later, he was scrambling around looking a little like the creepy dancing Rumpelstiltskin kid that has inexplicably taken over my TikTok algorithm. Is it just mine? My TikTok algorithm is concerning.

Then CBS flashed a graphic documenting all the games Kyler has missed because of injury.

Which felt less like broadcasting and more like somebody reading the incantation out loud in a horror movie. Like the announcers just broke open the one wish willow stick on live TV.

DON’T READ THAT OUT LOUD!!

Too late.

Within minutes, Kyler got folded into a little origami bird and sent fluttering toward the locker room.

His Vikings debut was over with a concussion.

Welcome to Minnesota. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the Kyler Era was to be “short” lived.

WENTZ UPON A TIME

And so, once again, our season was placed in the hands of Carson Wentz.

Which is a sentence Vikings fans probably shouldn’t have to say this many times in one lifetime.

But here’s the weird thing.

Carson was…fine.

Actually, better than fine.

When Wentz finally got Minnesota into scoring position, we celebrated the first Vikings points of 2026 with a chip-shot field goal.

Normally, Sköliosis rules are very clear:

Touchdown = lake plunge.

Field goal = keep your clothes on but you can pop open another Lake Hour or Long Drink or whatever canned beverage floats your boat.

But desperate times call for desperate measures.

We hadn’t scored a touchdown. It was a beautiful September afternoon. The lake was right there.

We needed to do something to get the juices flowing.

FIELD GOAL PLUNGE it is.

Take the points while you can Packers fans and Mr. LeFleur. That’s our new Minnemotto.

In retrospect, maybe we should have saved our energy.

Because things were about to get weird.

JJ IS JJ AGAIN

For all the attention paid to our newest Viking, perhaps the most encouraging thing Sunday was seeing one of our oldest friends look like himself again.

Justin Jefferson is back.

Not that he ever really left.

But last season was strangely quiet by Jefferson standards. Two receiving touchdowns all year.

Sunday?

Two touchdowns in one afternoon.

One for each J and a two point conversion as the little dot in between.

Eight catches. 92 yards. Two scores. 1 two point conversion.

That’s his entire 2025 touchdown production before we’ve even located all the Halloween decorations in the basement.

And suddenly there was JJ doing JJ things again — floating behind defenders, making difficult catches look routine, and reminding us that having Justin Jefferson on your football team is a little like discovering $18 dollars in wadded up bills in the pocket of your old jean jacket.

You knew you owned the jacket.

You just temporarily forgot there was still $18 bucks in it.

Most importantly, Jefferson immediately developed chemistry with Wentz, including the 39-yard touchdown before halftime that changed the emotional temperature of the afternoon.

For the first time Sunday we weren’t just listening to the Vikings.

We were watching.

Phones came out.

Radios got turned up.

Pontoon conversations started stopping mid-sentence.

Uh-oh.

They’re getting us interested. They are sucking us in.

VITAMIN D

Most of the sports media spent the offseason talking about our new Mini-sotan, and the expected intense QB competition expected to start the season as if our season depended on the result of it.

But many of us were less concerned with the new Mini-sotans and were more curious about the new Mega-sotans evil mastermind Brian Flores was collecting in the off season like infinity stones.

Yeah, Flores appears to have spent the offseason building a defensive line the same way a 9-year-old builds a Madden roster:

SIZE: 99

STRENGTH: 99

SUBTLETY: 4

And right in the middle of it is a 6-foot-whatever, 300-and-plenty-pound rookie from Iowa State named Domonique Orange.

Yes.

Orange.

Which means somewhere in Eagan a marketing person immediately whispered:

“Please God, let this guy be good.”

Even better, he already came with the nickname:

BIG CITRUS.

This isn’t a football player.

This is a Florida roadside attraction that people stop at to take their instagram selfies at.

And Sunday, Big Citrus delivered the play that squeezed the life out of Green Bay. Citrus is supposed to be great for getting our Vitamin C - But Dominique might just be helping us also get our fill of Vitamin D(efense) after the sunshine weather heads south for the winter.

ORANGE YOU GLAD?

With Green Bay leading 22-17 in the fourth quarter, the Packers had already kicked a field goal.

Take the points.

Go up eight.

Move along.

But Minnesota was offsides, giving Matt LaFleur the option of taking the penalty and trying fourth-and-1 instead.

LaFleur looked across the field, saw approximately 1,700 pounds of angry purple humanity stacked over the football and apparently thought:

Yeah. Let’s run directly into that.

Jordan Love tried the sneak.

Big Citrus said no.

Orange exploded into the middle and helped stuff Love, causing a Purple eruption. Apparently Big Citrus hasn’t gotten the NFL memo yet on the campaign to “Stop Hate” or got momentarily confused and decided to stop Love instead. Easy mistake big guy.

Anyway, as a result the Packers got nothing. Minnesota took over. And suddenly the entire game changed.

Even Orange thought Green Bay’s decision was a little disrespectful afterward.

Which is fantastic.

One NFL game.

One enormous fourth-down stop.

Already taking things personally.

We love this kid.

And once somebody squeezed Big Citrus, apparently the juice went everywhere.

THE JUICE WAS WORTH THE SQUEEZE

From that moment on, Brian Flores basically released the hounds.

Dallas Turner.

Blake Cashman.

Andrew Van Ginkel.

Harrison Smith (Bonus: now with hockey hair).

James Pierre.

Orange.

Guys were coming from everywhere.

The Packers spent much of the afternoon moving the ball through the air — Jordan Love actually finished with 387 passing yards — but when the game got tight, Flores’s defense transformed from something you could move the ball against into something you’d rather not make eye contact with.

Green Bay’s final possessions began to look less like offensive football and more like the wildebeest scene from The Lion King.

Purple jerseys everywhere.

Turner got to Love.

Cashman and Van Ginkel got to Love.

Pierre eventually picked him off.

The Vikings forced critical late turnovers, and Minnesota scored the game’s final 29 points.

Twenty-nine.

Unanswered.

Against the Packers.

This wasn’t a comeback.

This was a home invasion.

And here’s the stat that tells you everything you need to know about Flores: Minnesota reportedly blitzed Love on 78.3% of his dropbacks, the highest rate by an NFL defense in eight years.

WENTZ IN DOUBT…

Meanwhile, Wentz kept doing something extremely important:

Not screwing it up.

Actually, that’s unfair.

He did considerably more than that.

Wentz came off the bench cold and finished 12-of-19 for 133 yards and three touchdowns, helping Minnesota turn a 22-10 third-quarter deficit into a 39-22 win.

And suddenly we’ve found ourselves in the strangest Vikings quarterback controversy imaginable.

The guy we just acquired to be our starting quarterback played approximately long enough to validate his parking.

The backup came in and threw three touchdowns.

And now we’re all doing the thing Vikings fans swore we’d never do again:

talking ourselves into Carson Wentz.

Don’t.

Stop it.

It’s Week 1.

PROCEED WITH CAUTION

And that’s really where we find ourselves after Sunday.

Interested.

Intrigued.

Maybe even a little excited.

But not committed.

Not yet.

Because we’ve been in this relationship before.

The Vikings come knocking on our door every September looking like a seductress in purple. They’ve changed. They’ve matured. They’ve been working on themselves.

“This year is different.”

Next thing you know it’s January, you’re standing barefoot in the kitchen staring silently at a television while your wife asks:

“Why do you do this to yourself every year?”

Not this time.

This time we’re setting boundaries.

You want our Sundays, Vikings?

Earn them.

You want us to close the cabin early?

Earn it.

You want us to abandon a perfectly beautiful 72-degree October afternoon so we can sit in a dark basement yelling at a 70-inch television?

Earn it.

You want us checking playoff scenarios before Thanksgiving and looking at flights to wherever the Super Bowl is this year?

Easy there, Purple.

We’re not there yet.

Sunday was only the first date.

But…

Justin Jefferson looked like Justin Jefferson again.

Brian Flores appears to have assembled a defense consisting primarily of refrigerators with anger-management issues.

Big Citrus looks like he might become our new favorite fruit and leave a wake of canker sores across the land of 10,000 lakes.

Carson Wentz somehow has us Googling things we’d rather not admit we’re Googling.

And the Vikings just spotted the Packers a 22-10 lead before scoring 29 straight points and beating them by 17.

So we’re not saying we’re back.

We’re definitely not saying Super Bowl.

We’re certainly not moving our Sunday plans around yet.

But maybe next week we’ll stay a little closer to the television.

Maybe the pontoon radio gets turned up a little louder.

Maybe we keep the purple jersey somewhere near the top of the drawer.

And maybe — maybe — the next time the Vikings score, we won’t need to bend the rules and jump into the lake for a field goal.

Because after Week 1…

the water’s starting to feel pretty damn good.

SKOL.

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