00:00:00
Speaker 1: As the official ticket marketplace of the Minnesota Vikings and the NFL, Ticketmaster is the safest and most convenient marketplace to score fully verified Viking tickets. Get those touchdown celebrations ready and score your tickets today at Ticketmaster.com slash Vikings. Join Paul Allen and Alec Lewis this Friday, October 2nd at the Buffalo Wild Wings in Monticello for Friday Football Feast presented by Coors Light. Visit Vikings.com slash BWW for full schedule and details. Before kickoff, there's one sign that it's game time, and that's when the mountains turn blue. Be sure to get your Mountain Cold Coors Light at U.S. Bank Stadium. Hey, everybody. Thanks for listening on the podcast feed. This is another fun episode for Chad and I. The great Pete Bursich joined us. He's always interviewing the legends from this organization, so we flipped it on him, asked him a bunch of really fun questions. I think you are going to like it a lot. So let's go ahead and jump into our conversation. with the great Pete Bursich.
00:01:04
Speaker 2: Hey, Viking fans, welcome to the tailgate brought to you by Ticketmaster.
00:01:17
Speaker 1: Your favorite football team is 3-0. I'm joined by the great Chad Daniels, and we're not going to waste any time today. We are excited about the Miami game, but we got the opportunity to sit down with Pete Bursich, get him in a room for a while, and ask him a bunch of questions. So Chad and I are going to jump right into our conversation with Pete Bursich. Joining us in studio, a guy who spends a lot of his time asking other Viking legends about their stories, and now we're going to force him to do it for us here on the tailgate. Ladies and gentlemen... The great Pete Bursich.
00:01:55
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me on.
00:01:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, dude. Thanks for doing it. We've been it's been a really we changed the format of the show this year. And so it's basically we talked Tom West into badgering legends and coming on the show. So it's been three so far. Pretty good run. Jim McMahon. Oh, Brad Johnson. All right. into Pete Bursich and they all kind of, all three of you guys kind of land in that nineties Chad and Cy were children and have a lot of questions range. So be prepared for a bunch of that today. And I'm going to start out with one that feels like it should be at the end, but you and I talk about 98 a lot. The 98 Vikings, the 15-1 team, the team you played on. Uh, and I bother you about it often, but I don't think I've ever asked you this question, uh, What is something from that year that you think about or you remember that nobody talks about or nobody thinks about? Because it's always the same stuff, right? It's Moss, high-powered offense, heartbreaking kick. But like when you think about that, is there something else that pops into your brain that isn't overly discussed?
00:03:05
Speaker 3: I don't know. I think, you know, what you think a lot about is, and it just happened with being down in Tampa and playing in the big sombrero against Tony Dungy and Just when you go down there, you play him, and from the beginning of the game, he went forward on fourth down. And he knew exactly kind of where some of the bones were buried, especially with us defensively. And not like exposing it, but just chipping away at it, chipping away at it, chipping away at it. And losing that game, it was wild. You win seven in a row, and then you lose that game, and then you win seven more in a row. or eight more in a row. And then it's just that one hiccup. And you look back and you're like, what happened? It was just well done by Tony Dungy, right? And, again, he went for it on fourth down on every single play. And back then that was like suicide. It wasn't like it is now where everyone has the big pile of analytics and you type it in the computer and it tells you go for it or don't or whatever. It was revolutionary, like, back then. But All-Stod and that whole group and playing down in Tampa Bay, and it's just wild how that used to be part of our division. We'd go down there every year. They'd come up here every year. You just hoped that it was later in the season because I, as a player, I didn't like the heat. I'm from the north and played college up north and the whole thing, so the heat wasn't really a huge factor. But, yeah, that's a game I think about quite a bit.
00:04:35
Speaker 1: I think. Yeah, I'm going to get out of the way because our boy here, Chatty D, so he's a lifelong Viking fan, but it waned for a while and really liked the Eagles when he was younger.
00:04:47
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:04:48
Speaker 1: I know. I'm with you. But here's what brought him back.
00:04:50
Speaker 3: Seth Joyner.
00:04:51
Speaker 1: Here's what brought him back.
00:04:52
Speaker 4: Yeah, back then, yeah.
00:04:53
Speaker 1: Well, and Herschel Walker.
00:04:54
Speaker 3: They had some good defense.
00:04:56
Speaker 4: Keith Byers, Jerome Brown.
00:04:57
Speaker 3: They were bad. Crazy. I've been to Fergus Falls, by the way. Have I told you that? Oh, you have?
00:05:01
Speaker 1: What'd you do? I mean, it's not that far away. It's not like a huge.
00:05:04
Speaker 3: Flew out there on Ziggy's jet. This is back when they were trying to garner.
00:05:08
Speaker 1: Wait, this is real?
00:05:09
Speaker 3: Yes, they were trying to garner support for the building of the stadium. And Lester Bagley, there was one of those big, I don't know, whatever, city council meetings or whatever. Ben Lieber, me, and I can't remember who else it was, but just jumped on the old Falcon and flew out to Fergus Falls and flew back. It took like 10 minutes. Something I would only take a two and a half hour drive. I was like, zip, zip.
00:05:33
Speaker 4: I wish I would have had one of those when I was touring. That would have been nice instead of driving three hours to the airport every single week.
00:05:40
Speaker 1: Right.
00:05:40
Speaker 4: And having my kids go, you're gone a lot. How come you don't love us?
00:05:43
Speaker 3: And try.
00:05:43
Speaker 1: It's like, well, I am.
00:05:45
Speaker 3: It's just funny because I'm not from here originally. I'm from Chicago area. But when I come up here and I meet someone from like Fergus Falls or. you know, International Falls or whatever, and you've been there, you're like, hey, I've been there.
00:05:56
Speaker 1: It pains in your brain.
00:05:59
Speaker 3: Exactly. Because when you get out of the cities, it's a little different.
00:06:02
Speaker 4: Well, to go to your hometown, Joliet, right?
00:06:04
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:06:05
Speaker 4: So I know two things.
00:06:06
Speaker 1: Home of the Slammers.
00:06:08
Speaker 3: Yes.
00:06:08
Speaker 4: Oh, see, now I know three.
00:06:09
Speaker 3: Joliet Slammers.
00:06:10
Speaker 4: There's a prison.
00:06:11
Speaker 1: Yep.
00:06:11
Speaker 3: And then Rudy.
00:06:12
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:06:13
Speaker 4: That's the two things I know about Joliet.
00:06:15
Speaker 1: Have we talked about, because you went to Notre Dame, have we talked about Steve Gillespie's grandfather? No. On the show, Jay? Have we talked?
00:06:22
Speaker 4: Okay.
00:06:22
Speaker 1: So how many years post-Rudy were you?
00:06:26
Speaker 3: One was Rudy. I don't remember exactly.
00:06:29
Speaker 1: Late 70s? That shows how relevant Rudy was to the University of Notre Dame.
00:06:35
Speaker 3: Let's talk Rudy. All right. I know a bunch of his brothers.
00:06:40
Speaker 1: Of the Rudigers.
00:06:41
Speaker 3: Yes. So there was France.
00:06:42
Speaker 1: Was his name Rudy Rudiger?
00:06:44
Speaker 4: Am I remembering that right?
00:06:45
Speaker 3: They called him Rudy. Rudy because of his last name.
00:06:48
Speaker 4: Okay.
00:06:48
Speaker 3: One of his brothers, Francis, was a detective in the Julia Police Department.
00:06:53
Speaker 1: 75.
00:06:53
Speaker 3: Little bitty guy. Okay. Set national records in powerlifting. And he had his own gym. It was called Rudy's Gym. And Rudy's Gym was a gym that was in a garage. But it was so big, if you got invited to Rudy's Gym, you had to go. And then you'd walk in with your work because you had to wear work boots. That's what you lifted in. And then the weights were all, you know, the humid and rusty and slippery and the whole thing. I mean, it was anybody that did a drive-by and looked and they're like, what the hell? This guy's got a torture chamber in his garage.
00:07:23
Speaker 4: The lamest party I've ever seen.
00:07:25
Speaker 3: But it was like the biggest deal. His other brother was the head wrestling coach in my high school. Illinois High School State Coach of the Year a couple of times. His other brother was the first four-time state champion in wrestling in Illinois state history. He was a single A two years and then double A won it two years later. Joey Gilbert, I think, was the first four-time state champion in double A. Not that it matters. And then they make the movie about the little one. The run. He was a maintenance guy at the condos were right by right by school. Right. And then they would let him come in and work out. And he would tell us about this movie they're making about him. Right. You know, I did this and, you know, I got the sack and I was the last person that was carried off out of Notre Dame Stadium on the shoulders of my teammates. And we just looked at him. We're like, yeah, good luck with that.
00:08:25
Speaker 4: Good luck with that, buddy.
00:08:26
Speaker 1: One of the most famous sports movies of all time.
00:08:28
Speaker 3: And then you see the movie, and you're like, oh, my God, that's Hollywood right there. That's Hollywood.
00:08:33
Speaker 1: This is going to be really interesting that I get to tell this because you're from Joliet. Because, well, I'll just do it. Our friend Steve Gillespie, fantastic stand-up comedian, right? So Steve, I've known him for years, started at the exact same time as me. We might have known each other for almost a decade at this point. Yeah. We start talking, and somehow the subject of Rudy comes up. And you know in the movie Rudy, when they go, Coach Gillespie thinks you're.
00:08:58
Speaker 4: A p * * *?
00:09:00
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:09:01
Speaker 1: That's Steve's grandpa. Gordy Gillespie.
00:09:06
Speaker 3: No, I remember Gordy Gillespie.
00:09:07
Speaker 1: That's Steve Gillespie.
00:09:08
Speaker 3: I remember, yeah.
00:09:09
Speaker 1: One of the greatest college baseball coaches of all time. The all-time Illinois high school football coach.
00:09:16
Speaker 3: Winningest of all time.
00:09:17
Speaker 1: Coached Rudy.
00:09:19
Speaker 3: He would have so many guys come out for football that back in the day, they would split you up into linemen and non-linemen, and you would run 100 yards. If they had 150 guys on the field and they could only dress 90, the bottom 60 in both groups, 30 each, 30 each, goodbye. That was it. They would do that.
00:09:40
Speaker 1: Day one?
00:09:41
Speaker 3: They would cut guys. Yeah, day one.
00:09:43
Speaker 1: Oh, boy.
00:09:44
Speaker 3: That was the turnout. I grew up hearing about Cordy Gillespie and everything that he had done. He was a legend. He was an absolute legend.
00:09:53
Speaker 4: That's very cool.
00:09:54
Speaker 1: It's very, very cool.
00:09:55
Speaker 4: Because Steve, man, what happened to him?
00:09:57
Speaker 1: Not a legend.
00:09:58
Speaker 3: So we're talking about.
00:10:00
Speaker 4: about coaches, talking about Notre Dame. I'm not a big stats guy, but do you have any fun Lou Holtz stories?
00:10:04
Speaker 3: No.
00:10:05
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:10:05
Speaker 3: I mean, here's the thing. Yeah, there are a lot of fun ones, but not that you can share. Lou was interesting because I got recruited by Lou and Lou was, I also got recruited by Barry Alvarez. And the reason I went to Notre Dame was really because of Barry Alvarez, and I wish he would have stayed, but he left and went to Wisconsin. But Lou, you came to the house, and you meet him, and he's just, you know, he charms the pants off you and the whole thing, and then you go to your first training camp, and then about, you know, I don't know, 30 minutes into it, maybe two hours into it, you're like, who is this guy?
00:10:37
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:10:39
Speaker 3: This is not the guy that, you know, that you knew. And then the other part of it was he would beat you down You were so beaten down physically, mentally, the whole way that once you got to the game, the game was easy. The game was the easiest part of the week. Surviving him the rest of the way was the hard part. It seems a little like Herbie Brooks. Just all the time. It was relentless every single day. So you couldn't have soft skin. You couldn't let it get to you. And there were so many guys that I played with who were unbelievable talents that right? Notre Dame at the time was one of the top, I mean, five or 10, let's face it, schools to go. So you constantly, every year there would be 30, 25, 30 more guys that came in and they were all big, strong, fat. They were unbelievable. But a lot of them, I think today it would never work today, but you just had to, you had to find a way to just like we did when you do with the anger and stuff, you just had to, you had to just swallow it and pack it down. And then and then pull it up at certain parts of the day when you needed it, like nine on seven or whatever else.
00:11:44
Speaker 1: Stick it away and be like, someday this will be the thing that tears my family apart.
00:11:49
Speaker 3: My favorite loose story, one of my favorite loose stories, me personally, was in practice one day on a punt return. We're doing middle punt, right? I'm an inside guy and I'm blocking a guard on the punt team and the long snapper snaps the ball and the guard, instead of running a middle return, it's important. Instead of him just running down the field, he picks around the long snapper. So he goes this way. And this is practice, by the way. And so I'm like, all right, all I got to do is get him out of the middle of the field. So, you know, I push him out of the middle of the field. And then at the end of the play, he blows the whistle, comes walking out. He walks up to me. He's like, son, what return is it?
00:12:23
Speaker 4: I'm like, middle.
00:12:23
Speaker 3: He's like, which way are you supposed to block your guy? And I go, well, to the left. And he's like, which way did you block him? And I go, well, that way. And before I could explain, because I think I did the right thing, he looks at me and he goes– He's like, son, your ass is going to make me take recruiting much more seriously. And then just turned around and then walked away. But it was constant mind games. He would leave your name out of stuff on purpose, right?
00:12:48
Speaker 2: Oh, man.
00:12:49
Speaker 3: I don't know how many times, because my parents, I grew up 100 miles away. I don't know how many times I called my mom and dad on a Thursday and were like, you know what? You may not want to come out to the game because I don't know if I'm playing. This is my whole time. And I started, I don't know, 40-some games in college. I'm like, I didn't know. You get benched all the time.
00:13:08
Speaker 1: Get up.
00:13:09
Speaker 3: Get his ass up. Get him up. Can't win with this. And then you leave and go to the offense. And you're standing there going, what the hell did I do wrong? You wouldn't get an answer. And here's the thing. My dad played in the NFL. He was on the original Dallas Cowboy team. He went to Michigan State. He didn't say much, but he gave me some sage advice. And he goes, just don't ever let that guy get to you.
00:13:30
Speaker 1: All right?
00:13:31
Speaker 3: Just don't let him get to you. Because that's probably the real test if he gets to you. And let him know that. So every time I got benched, I would walk into his office, knock on the door, go, Coach, what do I got to do to get back on the field? And then I would just sit back, and I didn't give a rat's ass what he said. I just wanted to waste 15, 20 minutes of his time. So every time he knew he benched me, he's like, oh, damn it, that kid's going to be sitting in my office again. Right? Every time. Every single time. Just to kind of give him the, you know, I couldn't.
00:13:59
Speaker 1: Reverse Pavlov dog him.
00:14:02
Speaker 3: But that's the mental game that you had to play to survive that place, right? To get through him.
00:14:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:14:07
Speaker 1: And I don't like, I've known a couple of guys in basketball who, I don't think that's an uncommon story who the guy you get in the recruiting visit is completely different than the guy you get once you, once you get there, because once he's won you, I mean, and I wonder how that's all changing with NIL and the transfer portal and stuff like that. But back in the day is, You're a prestigious program. Get all the top people in the door and then use your psychological warfare to make sure you have the toughest one.
00:14:33
Speaker 3: You're probably going to win a lot of games. Back then, once you had them, you had them. There was no portal back then. Guys would transfer, and he would always bring up the guys that transferred and how they're not doing anything. But the only guy that did transfer was Dorsey Levens because he went to Georgia Tech and actually did well, and Lou would never bring him up. But he would always bring it up. And crash the screener on the other side. But then you start naming names. And you're like, oh, they all disappeared, coach.
00:14:57
Speaker 4: That's great.
00:14:58
Speaker 3: So it's like, I don't know. But he taught, you know, it was, you learned a lot, like the Lewis Leo Holtz time thing, where if we had a meeting at 2, if you weren't in your seat at 155, you were late. You know, that whole thing. Being on time. If you missed a meeting or a practice or were late, you just didn't play.
00:15:16
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:15:16
Speaker 3: Like, think about that. I guess the big picture, growing up in Joliet, right, there's a lot. Mike Allstott went there. You know, there were plenty of NFL guys that came out of there. And Tom Thayer being one of them, right, Joliet. And so I don't know how many people looked at you on your way out and are like, yeah, you're never going to make it, right? You're never going to make it. So you have all this pressure and all this stuff, and then you realize, man, if I get out of bed five minutes late, I could just ruin everything I've worked for.
00:15:48
Speaker 1: And they're all going to be right.
00:15:50
Speaker 4: Right.
00:15:51
Speaker 3: And so it was that, I guess, gets you ready for the real world. You know what I mean about being on time and how important all that stuff is, dress code and all those things that Lou was a stickler about that were just an absolute pain in the rear when you were going through it. Once you got out, you're like, yeah, I appreciate the discipline. I appreciate what he asked out of. out of all of us and I passed the test, I made it, right? So I graduated and that's it. It feels very karate kid. Yeah.
00:16:22
Speaker 4: Where you're all of a sudden you're like, why am I painting your house?
00:16:26
Speaker 3: Blocking kicks. Exactly.
00:16:27
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:16:28
Speaker 1: Right. Well, and then you get to the NFL and it's Denny Green.
00:16:31
Speaker 3: Who also recruited me in high school. I got a great Denny Green story. So we had this big, we had this gigantic Rottweiler, gigantic Rottweiler.
00:16:39
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:16:40
Speaker 3: Because my parents, they used to show dogs and all. But we had this big rivalry. And Denny Green comes to my house, and the dog's going.
00:16:46
Speaker 1: Really buried the show dog family stuff.
00:16:48
Speaker 3: It was him and I can't remember the offensive line coach that got in trouble in Miami for, doesn't matter. Came to my house, and the dog was just going nuts. So we put the dog in a bedroom, and the dog damn near ripped the door down. Right? So we're doing the whole recruiting thing, and the dog is just there. And you could tell Denny's like, whatever. Whatever. So I don't know how many, but four, five, six years go by, I get drafted by the Vikings, and one day, just one day, Denny never really talked to players much, but he came up by me and he goes, hey, you still got that dog? I'm like, no, coach, she died years ago. He goes, good. And then I just turned around and walked away. You know, it's like Denny was just so awesome to play for. Treated you like a man. If you were a man, he was fine with you. He was the best. He brought back my love of the game. I remember being here in minicamp, right? I show up in minicamp. I mean, you've got Jack Del Rio. You've got Chris Carter, Randall McDaniel. After a day of it, I remember waking up the next day, and I was like, I really don't care if I get cut. This is why I got a degree. This is a whole other level of everything. and you know I look back and seven years later seven seasons later after playing and I'm like I love the game that's why I got into coaching and all that because Denny really really brought that that back.
00:18:19
Speaker 1: Do you think that's because the you know as as as good as it probably made Notre Dame the psychological warfare of turning it into a regimen like that is you know that can drain the love out of stuff not saying that that's what happened but To get to Denny. It did.
00:18:34
Speaker 3: You didn't love any part of it. You appreciated it. Here's the thing. Back in the day with Notre Dame, that was a gigantic pile of dudes who were stuck in this school. It's anger, frustration, the whole thing. Being stuck in South Bend, Indiana, where the sun doesn't come out months at a time, and then we would just let it out on game day. It was like, all right, here we go. And that's what we did.
00:19:03
Speaker 1: Yeah. But then you get to the NFL and Denny, because everything I've heard about Denny was that, you know, he was almost like both really strict and really focused, but then also kind of familial. And maybe that's what you mean about the, if you handled your business, you felt respected and you felt like a part of it.
00:19:21
Speaker 3: Is that? And Denny was very, he was very, very good about, everybody was a little bit different. So he had to, he had to, Treated Chris Carter a little bit differently. Had to give Chris Carter some– make him feel like he's in control or has a little more responsibility than the rest. Whether or not he did, it's, you know, whatever. But how he handled Randy, how he handled a bunch of guys. But I think the secret to him was he knew a group of guys and could tell when they could work together. And we had roommates on the road. We'd be in the hotel. You don't get your own room. You had a roommate. You had a roommate for training camp. You had a roommate during the regular season. And so guys, he paid a lot of attention to how a group operates. And I know to this day, I just saw Antonio Banks down in Tampa. He's a security guard at the stadium down there. And immediately it was like we go back to everything that we were. Chris Walsh, Harold Morrow, Mo Williams. You know, we're not a bunch of guys that won games and played a ton. We were special teamers and the whole thing. But the group of– that group and the way they stuck together and everybody, there were no problems. There were no jerks. There were a couple guys that whatever, but you just– If you were a problem or if you upset people or just, and I'm trying not to cuss here, but Denny, you would be gone. If you disrespected Dennis Ryan or just, you know, was that kind.
00:20:52
Speaker 1: Of a person? Yeah, there was a standard for the sort of person.
00:20:54
Speaker 3: You had to be. Yeah, 100%. And that came before your playmaking ability because there are a lot of guys out there who can make a lot of plays, but they were, you know, they're not poisonous, but they're not good for, for whatever it was that Denny had going or wanted to get going. So in that regard, I thought he was unbelievable at that.
00:21:11
Speaker 1: Well, I would also say that the interesting thing about Denny when you study and you learn about him and you talk to people about him is this, like if you're looking for a through line in his story and all the way up through 98, it's the finding the path and purpose in places that other people couldn't.
00:21:29
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:21:29
Speaker 1: Because if you look at Chris, the cut from the Eagles famously, and Chris turned himself around. But Denny and the organization were involved in that. Johnny Randall, undrafted. He just had a penchant for finding belief, even through the Randy Moss pick.
00:21:44
Speaker 3: So to your point, if Denny had a football genius part to him, it was his ability to just watch somebody and then say, that guy needs to play. He did it with Robert Griffith. Robert Griffith was on the couch for a year. It was Gary Zahner that brought him in. So they bring in Griff. Griff goes out there for special teams. And Griff knows. He's like, yeah, I mess up this much. I'm gone. I mean, I just got off the couch. I don't have any equity in this league. So he did everything he possibly could, the whole thing. And then Denny just saw something in him, or you, or whomever it was. And he would just literally be like, all right, put that guy in. Robert Tate, put that guy in. Make Robert Tate from wide receiver, make him a corner.
00:22:30
Speaker 1: Make him a cornerback and then gets the pick against the Saints or whatever, yeah.
00:22:34
Speaker 3: And that was kind of his– he had a personnel genius to him in that regard, right, above and beyond all the coaching. But when you talk about the greats, the Bud Grants and the Jerry Burnses and the Tony Dungys and Monty Kiffins and all these people, they all have their things about them that made them unbelievable. That was Denny's thing. He could just spot talent. And when he did, he just literally made no bones. He'd just look at the position coach and say, put him in.
00:23:07
Speaker 1: The other thing I loved about him, because I'll ask one more Denny Green thing, and then what I was getting at earlier with Chad is I'm going to get out of the way so he can ask some Randall Cunningham questions. Because that's what won him back over, 98 and Randall. When the Eagle, when Cunningham came in.
00:23:19
Speaker 3: You didn't like Brad Johnson, did you? No, I did, yeah.
00:23:22
Speaker 4: I did. I was just an Eagles fan.
00:23:24
Speaker 1: But a huge, huge Cunningham fan. I think... That the type of coach Denny was, I don't want to say it's a lost art a little bit. It is. But he was so interested in developing such a good staff. And there were so many good coaches that came out. And of course, he came under Bill Walsh. So it would make sense why he'd be invested in that. But he seemed so much more interested in, like you said, being a CEO. And being the guy up on top who was looking at everything from this thousand foot view, then being down in the weeds and having to control this thing. And he seems like one of the best at that.
00:23:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. And he also had a way of letting, the inmates never really ran the asylum and he let us know when it was our problem, right? Like we'd lose a couple of games in a row and he'd throw up the schedule for the week and say, this is the schedule for the week. It's not changing. This isn't what's broken. You know, you just look at all of us and be like, this isn't the problem right here. Schedule's not the problem. So this is our schedule, and it's going to be forever, right? It's not changing. And it's just that little, oh, schedule's not the problem. It must be us. You know what I mean?
00:24:33
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:24:34
Speaker 3: He had just a subtle way of doing that. And then if things kept going wrong, then you'd show up for work one day and a guy would be gone.
00:24:42
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:24:43
Speaker 3: Nothing to be said. No, no big deal. But it'd be like, ooh, where did so-and-so go? And they're like, ooh, I think he was late for a lift or something. And next thing you know, it's— Have we.
00:24:52
Speaker 4: Heard from them since, though?
00:24:52
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:24:53
Speaker 3: That's the big question. I mean, that's— They didn't disappear fully. No.
00:24:57
Speaker 4: Okay.
00:24:57
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, no, not fully.
00:24:58
Speaker 4: Yeah, that'd be great. I don't have too many Randall Cunningham questions. I skipped hairball with my buddies in Vegas on Saturday night to go see him preach one time.
00:25:07
Speaker 1: Oh.
00:25:07
Speaker 4: And I thought it was.
00:25:09
Speaker 3: How was it? How do you do that when you're.
00:25:11
Speaker 4: How do you skip hairball?
00:25:12
Speaker 3: Well, no, no, no, no. Well, I mean, hairball is fantastic.
00:25:15
Speaker 1: Listen to me. If I can see him in Fergus Falls, I'm not seeing him in Vegas.
00:25:20
Speaker 4: Can't see hairball in Fergus Falls.
00:25:22
Speaker 1: At some point you could.
00:25:23
Speaker 3: That's messed up.
00:25:23
Speaker 4: It's Johnny Holmes, dude.
00:25:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, Johnny Holmes, hairball, same thing.
00:25:27
Speaker 3: You can go see Iron Maiden in Shakopee. Did I ever think I'd ever say that sentence and it'd be true? No, never. So you don't, don't. Just be careful what you say. Just be careful what you say. I mean, but watching, I mean, I would have a hard time watching Randall like randall cunningham do the preach thing because i'd be like hey that's my old quarterback my old teammate and now he's talking about god but i want to hear about the god stuff i want to hear about the football stuff.
00:25:51
Speaker 4: I was kind of hoping he would bring it in yeah.
00:25:53
Speaker 1: Yeah you gotta you gotta throw a metaphor in there or something yeah a little fly randall fly.
00:25:58
Speaker 3: And that's the hardest part because i guarantee for him he's like i do not want any longer to be known as the quarterback i want to be this is my life now and this is what i want to be known as so It's got to be tough.
00:26:08
Speaker 4: Yeah, I didn't, like, approach him or anything after because I just, you know.
00:26:11
Speaker 1: Good for you.
00:26:11
Speaker 4: They're just a watch.
00:26:12
Speaker 3: I would assume, like, in your business, that's what it's like being typecast, right?
00:26:16
Speaker 1: Sure.
00:26:16
Speaker 3: You land one big role. I mean, we wouldn't know. And then you've never been typecast?
00:26:21
Speaker 4: Well, you know, he always gets roles on sitcoms of guys that can't lift stuff. Otherwise, it's fine. Now, there's rumblings of a story maybe of Jerry Burns.
00:26:34
Speaker 3: Yes.
00:26:35
Speaker 1: That's all we got.
00:26:36
Speaker 3: Jay, well, I was going to say, Jay asked me about. I'm requesting this. Jay doing his producing things because he loves doing it. I was talking about funny stories, and I'm like, I've got 30-some years of stories. I've been here for 30 years now, so it's like I got. But my favorite was one Dennis Ryan told me about back in the day. You guys ever been to Mankato for training camp?
00:26:56
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
00:26:57
Speaker 3: You know, they had Gage Hall, which is right next to one. There was three practice fields or four. Jerry Burns late in camp one time. decided he was going to do something, right? And throughout training camp, he had an issue with Keith Millard and Monty Kiffin, Monty Kiffin being the defensive coordinator whose name's in the ring of honor in Tampa Bay. I didn't know that with the Buccaneers. But the two of them would always be jawing and fighting with each other one day. So Dennis Ryan's in the equipment room, and Jerry Burns comes off of practice field and goes, hey, I need you to go down and get me a mannequin. I want you to go to the mall. Go to the mall and get a mannequin. And Dennis Ryan, being young at the time, is like, all right, okay. I mean, what's he going to tell the coach? No. So he drops everything, gets in his car, drives to the mall, which is about 10 miles away, gets his mannequin, brings it back. And he's like, all right, coach, you got your mannequin. What do you want to do? He goes, I want you to dress it like Monty Kiffin. Dress it like Monty Kiffin and give it back to me.
00:27:53
Speaker 1: He's like, okay.
00:27:54
Speaker 3: Because Monty would wear a hat and then he had his rubber top and these shorts and these high socks and the shoes, so it looked like Monty. So they go on practice one day, and he pulls Millard and Monty aside, and he goes, all right, guys, we're going to do something. All right, you guys need to get in a fight like you normally do right before practice starts. So he's like, okay, we'll do that. And then what's going to happen is I'm going to kick both you guys out, and then you guys are going to go over and finish this somewhere else. So I guess the best way to end it would just be what the players saw, which was Bernsie– Gets practice started. He's like, all right, we're stretching on field three over there. So it's right next to Gage Hall. It's literally, there's a fence, there's the field, a fence, a street, and then there's, what, 12 stories of Gage Hall. And he's like, all right, we're stretching over here. So they start stretching, and then Monty and Millard start getting into it again, right? Again, just start going back and forth. So Bernsie's finally like, all right, I'm done with you two. I'm kicking you out. You're done. Get out of practice. So the two of them leave, and then they both go toward Gage Hall and disappear. Well, next thing you know, they're on the roof of Gage Hall. And you hear them MFing each other. You know, F you, Monty, this, and you, Monty, you're in a, you know, you a-hole that, blah, blah, blah. And then they start getting physical. Like grabbing each other, right? So they start grabbing and wrestling, and then they kind of disappear where you can't see them. Millard picks up the mannequin dressed up like Monty, comes to the side, and throws it over. And The players are looking up going, oh, my God, he just murdered Monty Kiffin. And then, you know, bam. And obviously, when it hits the ground, it busts into 100 pieces. But that's how they broke camp up back then. That was like comic relief.
00:29:41
Speaker 1: Oh, yes.
00:29:42
Speaker 3: That's so great. After weeks of breaking your heads together, you can't do that now.
00:29:46
Speaker 1: Fake a murder.
00:29:47
Speaker 4: Right.
00:29:48
Speaker 3: Exactly. I mean, I would just love to be in Jerry Burns' head for a day. He's sitting there going, all right, who's the one guy on this team that would throw a coach off of a roof?
00:29:59
Speaker 4: If I was Kiffin, I would have not showed up for a week just to make everybody think about it.
00:30:04
Speaker 3: So, yeah, those that's Dennis. I mean, Dennis Ryan had been here for forever. It's seen everything. That was probably his favorite story. And I heard it from him like three or four times. I'd hear him telling it and I just walk over and listen one more time just because it's my like my one of my favorites. It's so great. It's incredible.
00:30:23
Speaker 1: Normally, we close this show where Chad and I have to preview the game, but we're going to take advantage of the situation. We're going to do that with you. We each got a question for you about the game, and then we do a little prediction. We don't do a score, but we do what player to look out for. Last week, Chad kind of made it sound like you predicted a return. You did predict a big day from the special teams. So you're on one.
00:30:50
Speaker 4: In week one, I said Hitman was going to get a pick. He tipped a pick.
00:30:55
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:30:55
Speaker 4: And then I said— You're on a hot streak. And I said Dallas was going to go crazy two sacks, and he ended the Bears game with a second sack.
00:31:03
Speaker 3: So Chad's— He might be sacrificing the right animal.
00:31:07
Speaker 1: I think the guys I keep predicting end up getting ruled out before the game starts.
00:31:11
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're the John Madden curse.
00:31:14
Speaker 3: You're cursed, and then you're.
00:31:16
Speaker 1: So we need somebody to break the tiebreaker. But before we do that, we'll each ask you a question or so here about the game, because you're going to be better at talking about it than we are. Lost in all this is you're 3-0 with maybe the best defense in the league and one of the best special teams and an offensive coach and a quarterback who's just like, there's a lot of potential here.
00:31:39
Speaker 3: Which is exactly what you want of a 3-0 team.
00:31:43
Speaker 1: Yes. You don't want to be 3-0 and peaking. It's August or September. 3-0 and feel like the ceiling is way up there.
00:31:51
Speaker 3: Correct.
00:31:52
Speaker 1: Right? But you go into Miami, who's 0-3, they.
00:31:57
Speaker 1: Just lost A-chan. Where does your brain go? Because you always hear, stay away from the, oh, we're going to beat them, we're going to roll them, don't overlook anyone. But the other side of that, is there an amount of pressure to this? Because almost nothing can happen here except for the Vikings could win by 35 points and everybody goes, correct. But if you don't, it's almost nothing but consequences.
00:32:21
Speaker 3: I think the one thing we assume is that players see week to week or games like we do.
00:32:27
Speaker 4: Oh, sure.
00:32:27
Speaker 3: Because we as fans see big picture.
00:32:29
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:32:29
Speaker 3: Right. The Dolphins are 0-3. Well, they just lost to the Chiefs.
00:32:35
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:32:36
Speaker 3: They lost to the 49ers.
00:32:37
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:32:37
Speaker 3: And they lost to the Raiders, which– Everybody's undefeated. Raiders might be pretty good. So they haven't– every team they've played has been undefeated. But all you do as a player, you see the guy you're going to block or work against. You're going to see the offense that you're going to play. The guard I'm going to go up against is the center. That's the running back. And that's your world right there. I don't know if they're 2-0 or 5-6. It doesn't matter. All I know is that guard is really good or not really good, or this guy's– that's it. And when they run this route, this is what they're getting. They do this out of this formation and that formation, and that's your world. The trap that players fall into is a comfort level, meaning, You walk out there for practice on Wednesday after losing two, three games in a row, it's going to be a little bit of a different attitude than it is if you just won three games in a row. It can be. That's kind of the secret to the whole thing. Don't get too high, don't get too low, stay right here. That's what Warren Moon told me. That was the secret to the NFL. You have to be professional about it. That's why guys like Cashman and Eric Wilson have been around a long time. They've been up and down this ladder, so every single day you would expect– them to take the same level of concentration, professionalism, right? If you went out for a walkthrough this week and they were jimmy-jacking around and talking and there's a lot of noise and all that going on, whereas three weeks ago for the opening game it was quiet and everyone's listening and paying attention, that's where players– you lose players. It's not, well, we're going to win this game. I mean, you know, we're– They don't look at things that way. They don't see the big picture. They don't really pay attention to what the media is saying, what this guy all of a sudden is really good. You've got, for example, HN coming in here, and you're like, well, I've got to watch him on film and see if he's any good. I don't know if he's any good. Yeah, you're not just trusting the narrative. Or now that he's hurt, you don't just relax because it's the guy behind him. Exactly, and the other thing players love to do is talk about guys that are great that aren't talked about. They're like, hey, this guy here, this guy's unbelievable. That's kind of how players talk, right? So that's their world. It's very siloed. It's very short-term, very short-term. You're not looking a week ahead. You're not looking two weeks ahead. If it's bye week, and you know bye week's next week, like next week when you're getting ready to play New Orleans, They're better not being, you know, it's like you don't want any talk about what you're doing next weekend, right? You cross that bridge when you get there. It's very today, next meeting, next practice. This is my job. And I think that's the difficult part for younger players in their transition into adulthood is just being able to maintain that level of concentration, being able to jimmy jack around before in the locker room before a walkthrough and then all of a sudden as soon as you step on the field for a walkthrough it's like it's go time it's business time yeah it's right and you it's that it's being able to control that's like baseball right where it's so level-headed then all of a sudden one on every pitch you've got to be 100 100 ready to go chase down a ball in a gap if you're a center fielder right so you might stand there for the whole entire damn game and all of a sudden you're needed boom and it's that same ability to turn things on and off when it's needed, that's the trap players fall into.
00:36:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of one of the cool things about the NFL is once there is this level of everything that's at stake in an NFL game, personal through professional, through organizational, through community sponsor, everything that's involved, right? It's kind of this great equalizer where It doesn't matter if you were the second pick in the NFL draft or if you're Jalen Redmond who was playing in the NFL. If you could come in– that's what I really like about this team right now is you have a guy like Jalen Redmond who you're like, is this guy a superstar?
00:36:45
Speaker 3: You're loving our $ 8 million payroll for our defensive line group. What?
00:36:50
Speaker 1: I like– Pete, I don't even like– I'm not worried about it, but I think everybody, I keep telling people, the idea to hold a defense, you tell me how dumb I am, but to hold a defense to this expectations for an entire season would be one of the most unbelievable things in league history.
00:37:13
Speaker 3: In this day and age, yeah, what's wild.
00:37:15
Speaker 1: The way the rules are tilted.
00:37:16
Speaker 3: What's crazy is, I don't know if you watched the Bears game last night, Yep. But you're starting to see what we do show up everywhere else now. Everywhere.
00:37:23
Speaker 4: Right?
00:37:23
Speaker 3: People are like, ooh, that's good. I like that. I'm going to start, you know. So when it works, it's copied. The problem is you've got to have the right people to execute what they're doing and what they're trying to do. And can you maintain this level of play for 17 games?
00:37:38
Speaker 1: No.
00:37:39
Speaker 3: Right. There's going to be bumps in the road. There's going to be. And that's when you talk about the offense. And when you go back and watch the film and you're thinking– you see– You come away from the Tampa game and you're like, oh, God. But then you look at all the meat that was left on the bone and all the possibilities that are there and how much better this product can look, right? And then you start getting balance. You need that. You can't in this league, I don't think, get very far in the postseason if you have a top five offensive defense and a 25th ranked offensive defense because at some point, Someone's going to stub their toe, and the other side of the ball is going to have to help them out. So you want to be top ten in kind of both, right? Just consistent across the way. Now we have that consistency out of our defense and our special teams so far. And our offense has– I mean, there's some opportunity on the table. It's there. You can see it.
00:38:36
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:38:36
Speaker 3: They just have to capitalize on it, and they've got the rest of the season to figure it out. It would be awesome for this offense to be in November, December, rolling. which is what you want, right? Which is what you want. So we'll see.
00:38:50
Speaker 1: Well, and I would say, and where I was going with that is like, I think I was just being fair to the defense in today's NFL, you know, that you're going to see, you're not going to see this. If you do, you know, they might have to change the Lombardi to the Flores. If you put on 17 of those, that's just a different thing. But it's the top defense EPA, second in the league since the beginning of last season, top last 11 games. They seem outrageous. But to your point, when they're playing at that level, I think that's why the energy, you can feel it in town right now. You can feel everybody's both really excited and kind of angsty at the same time. And with the noise from this week, it all kind of piles together because I think if you've been a Viking fan long enough, you recognize something that I don't know that everybody, fans, totally understood getting into this season, that wait a second. This is a lot closer. If that offense goes where we know it can go, and like you said, it doesn't have to be top eight, but if all of a sudden there's a top 15 offense, top 12 offense, you're competing at a level that puts you in the conversation with a very small group of teams.
00:40:01
Speaker 3: And the funny part about it is we've been playing close games and that sort of thing, but imagine this defense if you had the 98 offense. I mean, I remember that year we actually, the coaches had to sit down and come up with more things to do out of nickel, meaning you had the extra DB because we were ahead so much and teams were playing catch up and throwing the ball so much that we had to enhance all of our third down because our third down coverages and stuff we did with an extra DB on the field to respond to all that that we saw. So imagine if we had a two, three score lead, and then you're able with Flores to just turn that thing loose, right?
00:40:44
Speaker 1: You know what would be great, and what would be an interesting longer conversation some other day, but is, I'll be curious, we're in game three, who knows how anything goes, but just given the blitz rate, given some of the numbers, the chaos numbers, you know, this organization has some pretty iconic defenses. You look at that first Super Bowl defense with Joe Capp, right? But... it'd be funny to see where this one lands because if you're picking an offense in the history of the NFL, and I'm sorry, my dad and other guys, his age, but you're picking 98. It was the greatest offense in NFL history. It'll be curious where this defense has the potential to land in a storied franchise history full of rich defenses. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves at three games, but it's just been really fun to root for them.
00:41:28
Speaker 3: It has been. And the way, and again, it, it, Flores does an amazing job of getting guys in the right positions, but it's the way that these guys execute. It's the way that Cashman and Eric Wilson play off of each other. It's, you know, you don't hear a ton from, you know, you don't hear a ton from Dallas Turner or Van Ginkle in this last game, right? So it's not the same guys every single week that you're depending on that guy and that guy. It's everybody is showing up and doing their thing. And that's, That's the breadth and width of this whole thing, and I love it because offenses are going to one week be like, okay, we've got to take care of Van Ginkle and Turner or else we're done. So we're just going to make sure we've got a big body in it. And then what do you do? You leave the middle of your offense, your center, and your running back all day long with two linebackers that are unbelievably good at stunting and doing their deal. And next thing you know, you give up four sacks to the inside linebackers. Eric Wilson didn't have a sack or an intercept. He had nothing in the splash column going into this game. Still playing. He's playing unbelievably well. But all of a sudden, now it's like, hey, all right, we got a game where they want to use the running back to block the A gap. Well, here we go. We're going to just wear that out, right? And that's kind of the beauty of this defense is that every single week it's somebody else that gets the opportunity to go out there and make big plays, and they're doing it.
00:42:52
Speaker 4: And Minnesota fans, historically, something goes wrong. Oh, here we go, right?
00:42:58
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
00:42:59
Speaker 4: Well, last game, right?
00:43:00
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:43:00
Speaker 4: Last game, Metellus, he has a helmet-to-helmet call, which wasn't his fault because he was already head down before he hit the guy. And I would have normally gotten 20 text messages from my buddies, like, here we go. But everybody's just like, yeah, walk it off. This is no big deal. We're going to completely finish this game. It's different rooting for defense. It's a different feel. It really, really is.
00:43:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's– How hard, that's one of the hard, I mean, like I said, this is, I've seen every game here, well, pretty much since 94, so there's so much to remember, you know, and you have to just, you have to understand that these guys on the field have no idea. They've got no idea what it, that. I don't even know how many of them would know that the Vikings have been to four Super Bowls and didn't win one. They probably don't even know that. They know the years that you won the division because the banners are in the practice field. They can look up and say, oh, we were pretty good in the 70s. Holy cow, look at that. They have no idea. They don't know. They don't know about the 2009 NFC Championship game when we fumbled the ball I don't know how many times and then threw a pick at the end. The whole thing. It's like that we do that sticks with us and we carry with us constantly And when you're watching the game, you're like, here we go again. That's what the Vikings do. Here we go. They don't know. The coaches don't know. Kevin O'Connell didn't grow up a Viking fan. He's not familiar with us in the 70s and the 80s. None of them know.
00:44:24
Speaker 1: They don't have a lineage of pessimistic men barking in their ear.
00:44:30
Speaker 3: Generations. Nobody in that part of the building that matters on game day has any clue what we've been through. You know what I'm saying?
00:44:38
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:44:39
Speaker 3: That's like my big, I guess that's my biggest defense in thinking that way is to say, well, that Metellus has no idea. He has no, you know, he has no idea what this, what we've been through. And so I'll give him a break.
00:44:52
Speaker 1: Uh, last question. Well, two things. Give me a quick answer on this one. And then I'll give you a last question that I can't not ask you. Who's your guy to watch this week? That's Chad and I always do a player or, or a prediction. Um, Staying away from score, who are you looking at this week that might surprise some people?
00:45:12
Speaker 3: I'm hoping it's, I mean, offensively, I mean, Jordan Addison. Yeah. I think if, depending, I mean, I know the JJ thing is kind of whatever, but him having to move around with the injury and play different positions, which he obviously doesn't do every, but a week of that in practice.
00:45:32
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:45:32
Speaker 3: Yeah. He's just such a good route runner. I'm a big Addison fan. And I love him because of the way he can run routes and how he can hang people out to dry, and it's so hard to cover him. I think he might have himself. If he comes into this game as the number one receiver, I think he's going to show up and be the guy.
00:45:55
Speaker 1: Chad, give me your prediction quick.
00:45:57
Speaker 4: I got Rodgers with a pick.
00:45:58
Speaker 1: Ooh, I like that. I am abstaining this week because I feel like everyone I've picked so far has gone a negative direction. So unless I could, you know, like predict a coach's outfit or like an equipment manager's shoes or something, I think I should stay away from it. This is the last question. So you keep mentioning 30 years here with the organization, 20 years of calling games.
00:46:23
Speaker 3: This is my 20th season on the radio.
00:46:26
Speaker 1: So there is an infamous moment in Washington, D.C., where the fans got a little out of hand. Can you contextualize that for people who might not know the story and give us your perspective?
00:46:38
Speaker 3: At certain stadiums, like in Chicago or in Washington, where the booth is, when the fans stand up, they can literally turn and look at you. Their faces are right there. And sometimes you get lucky, and there's some Viking fans maybe, but sometimes you don't get lucky, and sometimes you get very unlucky. And you have a belligerent fan that's right in front of you. And that's part of it. It's the way the game went that was the other part of it. Because that was the game that was very close. And we had a play where, and I'm trying to remember the names, but our safety might have been Cam Bynum, but was free to make a pick. And the referee ran into him and knocked him down. And the ball was incomplete. It was the referee. And I went absolutely bonkers because... referees are, referees change games, referees change seasons. And when they, I mean, it literally looked like he had took them out. I've never seen, I've never seen a back judge that far in the middle. The whole thing was just, you know, so we're going, I'm going bananas. We're all going bananas. And then, and then the guys in front of us are all like looking at us and smiling and laughing. And then they kept, and then they started with the reaching over and pushing PA's computer closed.
00:47:55
Speaker 1: Right.
00:47:55
Speaker 3: They started, they started reaching in the booth. And then it just kept going. And then Paul started calling them out. And then he started calling them out during the broadcast. And I'm like, all right, cool. Let's pile on. Let's make it a bit. All right, let's go. And so we started ripping on the guys in front. They hear it. They start saying stuff back. And it got so bad that the first time I almost cussed on the radio because I told the guy to sit the you-know-what down because they were just being so ridiculous. And fortunately for us, next door was the security booth. And they had a bunch of their policemen in there in the full guard. I'm talking bulletproof vests and the rifles and the whole thing. And so we called them over, and we told them what was going on. And like four or five of them, I have a picture of it, came piling in, AR-15s, the whole thing, came walking in. And they're standing there, and they go, which one is it? And you're like, that one right there. And they went out, got down there, picked the guy up, and took him out. Took them out. Removed. Like, when they throw that up on the scoreboard everywhere they do, you know, things that aren't allowed during the game, you know, excessive drinking and rowdiness and all those things that could be a crime, you'll be removed.
00:49:06
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
00:49:07
Speaker 3: You're going to get removed. AR-15s? I mean, it was– no, I have a picture of it somewhere on my phone, but it was legit.
00:49:16
Speaker 4: It was– Sounds like Philly more than D.C.
00:49:19
Speaker 1: That's what I was just going to say.
00:49:20
Speaker 3: Say.
00:49:21
Speaker 1: We are both fans of being unhinged at games, which is why it's amazing that we get let on the sidelines every once in a while or on the field.
00:49:29
Speaker 3: The Minnesota level of unhinged I don't think is... The East Coast level of unhinged is, I think, might be another level.
00:49:36
Speaker 1: I agree, but I would ask you not to lump us in with the hot dish and understand that perhaps we have a certain skill set. Yes. But even as crazy as you are, Chad, can you imagine the level of extra, like, I don't care how this goes, to turn around? and shut the play-by-play guy's computer, that's a bananas choice. Reaching into the booth.
00:50:01
Speaker 3: Reaching into the booth. So funny.
00:50:04
Speaker 1: I know it sucks.
00:50:05
Speaker 3: That's so funny.
00:50:06
Speaker 4: But in order to get away with it, you have had to already establish a fun back and forth, not a we don't like each other back and forth.
00:50:15
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.
00:50:16
Speaker 4: If it's fun and you shut it, hilarious.
00:50:18
Speaker 3: Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes the back and forth with the fans can be very fun, like you're saying. This one wasn't fun.
00:50:24
Speaker 1: Sure.
00:50:25
Speaker 3: This one was not fun at all.
00:50:26
Speaker 4: Well, it ended with AR-15.
00:50:27
Speaker 1: That's very rarely the way fun stories happen. Unless somebody's like, and then he brought me a giant gummy AR-15. Well, this one was fun, Pete. Thank you for doing this.
00:50:39
Speaker 3: We really appreciate it. You go from like two Hall of Famers and then you got this guy.
00:50:44
Speaker 1: Hey, here's the thing. Everybody's a Hall of Famer to someone, Pete.
00:50:47
Speaker 2: Oh, boy.
00:50:48
Speaker 3: Here we go.
00:50:49
Speaker 4: Yeah, can you believe this? I have two podcasts.
00:50:51
Speaker 1: Wow. Wow. Listen to me.
00:50:54
Speaker 3: Two podcasts with that?
00:50:55
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:50:56
Speaker 3: Pete.
00:50:56
Speaker 4: And a fake friendship.
00:50:57
Speaker 1: If it's mentionable, it's manageable. Someone's in couples therapy.
00:51:03
Speaker 3: Gotta go!
00:51:06
Speaker 1: Thanks again to Pete. And thank you for joining Chad and I on this week's show. And thank you for listening to our podcast feed. While you're here, make sure to give us a good review. It sure helps us out a lot. Finally, a huge shout-out to Ticketmaster, the official ticket marketplace of the Minnesota Vikings. for helping make this show happen. Enjoy the game, everybody.
Speaker 1: As the official ticket marketplace of the Minnesota Vikings and the NFL, Ticketmaster is the safest and most convenient marketplace to score fully verified Viking tickets. Get those touchdown celebrations ready and score your tickets today at Ticketmaster.com slash Vikings. Join Paul Allen and Alec Lewis this Friday, October 2nd at the Buffalo Wild Wings in Monticello for Friday Football Feast presented by Coors Light. Visit Vikings.com slash BWW for full schedule and details. Before kickoff, there's one sign that it's game time, and that's when the mountains turn blue. Be sure to get your Mountain Cold Coors Light at U.S. Bank Stadium. Hey, everybody. Thanks for listening on the podcast feed. This is another fun episode for Chad and I. The great Pete Bursich joined us. He's always interviewing the legends from this organization, so we flipped it on him, asked him a bunch of really fun questions. I think you are going to like it a lot. So let's go ahead and jump into our conversation. with the great Pete Bursich.
00:01:04
Speaker 2: Hey, Viking fans, welcome to the tailgate brought to you by Ticketmaster.
00:01:17
Speaker 1: Your favorite football team is 3-0. I'm joined by the great Chad Daniels, and we're not going to waste any time today. We are excited about the Miami game, but we got the opportunity to sit down with Pete Bursich, get him in a room for a while, and ask him a bunch of questions. So Chad and I are going to jump right into our conversation with Pete Bursich. Joining us in studio, a guy who spends a lot of his time asking other Viking legends about their stories, and now we're going to force him to do it for us here on the tailgate. Ladies and gentlemen... The great Pete Bursich.
00:01:55
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me on.
00:01:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, dude. Thanks for doing it. We've been it's been a really we changed the format of the show this year. And so it's basically we talked Tom West into badgering legends and coming on the show. So it's been three so far. Pretty good run. Jim McMahon. Oh, Brad Johnson. All right. into Pete Bursich and they all kind of, all three of you guys kind of land in that nineties Chad and Cy were children and have a lot of questions range. So be prepared for a bunch of that today. And I'm going to start out with one that feels like it should be at the end, but you and I talk about 98 a lot. The 98 Vikings, the 15-1 team, the team you played on. Uh, and I bother you about it often, but I don't think I've ever asked you this question, uh, What is something from that year that you think about or you remember that nobody talks about or nobody thinks about? Because it's always the same stuff, right? It's Moss, high-powered offense, heartbreaking kick. But like when you think about that, is there something else that pops into your brain that isn't overly discussed?
00:03:05
Speaker 3: I don't know. I think, you know, what you think a lot about is, and it just happened with being down in Tampa and playing in the big sombrero against Tony Dungy and Just when you go down there, you play him, and from the beginning of the game, he went forward on fourth down. And he knew exactly kind of where some of the bones were buried, especially with us defensively. And not like exposing it, but just chipping away at it, chipping away at it, chipping away at it. And losing that game, it was wild. You win seven in a row, and then you lose that game, and then you win seven more in a row. or eight more in a row. And then it's just that one hiccup. And you look back and you're like, what happened? It was just well done by Tony Dungy, right? And, again, he went for it on fourth down on every single play. And back then that was like suicide. It wasn't like it is now where everyone has the big pile of analytics and you type it in the computer and it tells you go for it or don't or whatever. It was revolutionary, like, back then. But All-Stod and that whole group and playing down in Tampa Bay, and it's just wild how that used to be part of our division. We'd go down there every year. They'd come up here every year. You just hoped that it was later in the season because I, as a player, I didn't like the heat. I'm from the north and played college up north and the whole thing, so the heat wasn't really a huge factor. But, yeah, that's a game I think about quite a bit.
00:04:35
Speaker 1: I think. Yeah, I'm going to get out of the way because our boy here, Chatty D, so he's a lifelong Viking fan, but it waned for a while and really liked the Eagles when he was younger.
00:04:47
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:04:48
Speaker 1: I know. I'm with you. But here's what brought him back.
00:04:50
Speaker 3: Seth Joyner.
00:04:51
Speaker 1: Here's what brought him back.
00:04:52
Speaker 4: Yeah, back then, yeah.
00:04:53
Speaker 1: Well, and Herschel Walker.
00:04:54
Speaker 3: They had some good defense.
00:04:56
Speaker 4: Keith Byers, Jerome Brown.
00:04:57
Speaker 3: They were bad. Crazy. I've been to Fergus Falls, by the way. Have I told you that? Oh, you have?
00:05:01
Speaker 1: What'd you do? I mean, it's not that far away. It's not like a huge.
00:05:04
Speaker 3: Flew out there on Ziggy's jet. This is back when they were trying to garner.
00:05:08
Speaker 1: Wait, this is real?
00:05:09
Speaker 3: Yes, they were trying to garner support for the building of the stadium. And Lester Bagley, there was one of those big, I don't know, whatever, city council meetings or whatever. Ben Lieber, me, and I can't remember who else it was, but just jumped on the old Falcon and flew out to Fergus Falls and flew back. It took like 10 minutes. Something I would only take a two and a half hour drive. I was like, zip, zip.
00:05:33
Speaker 4: I wish I would have had one of those when I was touring. That would have been nice instead of driving three hours to the airport every single week.
00:05:40
Speaker 1: Right.
00:05:40
Speaker 4: And having my kids go, you're gone a lot. How come you don't love us?
00:05:43
Speaker 3: And try.
00:05:43
Speaker 1: It's like, well, I am.
00:05:45
Speaker 3: It's just funny because I'm not from here originally. I'm from Chicago area. But when I come up here and I meet someone from like Fergus Falls or. you know, International Falls or whatever, and you've been there, you're like, hey, I've been there.
00:05:56
Speaker 1: It pains in your brain.
00:05:59
Speaker 3: Exactly. Because when you get out of the cities, it's a little different.
00:06:02
Speaker 4: Well, to go to your hometown, Joliet, right?
00:06:04
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:06:05
Speaker 4: So I know two things.
00:06:06
Speaker 1: Home of the Slammers.
00:06:08
Speaker 3: Yes.
00:06:08
Speaker 4: Oh, see, now I know three.
00:06:09
Speaker 3: Joliet Slammers.
00:06:10
Speaker 4: There's a prison.
00:06:11
Speaker 1: Yep.
00:06:11
Speaker 3: And then Rudy.
00:06:12
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:06:13
Speaker 4: That's the two things I know about Joliet.
00:06:15
Speaker 1: Have we talked about, because you went to Notre Dame, have we talked about Steve Gillespie's grandfather? No. On the show, Jay? Have we talked?
00:06:22
Speaker 4: Okay.
00:06:22
Speaker 1: So how many years post-Rudy were you?
00:06:26
Speaker 3: One was Rudy. I don't remember exactly.
00:06:29
Speaker 1: Late 70s? That shows how relevant Rudy was to the University of Notre Dame.
00:06:35
Speaker 3: Let's talk Rudy. All right. I know a bunch of his brothers.
00:06:40
Speaker 1: Of the Rudigers.
00:06:41
Speaker 3: Yes. So there was France.
00:06:42
Speaker 1: Was his name Rudy Rudiger?
00:06:44
Speaker 4: Am I remembering that right?
00:06:45
Speaker 3: They called him Rudy. Rudy because of his last name.
00:06:48
Speaker 4: Okay.
00:06:48
Speaker 3: One of his brothers, Francis, was a detective in the Julia Police Department.
00:06:53
Speaker 1: 75.
00:06:53
Speaker 3: Little bitty guy. Okay. Set national records in powerlifting. And he had his own gym. It was called Rudy's Gym. And Rudy's Gym was a gym that was in a garage. But it was so big, if you got invited to Rudy's Gym, you had to go. And then you'd walk in with your work because you had to wear work boots. That's what you lifted in. And then the weights were all, you know, the humid and rusty and slippery and the whole thing. I mean, it was anybody that did a drive-by and looked and they're like, what the hell? This guy's got a torture chamber in his garage.
00:07:23
Speaker 4: The lamest party I've ever seen.
00:07:25
Speaker 3: But it was like the biggest deal. His other brother was the head wrestling coach in my high school. Illinois High School State Coach of the Year a couple of times. His other brother was the first four-time state champion in wrestling in Illinois state history. He was a single A two years and then double A won it two years later. Joey Gilbert, I think, was the first four-time state champion in double A. Not that it matters. And then they make the movie about the little one. The run. He was a maintenance guy at the condos were right by right by school. Right. And then they would let him come in and work out. And he would tell us about this movie they're making about him. Right. You know, I did this and, you know, I got the sack and I was the last person that was carried off out of Notre Dame Stadium on the shoulders of my teammates. And we just looked at him. We're like, yeah, good luck with that.
00:08:25
Speaker 4: Good luck with that, buddy.
00:08:26
Speaker 1: One of the most famous sports movies of all time.
00:08:28
Speaker 3: And then you see the movie, and you're like, oh, my God, that's Hollywood right there. That's Hollywood.
00:08:33
Speaker 1: This is going to be really interesting that I get to tell this because you're from Joliet. Because, well, I'll just do it. Our friend Steve Gillespie, fantastic stand-up comedian, right? So Steve, I've known him for years, started at the exact same time as me. We might have known each other for almost a decade at this point. Yeah. We start talking, and somehow the subject of Rudy comes up. And you know in the movie Rudy, when they go, Coach Gillespie thinks you're.
00:08:58
Speaker 4: A p * * *?
00:09:00
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:09:01
Speaker 1: That's Steve's grandpa. Gordy Gillespie.
00:09:06
Speaker 3: No, I remember Gordy Gillespie.
00:09:07
Speaker 1: That's Steve Gillespie.
00:09:08
Speaker 3: I remember, yeah.
00:09:09
Speaker 1: One of the greatest college baseball coaches of all time. The all-time Illinois high school football coach.
00:09:16
Speaker 3: Winningest of all time.
00:09:17
Speaker 1: Coached Rudy.
00:09:19
Speaker 3: He would have so many guys come out for football that back in the day, they would split you up into linemen and non-linemen, and you would run 100 yards. If they had 150 guys on the field and they could only dress 90, the bottom 60 in both groups, 30 each, 30 each, goodbye. That was it. They would do that.
00:09:40
Speaker 1: Day one?
00:09:41
Speaker 3: They would cut guys. Yeah, day one.
00:09:43
Speaker 1: Oh, boy.
00:09:44
Speaker 3: That was the turnout. I grew up hearing about Cordy Gillespie and everything that he had done. He was a legend. He was an absolute legend.
00:09:53
Speaker 4: That's very cool.
00:09:54
Speaker 1: It's very, very cool.
00:09:55
Speaker 4: Because Steve, man, what happened to him?
00:09:57
Speaker 1: Not a legend.
00:09:58
Speaker 3: So we're talking about.
00:10:00
Speaker 4: about coaches, talking about Notre Dame. I'm not a big stats guy, but do you have any fun Lou Holtz stories?
00:10:04
Speaker 3: No.
00:10:05
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:10:05
Speaker 3: I mean, here's the thing. Yeah, there are a lot of fun ones, but not that you can share. Lou was interesting because I got recruited by Lou and Lou was, I also got recruited by Barry Alvarez. And the reason I went to Notre Dame was really because of Barry Alvarez, and I wish he would have stayed, but he left and went to Wisconsin. But Lou, you came to the house, and you meet him, and he's just, you know, he charms the pants off you and the whole thing, and then you go to your first training camp, and then about, you know, I don't know, 30 minutes into it, maybe two hours into it, you're like, who is this guy?
00:10:37
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:10:39
Speaker 3: This is not the guy that, you know, that you knew. And then the other part of it was he would beat you down You were so beaten down physically, mentally, the whole way that once you got to the game, the game was easy. The game was the easiest part of the week. Surviving him the rest of the way was the hard part. It seems a little like Herbie Brooks. Just all the time. It was relentless every single day. So you couldn't have soft skin. You couldn't let it get to you. And there were so many guys that I played with who were unbelievable talents that right? Notre Dame at the time was one of the top, I mean, five or 10, let's face it, schools to go. So you constantly, every year there would be 30, 25, 30 more guys that came in and they were all big, strong, fat. They were unbelievable. But a lot of them, I think today it would never work today, but you just had to, you had to find a way to just like we did when you do with the anger and stuff, you just had to, you had to just swallow it and pack it down. And then and then pull it up at certain parts of the day when you needed it, like nine on seven or whatever else.
00:11:44
Speaker 1: Stick it away and be like, someday this will be the thing that tears my family apart.
00:11:49
Speaker 3: My favorite loose story, one of my favorite loose stories, me personally, was in practice one day on a punt return. We're doing middle punt, right? I'm an inside guy and I'm blocking a guard on the punt team and the long snapper snaps the ball and the guard, instead of running a middle return, it's important. Instead of him just running down the field, he picks around the long snapper. So he goes this way. And this is practice, by the way. And so I'm like, all right, all I got to do is get him out of the middle of the field. So, you know, I push him out of the middle of the field. And then at the end of the play, he blows the whistle, comes walking out. He walks up to me. He's like, son, what return is it?
00:12:23
Speaker 4: I'm like, middle.
00:12:23
Speaker 3: He's like, which way are you supposed to block your guy? And I go, well, to the left. And he's like, which way did you block him? And I go, well, that way. And before I could explain, because I think I did the right thing, he looks at me and he goes– He's like, son, your ass is going to make me take recruiting much more seriously. And then just turned around and then walked away. But it was constant mind games. He would leave your name out of stuff on purpose, right?
00:12:48
Speaker 2: Oh, man.
00:12:49
Speaker 3: I don't know how many times, because my parents, I grew up 100 miles away. I don't know how many times I called my mom and dad on a Thursday and were like, you know what? You may not want to come out to the game because I don't know if I'm playing. This is my whole time. And I started, I don't know, 40-some games in college. I'm like, I didn't know. You get benched all the time.
00:13:08
Speaker 1: Get up.
00:13:09
Speaker 3: Get his ass up. Get him up. Can't win with this. And then you leave and go to the offense. And you're standing there going, what the hell did I do wrong? You wouldn't get an answer. And here's the thing. My dad played in the NFL. He was on the original Dallas Cowboy team. He went to Michigan State. He didn't say much, but he gave me some sage advice. And he goes, just don't ever let that guy get to you.
00:13:30
Speaker 1: All right?
00:13:31
Speaker 3: Just don't let him get to you. Because that's probably the real test if he gets to you. And let him know that. So every time I got benched, I would walk into his office, knock on the door, go, Coach, what do I got to do to get back on the field? And then I would just sit back, and I didn't give a rat's ass what he said. I just wanted to waste 15, 20 minutes of his time. So every time he knew he benched me, he's like, oh, damn it, that kid's going to be sitting in my office again. Right? Every time. Every single time. Just to kind of give him the, you know, I couldn't.
00:13:59
Speaker 1: Reverse Pavlov dog him.
00:14:02
Speaker 3: But that's the mental game that you had to play to survive that place, right? To get through him.
00:14:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:14:07
Speaker 1: And I don't like, I've known a couple of guys in basketball who, I don't think that's an uncommon story who the guy you get in the recruiting visit is completely different than the guy you get once you, once you get there, because once he's won you, I mean, and I wonder how that's all changing with NIL and the transfer portal and stuff like that. But back in the day is, You're a prestigious program. Get all the top people in the door and then use your psychological warfare to make sure you have the toughest one.
00:14:33
Speaker 3: You're probably going to win a lot of games. Back then, once you had them, you had them. There was no portal back then. Guys would transfer, and he would always bring up the guys that transferred and how they're not doing anything. But the only guy that did transfer was Dorsey Levens because he went to Georgia Tech and actually did well, and Lou would never bring him up. But he would always bring it up. And crash the screener on the other side. But then you start naming names. And you're like, oh, they all disappeared, coach.
00:14:57
Speaker 4: That's great.
00:14:58
Speaker 3: So it's like, I don't know. But he taught, you know, it was, you learned a lot, like the Lewis Leo Holtz time thing, where if we had a meeting at 2, if you weren't in your seat at 155, you were late. You know, that whole thing. Being on time. If you missed a meeting or a practice or were late, you just didn't play.
00:15:16
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:15:16
Speaker 3: Like, think about that. I guess the big picture, growing up in Joliet, right, there's a lot. Mike Allstott went there. You know, there were plenty of NFL guys that came out of there. And Tom Thayer being one of them, right, Joliet. And so I don't know how many people looked at you on your way out and are like, yeah, you're never going to make it, right? You're never going to make it. So you have all this pressure and all this stuff, and then you realize, man, if I get out of bed five minutes late, I could just ruin everything I've worked for.
00:15:48
Speaker 1: And they're all going to be right.
00:15:50
Speaker 4: Right.
00:15:51
Speaker 3: And so it was that, I guess, gets you ready for the real world. You know what I mean about being on time and how important all that stuff is, dress code and all those things that Lou was a stickler about that were just an absolute pain in the rear when you were going through it. Once you got out, you're like, yeah, I appreciate the discipline. I appreciate what he asked out of. out of all of us and I passed the test, I made it, right? So I graduated and that's it. It feels very karate kid. Yeah.
00:16:22
Speaker 4: Where you're all of a sudden you're like, why am I painting your house?
00:16:26
Speaker 3: Blocking kicks. Exactly.
00:16:27
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:16:28
Speaker 1: Right. Well, and then you get to the NFL and it's Denny Green.
00:16:31
Speaker 3: Who also recruited me in high school. I got a great Denny Green story. So we had this big, we had this gigantic Rottweiler, gigantic Rottweiler.
00:16:39
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:16:40
Speaker 3: Because my parents, they used to show dogs and all. But we had this big rivalry. And Denny Green comes to my house, and the dog's going.
00:16:46
Speaker 1: Really buried the show dog family stuff.
00:16:48
Speaker 3: It was him and I can't remember the offensive line coach that got in trouble in Miami for, doesn't matter. Came to my house, and the dog was just going nuts. So we put the dog in a bedroom, and the dog damn near ripped the door down. Right? So we're doing the whole recruiting thing, and the dog is just there. And you could tell Denny's like, whatever. Whatever. So I don't know how many, but four, five, six years go by, I get drafted by the Vikings, and one day, just one day, Denny never really talked to players much, but he came up by me and he goes, hey, you still got that dog? I'm like, no, coach, she died years ago. He goes, good. And then I just turned around and walked away. You know, it's like Denny was just so awesome to play for. Treated you like a man. If you were a man, he was fine with you. He was the best. He brought back my love of the game. I remember being here in minicamp, right? I show up in minicamp. I mean, you've got Jack Del Rio. You've got Chris Carter, Randall McDaniel. After a day of it, I remember waking up the next day, and I was like, I really don't care if I get cut. This is why I got a degree. This is a whole other level of everything. and you know I look back and seven years later seven seasons later after playing and I'm like I love the game that's why I got into coaching and all that because Denny really really brought that that back.
00:18:19
Speaker 1: Do you think that's because the you know as as as good as it probably made Notre Dame the psychological warfare of turning it into a regimen like that is you know that can drain the love out of stuff not saying that that's what happened but To get to Denny. It did.
00:18:34
Speaker 3: You didn't love any part of it. You appreciated it. Here's the thing. Back in the day with Notre Dame, that was a gigantic pile of dudes who were stuck in this school. It's anger, frustration, the whole thing. Being stuck in South Bend, Indiana, where the sun doesn't come out months at a time, and then we would just let it out on game day. It was like, all right, here we go. And that's what we did.
00:19:03
Speaker 1: Yeah. But then you get to the NFL and Denny, because everything I've heard about Denny was that, you know, he was almost like both really strict and really focused, but then also kind of familial. And maybe that's what you mean about the, if you handled your business, you felt respected and you felt like a part of it.
00:19:21
Speaker 3: Is that? And Denny was very, he was very, very good about, everybody was a little bit different. So he had to, he had to, Treated Chris Carter a little bit differently. Had to give Chris Carter some– make him feel like he's in control or has a little more responsibility than the rest. Whether or not he did, it's, you know, whatever. But how he handled Randy, how he handled a bunch of guys. But I think the secret to him was he knew a group of guys and could tell when they could work together. And we had roommates on the road. We'd be in the hotel. You don't get your own room. You had a roommate. You had a roommate for training camp. You had a roommate during the regular season. And so guys, he paid a lot of attention to how a group operates. And I know to this day, I just saw Antonio Banks down in Tampa. He's a security guard at the stadium down there. And immediately it was like we go back to everything that we were. Chris Walsh, Harold Morrow, Mo Williams. You know, we're not a bunch of guys that won games and played a ton. We were special teamers and the whole thing. But the group of– that group and the way they stuck together and everybody, there were no problems. There were no jerks. There were a couple guys that whatever, but you just– If you were a problem or if you upset people or just, and I'm trying not to cuss here, but Denny, you would be gone. If you disrespected Dennis Ryan or just, you know, was that kind.
00:20:52
Speaker 1: Of a person? Yeah, there was a standard for the sort of person.
00:20:54
Speaker 3: You had to be. Yeah, 100%. And that came before your playmaking ability because there are a lot of guys out there who can make a lot of plays, but they were, you know, they're not poisonous, but they're not good for, for whatever it was that Denny had going or wanted to get going. So in that regard, I thought he was unbelievable at that.
00:21:11
Speaker 1: Well, I would also say that the interesting thing about Denny when you study and you learn about him and you talk to people about him is this, like if you're looking for a through line in his story and all the way up through 98, it's the finding the path and purpose in places that other people couldn't.
00:21:29
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:21:29
Speaker 1: Because if you look at Chris, the cut from the Eagles famously, and Chris turned himself around. But Denny and the organization were involved in that. Johnny Randall, undrafted. He just had a penchant for finding belief, even through the Randy Moss pick.
00:21:44
Speaker 3: So to your point, if Denny had a football genius part to him, it was his ability to just watch somebody and then say, that guy needs to play. He did it with Robert Griffith. Robert Griffith was on the couch for a year. It was Gary Zahner that brought him in. So they bring in Griff. Griff goes out there for special teams. And Griff knows. He's like, yeah, I mess up this much. I'm gone. I mean, I just got off the couch. I don't have any equity in this league. So he did everything he possibly could, the whole thing. And then Denny just saw something in him, or you, or whomever it was. And he would just literally be like, all right, put that guy in. Robert Tate, put that guy in. Make Robert Tate from wide receiver, make him a corner.
00:22:30
Speaker 1: Make him a cornerback and then gets the pick against the Saints or whatever, yeah.
00:22:34
Speaker 3: And that was kind of his– he had a personnel genius to him in that regard, right, above and beyond all the coaching. But when you talk about the greats, the Bud Grants and the Jerry Burnses and the Tony Dungys and Monty Kiffins and all these people, they all have their things about them that made them unbelievable. That was Denny's thing. He could just spot talent. And when he did, he just literally made no bones. He'd just look at the position coach and say, put him in.
00:23:07
Speaker 1: The other thing I loved about him, because I'll ask one more Denny Green thing, and then what I was getting at earlier with Chad is I'm going to get out of the way so he can ask some Randall Cunningham questions. Because that's what won him back over, 98 and Randall. When the Eagle, when Cunningham came in.
00:23:19
Speaker 3: You didn't like Brad Johnson, did you? No, I did, yeah.
00:23:22
Speaker 4: I did. I was just an Eagles fan.
00:23:24
Speaker 1: But a huge, huge Cunningham fan. I think... That the type of coach Denny was, I don't want to say it's a lost art a little bit. It is. But he was so interested in developing such a good staff. And there were so many good coaches that came out. And of course, he came under Bill Walsh. So it would make sense why he'd be invested in that. But he seemed so much more interested in, like you said, being a CEO. And being the guy up on top who was looking at everything from this thousand foot view, then being down in the weeds and having to control this thing. And he seems like one of the best at that.
00:23:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. And he also had a way of letting, the inmates never really ran the asylum and he let us know when it was our problem, right? Like we'd lose a couple of games in a row and he'd throw up the schedule for the week and say, this is the schedule for the week. It's not changing. This isn't what's broken. You know, you just look at all of us and be like, this isn't the problem right here. Schedule's not the problem. So this is our schedule, and it's going to be forever, right? It's not changing. And it's just that little, oh, schedule's not the problem. It must be us. You know what I mean?
00:24:33
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:24:34
Speaker 3: He had just a subtle way of doing that. And then if things kept going wrong, then you'd show up for work one day and a guy would be gone.
00:24:42
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:24:43
Speaker 3: Nothing to be said. No, no big deal. But it'd be like, ooh, where did so-and-so go? And they're like, ooh, I think he was late for a lift or something. And next thing you know, it's— Have we.
00:24:52
Speaker 4: Heard from them since, though?
00:24:52
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:24:53
Speaker 3: That's the big question. I mean, that's— They didn't disappear fully. No.
00:24:57
Speaker 4: Okay.
00:24:57
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, no, not fully.
00:24:58
Speaker 4: Yeah, that'd be great. I don't have too many Randall Cunningham questions. I skipped hairball with my buddies in Vegas on Saturday night to go see him preach one time.
00:25:07
Speaker 1: Oh.
00:25:07
Speaker 4: And I thought it was.
00:25:09
Speaker 3: How was it? How do you do that when you're.
00:25:11
Speaker 4: How do you skip hairball?
00:25:12
Speaker 3: Well, no, no, no, no. Well, I mean, hairball is fantastic.
00:25:15
Speaker 1: Listen to me. If I can see him in Fergus Falls, I'm not seeing him in Vegas.
00:25:20
Speaker 4: Can't see hairball in Fergus Falls.
00:25:22
Speaker 1: At some point you could.
00:25:23
Speaker 3: That's messed up.
00:25:23
Speaker 4: It's Johnny Holmes, dude.
00:25:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, Johnny Holmes, hairball, same thing.
00:25:27
Speaker 3: You can go see Iron Maiden in Shakopee. Did I ever think I'd ever say that sentence and it'd be true? No, never. So you don't, don't. Just be careful what you say. Just be careful what you say. I mean, but watching, I mean, I would have a hard time watching Randall like randall cunningham do the preach thing because i'd be like hey that's my old quarterback my old teammate and now he's talking about god but i want to hear about the god stuff i want to hear about the football stuff.
00:25:51
Speaker 4: I was kind of hoping he would bring it in yeah.
00:25:53
Speaker 1: Yeah you gotta you gotta throw a metaphor in there or something yeah a little fly randall fly.
00:25:58
Speaker 3: And that's the hardest part because i guarantee for him he's like i do not want any longer to be known as the quarterback i want to be this is my life now and this is what i want to be known as so It's got to be tough.
00:26:08
Speaker 4: Yeah, I didn't, like, approach him or anything after because I just, you know.
00:26:11
Speaker 1: Good for you.
00:26:11
Speaker 4: They're just a watch.
00:26:12
Speaker 3: I would assume, like, in your business, that's what it's like being typecast, right?
00:26:16
Speaker 1: Sure.
00:26:16
Speaker 3: You land one big role. I mean, we wouldn't know. And then you've never been typecast?
00:26:21
Speaker 4: Well, you know, he always gets roles on sitcoms of guys that can't lift stuff. Otherwise, it's fine. Now, there's rumblings of a story maybe of Jerry Burns.
00:26:34
Speaker 3: Yes.
00:26:35
Speaker 1: That's all we got.
00:26:36
Speaker 3: Jay, well, I was going to say, Jay asked me about. I'm requesting this. Jay doing his producing things because he loves doing it. I was talking about funny stories, and I'm like, I've got 30-some years of stories. I've been here for 30 years now, so it's like I got. But my favorite was one Dennis Ryan told me about back in the day. You guys ever been to Mankato for training camp?
00:26:56
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
00:26:57
Speaker 3: You know, they had Gage Hall, which is right next to one. There was three practice fields or four. Jerry Burns late in camp one time. decided he was going to do something, right? And throughout training camp, he had an issue with Keith Millard and Monty Kiffin, Monty Kiffin being the defensive coordinator whose name's in the ring of honor in Tampa Bay. I didn't know that with the Buccaneers. But the two of them would always be jawing and fighting with each other one day. So Dennis Ryan's in the equipment room, and Jerry Burns comes off of practice field and goes, hey, I need you to go down and get me a mannequin. I want you to go to the mall. Go to the mall and get a mannequin. And Dennis Ryan, being young at the time, is like, all right, okay. I mean, what's he going to tell the coach? No. So he drops everything, gets in his car, drives to the mall, which is about 10 miles away, gets his mannequin, brings it back. And he's like, all right, coach, you got your mannequin. What do you want to do? He goes, I want you to dress it like Monty Kiffin. Dress it like Monty Kiffin and give it back to me.
00:27:53
Speaker 1: He's like, okay.
00:27:54
Speaker 3: Because Monty would wear a hat and then he had his rubber top and these shorts and these high socks and the shoes, so it looked like Monty. So they go on practice one day, and he pulls Millard and Monty aside, and he goes, all right, guys, we're going to do something. All right, you guys need to get in a fight like you normally do right before practice starts. So he's like, okay, we'll do that. And then what's going to happen is I'm going to kick both you guys out, and then you guys are going to go over and finish this somewhere else. So I guess the best way to end it would just be what the players saw, which was Bernsie– Gets practice started. He's like, all right, we're stretching on field three over there. So it's right next to Gage Hall. It's literally, there's a fence, there's the field, a fence, a street, and then there's, what, 12 stories of Gage Hall. And he's like, all right, we're stretching over here. So they start stretching, and then Monty and Millard start getting into it again, right? Again, just start going back and forth. So Bernsie's finally like, all right, I'm done with you two. I'm kicking you out. You're done. Get out of practice. So the two of them leave, and then they both go toward Gage Hall and disappear. Well, next thing you know, they're on the roof of Gage Hall. And you hear them MFing each other. You know, F you, Monty, this, and you, Monty, you're in a, you know, you a-hole that, blah, blah, blah. And then they start getting physical. Like grabbing each other, right? So they start grabbing and wrestling, and then they kind of disappear where you can't see them. Millard picks up the mannequin dressed up like Monty, comes to the side, and throws it over. And The players are looking up going, oh, my God, he just murdered Monty Kiffin. And then, you know, bam. And obviously, when it hits the ground, it busts into 100 pieces. But that's how they broke camp up back then. That was like comic relief.
00:29:41
Speaker 1: Oh, yes.
00:29:42
Speaker 3: That's so great. After weeks of breaking your heads together, you can't do that now.
00:29:46
Speaker 1: Fake a murder.
00:29:47
Speaker 4: Right.
00:29:48
Speaker 3: Exactly. I mean, I would just love to be in Jerry Burns' head for a day. He's sitting there going, all right, who's the one guy on this team that would throw a coach off of a roof?
00:29:59
Speaker 4: If I was Kiffin, I would have not showed up for a week just to make everybody think about it.
00:30:04
Speaker 3: So, yeah, those that's Dennis. I mean, Dennis Ryan had been here for forever. It's seen everything. That was probably his favorite story. And I heard it from him like three or four times. I'd hear him telling it and I just walk over and listen one more time just because it's my like my one of my favorites. It's so great. It's incredible.
00:30:23
Speaker 1: Normally, we close this show where Chad and I have to preview the game, but we're going to take advantage of the situation. We're going to do that with you. We each got a question for you about the game, and then we do a little prediction. We don't do a score, but we do what player to look out for. Last week, Chad kind of made it sound like you predicted a return. You did predict a big day from the special teams. So you're on one.
00:30:50
Speaker 4: In week one, I said Hitman was going to get a pick. He tipped a pick.
00:30:55
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:30:55
Speaker 4: And then I said— You're on a hot streak. And I said Dallas was going to go crazy two sacks, and he ended the Bears game with a second sack.
00:31:03
Speaker 3: So Chad's— He might be sacrificing the right animal.
00:31:07
Speaker 1: I think the guys I keep predicting end up getting ruled out before the game starts.
00:31:11
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're the John Madden curse.
00:31:14
Speaker 3: You're cursed, and then you're.
00:31:16
Speaker 1: So we need somebody to break the tiebreaker. But before we do that, we'll each ask you a question or so here about the game, because you're going to be better at talking about it than we are. Lost in all this is you're 3-0 with maybe the best defense in the league and one of the best special teams and an offensive coach and a quarterback who's just like, there's a lot of potential here.
00:31:39
Speaker 3: Which is exactly what you want of a 3-0 team.
00:31:43
Speaker 1: Yes. You don't want to be 3-0 and peaking. It's August or September. 3-0 and feel like the ceiling is way up there.
00:31:51
Speaker 3: Correct.
00:31:52
Speaker 1: Right? But you go into Miami, who's 0-3, they.
00:31:57
Speaker 1: Just lost A-chan. Where does your brain go? Because you always hear, stay away from the, oh, we're going to beat them, we're going to roll them, don't overlook anyone. But the other side of that, is there an amount of pressure to this? Because almost nothing can happen here except for the Vikings could win by 35 points and everybody goes, correct. But if you don't, it's almost nothing but consequences.
00:32:21
Speaker 3: I think the one thing we assume is that players see week to week or games like we do.
00:32:27
Speaker 4: Oh, sure.
00:32:27
Speaker 3: Because we as fans see big picture.
00:32:29
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:32:29
Speaker 3: Right. The Dolphins are 0-3. Well, they just lost to the Chiefs.
00:32:35
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:32:36
Speaker 3: They lost to the 49ers.
00:32:37
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:32:37
Speaker 3: And they lost to the Raiders, which– Everybody's undefeated. Raiders might be pretty good. So they haven't– every team they've played has been undefeated. But all you do as a player, you see the guy you're going to block or work against. You're going to see the offense that you're going to play. The guard I'm going to go up against is the center. That's the running back. And that's your world right there. I don't know if they're 2-0 or 5-6. It doesn't matter. All I know is that guard is really good or not really good, or this guy's– that's it. And when they run this route, this is what they're getting. They do this out of this formation and that formation, and that's your world. The trap that players fall into is a comfort level, meaning, You walk out there for practice on Wednesday after losing two, three games in a row, it's going to be a little bit of a different attitude than it is if you just won three games in a row. It can be. That's kind of the secret to the whole thing. Don't get too high, don't get too low, stay right here. That's what Warren Moon told me. That was the secret to the NFL. You have to be professional about it. That's why guys like Cashman and Eric Wilson have been around a long time. They've been up and down this ladder, so every single day you would expect– them to take the same level of concentration, professionalism, right? If you went out for a walkthrough this week and they were jimmy-jacking around and talking and there's a lot of noise and all that going on, whereas three weeks ago for the opening game it was quiet and everyone's listening and paying attention, that's where players– you lose players. It's not, well, we're going to win this game. I mean, you know, we're– They don't look at things that way. They don't see the big picture. They don't really pay attention to what the media is saying, what this guy all of a sudden is really good. You've got, for example, HN coming in here, and you're like, well, I've got to watch him on film and see if he's any good. I don't know if he's any good. Yeah, you're not just trusting the narrative. Or now that he's hurt, you don't just relax because it's the guy behind him. Exactly, and the other thing players love to do is talk about guys that are great that aren't talked about. They're like, hey, this guy here, this guy's unbelievable. That's kind of how players talk, right? So that's their world. It's very siloed. It's very short-term, very short-term. You're not looking a week ahead. You're not looking two weeks ahead. If it's bye week, and you know bye week's next week, like next week when you're getting ready to play New Orleans, They're better not being, you know, it's like you don't want any talk about what you're doing next weekend, right? You cross that bridge when you get there. It's very today, next meeting, next practice. This is my job. And I think that's the difficult part for younger players in their transition into adulthood is just being able to maintain that level of concentration, being able to jimmy jack around before in the locker room before a walkthrough and then all of a sudden as soon as you step on the field for a walkthrough it's like it's go time it's business time yeah it's right and you it's that it's being able to control that's like baseball right where it's so level-headed then all of a sudden one on every pitch you've got to be 100 100 ready to go chase down a ball in a gap if you're a center fielder right so you might stand there for the whole entire damn game and all of a sudden you're needed boom and it's that same ability to turn things on and off when it's needed, that's the trap players fall into.
00:36:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of one of the cool things about the NFL is once there is this level of everything that's at stake in an NFL game, personal through professional, through organizational, through community sponsor, everything that's involved, right? It's kind of this great equalizer where It doesn't matter if you were the second pick in the NFL draft or if you're Jalen Redmond who was playing in the NFL. If you could come in– that's what I really like about this team right now is you have a guy like Jalen Redmond who you're like, is this guy a superstar?
00:36:45
Speaker 3: You're loving our $ 8 million payroll for our defensive line group. What?
00:36:50
Speaker 1: I like– Pete, I don't even like– I'm not worried about it, but I think everybody, I keep telling people, the idea to hold a defense, you tell me how dumb I am, but to hold a defense to this expectations for an entire season would be one of the most unbelievable things in league history.
00:37:13
Speaker 3: In this day and age, yeah, what's wild.
00:37:15
Speaker 1: The way the rules are tilted.
00:37:16
Speaker 3: What's crazy is, I don't know if you watched the Bears game last night, Yep. But you're starting to see what we do show up everywhere else now. Everywhere.
00:37:23
Speaker 4: Right?
00:37:23
Speaker 3: People are like, ooh, that's good. I like that. I'm going to start, you know. So when it works, it's copied. The problem is you've got to have the right people to execute what they're doing and what they're trying to do. And can you maintain this level of play for 17 games?
00:37:38
Speaker 1: No.
00:37:39
Speaker 3: Right. There's going to be bumps in the road. There's going to be. And that's when you talk about the offense. And when you go back and watch the film and you're thinking– you see– You come away from the Tampa game and you're like, oh, God. But then you look at all the meat that was left on the bone and all the possibilities that are there and how much better this product can look, right? And then you start getting balance. You need that. You can't in this league, I don't think, get very far in the postseason if you have a top five offensive defense and a 25th ranked offensive defense because at some point, Someone's going to stub their toe, and the other side of the ball is going to have to help them out. So you want to be top ten in kind of both, right? Just consistent across the way. Now we have that consistency out of our defense and our special teams so far. And our offense has– I mean, there's some opportunity on the table. It's there. You can see it.
00:38:36
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:38:36
Speaker 3: They just have to capitalize on it, and they've got the rest of the season to figure it out. It would be awesome for this offense to be in November, December, rolling. which is what you want, right? Which is what you want. So we'll see.
00:38:50
Speaker 1: Well, and I would say, and where I was going with that is like, I think I was just being fair to the defense in today's NFL, you know, that you're going to see, you're not going to see this. If you do, you know, they might have to change the Lombardi to the Flores. If you put on 17 of those, that's just a different thing. But it's the top defense EPA, second in the league since the beginning of last season, top last 11 games. They seem outrageous. But to your point, when they're playing at that level, I think that's why the energy, you can feel it in town right now. You can feel everybody's both really excited and kind of angsty at the same time. And with the noise from this week, it all kind of piles together because I think if you've been a Viking fan long enough, you recognize something that I don't know that everybody, fans, totally understood getting into this season, that wait a second. This is a lot closer. If that offense goes where we know it can go, and like you said, it doesn't have to be top eight, but if all of a sudden there's a top 15 offense, top 12 offense, you're competing at a level that puts you in the conversation with a very small group of teams.
00:40:01
Speaker 3: And the funny part about it is we've been playing close games and that sort of thing, but imagine this defense if you had the 98 offense. I mean, I remember that year we actually, the coaches had to sit down and come up with more things to do out of nickel, meaning you had the extra DB because we were ahead so much and teams were playing catch up and throwing the ball so much that we had to enhance all of our third down because our third down coverages and stuff we did with an extra DB on the field to respond to all that that we saw. So imagine if we had a two, three score lead, and then you're able with Flores to just turn that thing loose, right?
00:40:44
Speaker 1: You know what would be great, and what would be an interesting longer conversation some other day, but is, I'll be curious, we're in game three, who knows how anything goes, but just given the blitz rate, given some of the numbers, the chaos numbers, you know, this organization has some pretty iconic defenses. You look at that first Super Bowl defense with Joe Capp, right? But... it'd be funny to see where this one lands because if you're picking an offense in the history of the NFL, and I'm sorry, my dad and other guys, his age, but you're picking 98. It was the greatest offense in NFL history. It'll be curious where this defense has the potential to land in a storied franchise history full of rich defenses. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves at three games, but it's just been really fun to root for them.
00:41:28
Speaker 3: It has been. And the way, and again, it, it, Flores does an amazing job of getting guys in the right positions, but it's the way that these guys execute. It's the way that Cashman and Eric Wilson play off of each other. It's, you know, you don't hear a ton from, you know, you don't hear a ton from Dallas Turner or Van Ginkle in this last game, right? So it's not the same guys every single week that you're depending on that guy and that guy. It's everybody is showing up and doing their thing. And that's, That's the breadth and width of this whole thing, and I love it because offenses are going to one week be like, okay, we've got to take care of Van Ginkle and Turner or else we're done. So we're just going to make sure we've got a big body in it. And then what do you do? You leave the middle of your offense, your center, and your running back all day long with two linebackers that are unbelievably good at stunting and doing their deal. And next thing you know, you give up four sacks to the inside linebackers. Eric Wilson didn't have a sack or an intercept. He had nothing in the splash column going into this game. Still playing. He's playing unbelievably well. But all of a sudden, now it's like, hey, all right, we got a game where they want to use the running back to block the A gap. Well, here we go. We're going to just wear that out, right? And that's kind of the beauty of this defense is that every single week it's somebody else that gets the opportunity to go out there and make big plays, and they're doing it.
00:42:52
Speaker 4: And Minnesota fans, historically, something goes wrong. Oh, here we go, right?
00:42:58
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
00:42:59
Speaker 4: Well, last game, right?
00:43:00
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:43:00
Speaker 4: Last game, Metellus, he has a helmet-to-helmet call, which wasn't his fault because he was already head down before he hit the guy. And I would have normally gotten 20 text messages from my buddies, like, here we go. But everybody's just like, yeah, walk it off. This is no big deal. We're going to completely finish this game. It's different rooting for defense. It's a different feel. It really, really is.
00:43:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's– How hard, that's one of the hard, I mean, like I said, this is, I've seen every game here, well, pretty much since 94, so there's so much to remember, you know, and you have to just, you have to understand that these guys on the field have no idea. They've got no idea what it, that. I don't even know how many of them would know that the Vikings have been to four Super Bowls and didn't win one. They probably don't even know that. They know the years that you won the division because the banners are in the practice field. They can look up and say, oh, we were pretty good in the 70s. Holy cow, look at that. They have no idea. They don't know. They don't know about the 2009 NFC Championship game when we fumbled the ball I don't know how many times and then threw a pick at the end. The whole thing. It's like that we do that sticks with us and we carry with us constantly And when you're watching the game, you're like, here we go again. That's what the Vikings do. Here we go. They don't know. The coaches don't know. Kevin O'Connell didn't grow up a Viking fan. He's not familiar with us in the 70s and the 80s. None of them know.
00:44:24
Speaker 1: They don't have a lineage of pessimistic men barking in their ear.
00:44:30
Speaker 3: Generations. Nobody in that part of the building that matters on game day has any clue what we've been through. You know what I'm saying?
00:44:38
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:44:39
Speaker 3: That's like my big, I guess that's my biggest defense in thinking that way is to say, well, that Metellus has no idea. He has no, you know, he has no idea what this, what we've been through. And so I'll give him a break.
00:44:52
Speaker 1: Uh, last question. Well, two things. Give me a quick answer on this one. And then I'll give you a last question that I can't not ask you. Who's your guy to watch this week? That's Chad and I always do a player or, or a prediction. Um, Staying away from score, who are you looking at this week that might surprise some people?
00:45:12
Speaker 3: I'm hoping it's, I mean, offensively, I mean, Jordan Addison. Yeah. I think if, depending, I mean, I know the JJ thing is kind of whatever, but him having to move around with the injury and play different positions, which he obviously doesn't do every, but a week of that in practice.
00:45:32
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:45:32
Speaker 3: Yeah. He's just such a good route runner. I'm a big Addison fan. And I love him because of the way he can run routes and how he can hang people out to dry, and it's so hard to cover him. I think he might have himself. If he comes into this game as the number one receiver, I think he's going to show up and be the guy.
00:45:55
Speaker 1: Chad, give me your prediction quick.
00:45:57
Speaker 4: I got Rodgers with a pick.
00:45:58
Speaker 1: Ooh, I like that. I am abstaining this week because I feel like everyone I've picked so far has gone a negative direction. So unless I could, you know, like predict a coach's outfit or like an equipment manager's shoes or something, I think I should stay away from it. This is the last question. So you keep mentioning 30 years here with the organization, 20 years of calling games.
00:46:23
Speaker 3: This is my 20th season on the radio.
00:46:26
Speaker 1: So there is an infamous moment in Washington, D.C., where the fans got a little out of hand. Can you contextualize that for people who might not know the story and give us your perspective?
00:46:38
Speaker 3: At certain stadiums, like in Chicago or in Washington, where the booth is, when the fans stand up, they can literally turn and look at you. Their faces are right there. And sometimes you get lucky, and there's some Viking fans maybe, but sometimes you don't get lucky, and sometimes you get very unlucky. And you have a belligerent fan that's right in front of you. And that's part of it. It's the way the game went that was the other part of it. Because that was the game that was very close. And we had a play where, and I'm trying to remember the names, but our safety might have been Cam Bynum, but was free to make a pick. And the referee ran into him and knocked him down. And the ball was incomplete. It was the referee. And I went absolutely bonkers because... referees are, referees change games, referees change seasons. And when they, I mean, it literally looked like he had took them out. I've never seen, I've never seen a back judge that far in the middle. The whole thing was just, you know, so we're going, I'm going bananas. We're all going bananas. And then, and then the guys in front of us are all like looking at us and smiling and laughing. And then they kept, and then they started with the reaching over and pushing PA's computer closed.
00:47:55
Speaker 1: Right.
00:47:55
Speaker 3: They started, they started reaching in the booth. And then it just kept going. And then Paul started calling them out. And then he started calling them out during the broadcast. And I'm like, all right, cool. Let's pile on. Let's make it a bit. All right, let's go. And so we started ripping on the guys in front. They hear it. They start saying stuff back. And it got so bad that the first time I almost cussed on the radio because I told the guy to sit the you-know-what down because they were just being so ridiculous. And fortunately for us, next door was the security booth. And they had a bunch of their policemen in there in the full guard. I'm talking bulletproof vests and the rifles and the whole thing. And so we called them over, and we told them what was going on. And like four or five of them, I have a picture of it, came piling in, AR-15s, the whole thing, came walking in. And they're standing there, and they go, which one is it? And you're like, that one right there. And they went out, got down there, picked the guy up, and took him out. Took them out. Removed. Like, when they throw that up on the scoreboard everywhere they do, you know, things that aren't allowed during the game, you know, excessive drinking and rowdiness and all those things that could be a crime, you'll be removed.
00:49:06
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
00:49:07
Speaker 3: You're going to get removed. AR-15s? I mean, it was– no, I have a picture of it somewhere on my phone, but it was legit.
00:49:16
Speaker 4: It was– Sounds like Philly more than D.C.
00:49:19
Speaker 1: That's what I was just going to say.
00:49:20
Speaker 3: Say.
00:49:21
Speaker 1: We are both fans of being unhinged at games, which is why it's amazing that we get let on the sidelines every once in a while or on the field.
00:49:29
Speaker 3: The Minnesota level of unhinged I don't think is... The East Coast level of unhinged is, I think, might be another level.
00:49:36
Speaker 1: I agree, but I would ask you not to lump us in with the hot dish and understand that perhaps we have a certain skill set. Yes. But even as crazy as you are, Chad, can you imagine the level of extra, like, I don't care how this goes, to turn around? and shut the play-by-play guy's computer, that's a bananas choice. Reaching into the booth.
00:50:01
Speaker 3: Reaching into the booth. So funny.
00:50:04
Speaker 1: I know it sucks.
00:50:05
Speaker 3: That's so funny.
00:50:06
Speaker 4: But in order to get away with it, you have had to already establish a fun back and forth, not a we don't like each other back and forth.
00:50:15
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.
00:50:16
Speaker 4: If it's fun and you shut it, hilarious.
00:50:18
Speaker 3: Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes the back and forth with the fans can be very fun, like you're saying. This one wasn't fun.
00:50:24
Speaker 1: Sure.
00:50:25
Speaker 3: This one was not fun at all.
00:50:26
Speaker 4: Well, it ended with AR-15.
00:50:27
Speaker 1: That's very rarely the way fun stories happen. Unless somebody's like, and then he brought me a giant gummy AR-15. Well, this one was fun, Pete. Thank you for doing this.
00:50:39
Speaker 3: We really appreciate it. You go from like two Hall of Famers and then you got this guy.
00:50:44
Speaker 1: Hey, here's the thing. Everybody's a Hall of Famer to someone, Pete.
00:50:47
Speaker 2: Oh, boy.
00:50:48
Speaker 3: Here we go.
00:50:49
Speaker 4: Yeah, can you believe this? I have two podcasts.
00:50:51
Speaker 1: Wow. Wow. Listen to me.
00:50:54
Speaker 3: Two podcasts with that?
00:50:55
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:50:56
Speaker 3: Pete.
00:50:56
Speaker 4: And a fake friendship.
00:50:57
Speaker 1: If it's mentionable, it's manageable. Someone's in couples therapy.
00:51:03
Speaker 3: Gotta go!
00:51:06
Speaker 1: Thanks again to Pete. And thank you for joining Chad and I on this week's show. And thank you for listening to our podcast feed. While you're here, make sure to give us a good review. It sure helps us out a lot. Finally, a huge shout-out to Ticketmaster, the official ticket marketplace of the Minnesota Vikings. for helping make this show happen. Enjoy the game, everybody.
