His Year: Jeff George 1999

Jeff George saved the 1999 Vikings' season, but got kicked off the team anyway.

It’s the 1999 offseason, and Jeff George’s NFL career is over.

The Oakland Raiders, for whom Jeff has been the starting QB in both 1997 and 1998, have just jettisoned his contract to replace him with Rich Gannon, which leaves Jeff in the NFL wilderness, without any team to call his own, and without any teams requesting his services. For the man who was once seen as one of the most promising QB prospects in NFL history, this is the end of the line.

It was only nine seasons ago that Jeff George was the first overall pick in the 1990 NFL Draft. What on Earth could’ve gone so wrong that he is falling out of the NFL at the age of just 32?

Let me explain.

Jeff George is a man born at the wrong time, in the wrong place. From a young age, he is just not like everybody else. Indianapolis born and raised, Jeff’s athletics career got its start no differently than many children of the 60s, playing for his church’s sports teams. However, unlike many children of the 1960s in middle America, Jeff is a third generation middle-Eastern (Syria and Lebanon) immigrant on both sides of his family, with Jeff’s great grandparents being some of the many Christians that left the Greater Damascus area in the early 1900s, for reasons that need not be discussed on a football publication.

Therefore, his athletics career gets its start not playing for the local Roman Catholic church like most kids. He gets his start playing for the relatively new (at the time) Eastern Orthodox church in Indianapolis, with his grandparents (first generation members of the heavily Christian Lebanese diaspora) being driving figures behind getting an Orthodox church started in the city.

His background and ancestry already mean that Jeff is unlike anybody else in a Midwestern city like Indianapolis, and once his athletic skills move from the church level to the high school level, it becomes clear immediately that his football talents separate him even further from the pack.

He wins two straight state championships for Warren Central High School in Indianapolis in 1984 and 1985, finding himself showered with every award you could possibly imagine. Every player of the year award is Jeff’s in 1985, and the hype is off the charts. It seems a foregone conclusion that he’s going to commit to Jimmy Johnson’s Miami Hurricanes, but at the last second, he changes tune, staying true to Indiana and committing to the Purdue Boilermakers.

This decision makes him a hero in his home state, even more than winning player of the year (in a state that in 1985 is far from a football power) already made him, but it’s also the decision that begins to the road to Jeff George becoming the vilified figure we all know him to be.

Jeff commits to Purdue for two promises. The first is that he will be a four year starter. Nobody has any issues with this, but the second is that the head coach Leon Burtnett will remain for his entire Purdue tenure. The university reneges on this promise almost immediately, firing Burtnett after Jeff’s freshman year. With one of his two key recruiting promises broken, Jeff decides he’s out, and enters the transfer portal.

What a pariah. Am I right?

This is what I mean about Jeff being born in the wrong time. In the modern era, players transfer when recruiting promises are broken, and fans are on the players’ side, but in 1986, this decision to transfer out of his home state turns Jeff from local hero to traitor overnight. He remains a hero in the Arab Indianapolis community, but amongst the general Indiana sports fans, Jeff will never get over this moment.

Jeff moves on and plays a great college career at Illinois, becoming one of few players ever to maintain his status as number one high school recruit in the country all the way into being the number one overall pick in the NFL Draft. The Colts of the early 1990s are not the smartest organisation in the world, so they deem it a good idea to trade second team All-Pro LT Chris Hinton, plus a first round choice, plus WR Andre Rison, all for the privilege to select Jeff George, whom their fans have already despised for years and branded a traitor, first overall.

I’m not sure how anybody ever thought this was going to work. Before Jeff ever takes the field, the Indianapolis fans hate his guts, and then the Colts elect to start Jeff as a rookie in 1990, which only makes the fans hate him even worse. After some individual regression and a slump into a 1-15 record in 1991, the relationship between Jeff and the Indianapolis fans is completely broken, and that with his teammates is not too far behind.

Over his first two years in the NFL, it already becomes clear who Jeff George is. He’s aloof, hotheaded, arrogant, immature, selfish, and even by his second NFL season in 1991, he’s been being told he’s the next big thing in football since 1984. There’s been a lot of Jeff George hype, and Jeff George has clearly listened to a lot of that hype.

This is what I mean when I say Jeff George was born in the wrong place.

Those words up there are all intended to be negative qualities, but in a different context, they would all be perceived as positive qualities. For instance, I would describe the legendary Kobe Bryant as aloof, hotheaded, arrogant, immature, selfish, and hyped beyond belief. In addition, Jeff and Kobe are both fiercely loyal people.

Loyalty goes both ways. If you believe in Jeff, he will reciprocate to the end of the world, but if you ever waver in your commitment, Jeff (just like Kobe) will throw you out the door in a heartbeat, because he will have lost all belief in you. All the same qualities inherent in Jeff George that make him so reviled in the early 1990s are ever-present in the career and the story of Kobe Bryant, and the so-called ‘Mamba mentality’ is talked about endlessly as being perfect for basketball.

One problem. This is not basketball.

Jeff George from the neck up is wired like a basketball player. In Jeff’s mind, it’s all about Jeff, and if Jeff does what he needs to do, everything else will come along for the ride. This is a mentality that works in basketball. If you listen to the ESPN people these days, they are begging NBA players to be as selfish and egotistical as Jeff George, but Jeff is not a basketball player. He’s a football QB.

As a football QB, it’s not about you. As an NBA star, you’re allowed to go up to the podium and accept credit for everything that the team did well. That’s NBA culture, but in football, you’re supposed to deflect all the credit to your teammates and to your coaches. You have to have an irrational belief in how good you are, and Jeff has no issue with that, but it’s taboo to actually show that belief to anybody else. This is the part Jeff struggles with.

In his mind, Jeff George is the best QB in the NFL, so when he does not play like the best QB in the NFL, he cannot keep his feelings pent up about it. Once again, if he were a basketball player, fans would praise this behaviour. That’s basketball culture, but as a football player in a city that hated him to begin with, this basketball mentality makes Jeff George public enemy number one, both inside and outside the facility.

It doesn’t help that Jeff, once he’s away from the football facility, is so clearly a people person. That would normally be a good trait for a QB, but the clear contrast between how Jeff treats his NFL colleagues and how he treats the people he loves, making it obvious that to him they are two different and distinct groups, only makes things worse.

He’s a legitimate family man, which in the warped world of the NFL is an insult. Jeff is a great father, and routinely puts the interests of the George family ahead of the interests of his football teams. Once again, in real life, the willingness and ability to put family life ahead of work life is a fantastic trait to have, but as we say all the time around here, pro sports are not real life. Jeff’s consistent commitment to put the George family ahead of the Indianapolis Colts is yet another thing that piles on top of the hatred that people have for him.

All of these things, the basketball mentality, the commitment to family (which is a bad thing in the football world), and the poor play on top of it, not helped by Jeff’s consistent lashing out against what he (and I) perceives as undeserved backlash eventually compound to force him out of his hometown. He holds out of training camp in 1993, trying to force a trade. Failing at that, he actually plays really well in 1993, but it’s too late. Both player and team are done with each other, and Jeff George is traded to the Atlanta Falcons.

The trade haul indicates that the league has not given up on Jeff as of 1994. The Falcons trade two firsts and two thirds for him. This is roughly equivalent to the Russell Wilson haul in 2021. That’s the amount of trade value Jeff has, and it’s because of the immense physical skill Jeff has.

We’ve talked about how he’s not meant for football from the neck up, but from the neck down, there’s never been a more perfect football player than Jeff George. His release is the quickest I’ve ever seen, and it takes just a flick of the wrist to throw the football 50 yards. The man is a physical marvel.

In a strictly physical sense, Jeff George looks a lot like Patrick Mahomes on the football field. Both guys are visibly afraid of contact, and as a result have footwork that is all over the place, often fading onto the back foot and throwing without their feet set unnecessarily, which seems like a recipe for failure, but their physical talents are so immense that these fundamental issues don’t matter.

Jeff is not nearly as good as Patrick, because they only are similar on the physical side of the game, but watching the games, it’s crazy how similar the two look. These two also provide a demonstration of how people talk about athletes differently depending on how they’re looked at in their time. Patrick is ‘the master of off-platform throws.’ Jeff ‘throws off the back foot unnecessarily.’ Jeff is ‘afraid of contact.’ Patrick is ‘doing the smart thing, avoiding hits.’ Etcetera.

All this negative talk gets to Jeff. It’s not fun to be hated in your own hometown, and when he gets to Atlanta, it’s an opportunity for a fresh start. For once, his teammates actually like him, and he does great things there, taking a team that’d been dead since Steve Bartkowski left (one winning record in 12 years), immediately boosting it to 7-9 in 1994, and becoming a legitimate top flight QB in 1995, ranking sixth in DYAR, tenth each in passing DVOA and ANY/A, and actually posting a 9-7 winning record, getting the Atlanta Falcons into the playoffs.

The Falcons are no match for the mighty 1995 Packers in their one and only playoff game, but Jeff does not embarrass himself individually, putting up 0.108 EPA/Play in his first playoff start. With this performance, and the solid (by Atlanta standards) 16-16 record the team has posted in his two years there, Jeff feels like it’s time to make a commitment. He puts down some roots in Atlanta, and tells his agent to work out a long term deal with the Falcons.

This is the decision that begins the end of Jeff’s career.

The Falcons say no. Despite making the playoffs for the first time in ages, they’re not interested in offering a long-term contract to Jeff George. We talked about Jeff’s sense of loyalty earlier. The instant he hears this, Jeff is out on the Atlanta Falcons. He rips up those roots he’d put down in Atlanta.

He still plays for the team in 1996, because they offer him so much money on a one year deal he can’t refuse it, but takes just three weeks into the season to have the infamous sideline shouting match with head coach June Jones, when June benches him at a time that doesn’t make any football sense, and Jeff (rightly, in my opinion) decides to let June Jones and the whole team know what he thinks of June’s choice to tank the whole year.

I say rightly, but I should temper it with saying that no, it isn’t right to freak out for ten minutes at your coach on the sideline during a game, but I absolutely agree with Jeff that an 0-3 start is too early to tank the whole season. That’s New York Giant behaviour, and Jeff was not going to stand for it. The tirade should’ve waited until everybody was behind closed doors, but his reaction to June’s decision to tank was absolutely the correct reaction in my opinion.

Knowing that Jeff is going to create problems with the idea of tanking the season (both in the locker room and on the field with his playing ability if they ever have to put him in a game), the Falcons take this excuse to suspend Jeff indefinitely. They try to trade him to the Seahawks. Jeff vetoes the deal. They try to trade him to the 1996 Chiefs (a very interesting what-if), but that falls apart too, and in the end, the man who dragged the lifeless Atlanta Falcons into the playoff in 1995 plays just three games in 1996, without any injury to explain why.

The Falcons wanted to tank. Jeff George didn’t, so he was benched. That’s really the story. Many people make the 1996 Falcons into a bigger deal than they are in the Jeff George story. Perhaps I’m just desensitized to this, because it’s a story we hear all the time in 2025 football (think of Daniel Jones and Joe Flacco last year, benched for being too good), but I’m not sure why Jeff George yelling at June Jones gets as much play as it gets. It wasn’t that important, but nevertheless, it’s a big part of the Jeff George story.

In the 1997 offseason, teams are much cooler on Jeff than they were just a couple seasons ago. This leads him into the arms of the Oakland Raiders, who in 1997 still have their reputation of being the NFL’s last chance. If you can’t get along here, you can’t get along anywhere, but if there’s anybody we know who can’t get along in any of the 30 NFL locker rooms, it’s Jeff George.

Jeff is fantastic in 1997, leading the NFL in passing yards, and ranking sixth in ANY/A on all that volume, so it’s not a fake number, but the very worst defence in football, in conjunction with a 2-5 record in one possession games, holds the team back to a 4-12 record. As a result, the team turns the entire coaching staff over for 1998, bringing in Jon Gruden and his West Coast offence, which is like oil and water with Jeff’s style of play.

This was never going to work, but the moment the relationship truly breaks is when Jeff goes on Oakland radio with four games left in the 1998 season and announces he’s done for the year. This is news to the Raiders, who are still in the playoff chase, and hopeful that their starting QB may be back for the last game or for the potential playoff game.

I don’t think this is anything untoward on anybody’s behalf. It’s just Jeff assuming the team wouldn’t want to make a change this late in the season. In fact, he does come back and play before the end of the season, making the whole thing a moot point, but because he’s Jeff George, this is treated like the most important moment in the world, which finally gets us back to the present.

At season’s end, the Raiders unburden themselves from Jeff’s big contract, to bring in Rich Gannon instead, and Jeff’s NFL career is over.

You may think I’m being hyperbolic, as Jeff led the NFL in passing yards just two years ago in 1997, but I promise you I’m not. It’s over. Everybody is fed up with the Jeff George show. It’s obvious to everybody that Jeff is certainly a top half and probably a top ten QB in the NFL in the 1999 offseason, but playing ability does not matter. He’s blackballed.

He was blackballed in 1997 also, but got thrown a lifeline by the NFL’s island of last chances in Oakland. Now even that’s been used up. If you can’t get along in Oakland, there is no place for you. The league has turned its back on Jeff.

It’s not strictly an effort to blackball Jeff because everybody hates him. There are some football reasons behind the lack of interest also. Jeff finds himself in the terrible position of not being a guy teams want to bring in to groom the QB of the future, because would you want your young QB groomed into being Jeff George? He’s not a guy teams want to bring in as a backup, because of that same Jeff George reputation, and now that he’s 32 years old, he’s also too old to be the QB of the future for any team in the NFL.

The fact that he’s a top ten QB in each of his last two full seasons in 1995 and 1997 should overcome this problem of not fitting into any archetype, and be good enough on its own to secure him a place to play, but it isn’t, because everybody hates Jeff George. That’s where the blackball bit comes in.

Looking for a veteran to play in place of rookie Donovan McNabb in 1999, the Eagles elect to bring in Doug Pedersen to start instead. Asked by the Philadelphia press why the answer is Doug Pedersen, and not top ten QB in the NFL Jeff George, Andy Reid says ‘You see what happened with June Jones. We’d rather go with a guy who’s not a problem.’

Man Andy, I too wish all my players were okay with tanking the season. What a problem Jeff George is, not wanting to lose on purpose.

This is a touchy subject on this publication, but Dick Vermeil also has to justify why he chooses to sign Trent Green in the 1999 offseason, instead of top ten NFL QB Jeff George. Dick justifies this by saying Trent is ‘less of a risk’ than Jeff. Right Dick, because giving a big contract to a 29 year old Trent Green with zero career seasons of positive xEPA/Play is so much less risky than established top ten QB, 32 year old Jeff George. We know this Trent Green choice works out extremely well, better for Dick individually than for the Ram franchise, but this explanation makes no sense.

Nor does that of Mike Ditka, head coach of the New Orleans Saints, who justifies not signing Jeff by simply stating ‘what has Jeff George ever done?’ Well Mike, does making the playoffs more recently than you have count for anything?

Dick Juaron (head coach of the Chicago Bears) gives the most ludicrous response of all. He says that his team will leave ‘no stone unturned’ searching for a veteran QB. Asked why this seems to apply only to the small stones, not to the giant boulder that is Jeff George, Dick states that Jeff has ‘never won.’ This is ironic, coming from a team set to start Erik Kramer at QB.

We love Erik Kramer around here, more than you guys even know since I haven’t published the Erik Kramer article yet, but Erik has been the full-time starter on a playoff team a grand total of zero times in his NFL career. Jeff George has been the full-time starter on a playoff team, and in fact has had winning records in the only two seasons of his career he’s had even top twenty scoring defence (9-7 on the 1992 Colts and 1995 Falcons), so out of Erik Kramer and Jeff George, who has won more?

You get the picture. These coaches give their reasons for why they don’t want Jeff George, but all the reasons are nonsense. Jeff George can be a problem in the locker room, but it’s got nothing to do with the June Jones incident, which I deem him to be mostly in the right on. Jeff George is not a bigger risk than Trent Green, and Jeff George is not any less of a winner than Erik Kramer.

Jeff’s agent calls the Seahawks, who (perhaps angered by the vetoed trade in 1996) simply tell him not to call back, and this leaves Jeff dangerously close to being completely out of options. He even resorts to coming out publicly and saying that he will play for free. He’ll take the league minimum of $400K and donate every cent to a local charity. He just wants the chance to be in the NFL.

This is shameful on the part of the league. What people remember the Colin Kaepernick situation for being is what this Jeff George situation actually is. Jeff has ranked top ten in ANY/A on good volume each of the last two seasons he was a full-time starter. Why does he have to beg to work for free? That’s just silly.

Any team in 1999 with an elite defence and a QB problem (namely Baltimore and Philadelphia, but there are others) can reach out and grab Jeff George at any time, but they don’t. They suppose that trading two draft picks for Scott Mitchell (Baltimore) and signing Doug Pedersen (Philadelphia) are better ideas.

This is hogwash. It’s an obvious leaguewide effort to blackball Jeff, for the egregious offence of being entirely unlikeable. Likeability is worth something. Don’t get me wrong, but is it a skill so important that a top ten QB should be driven out of the league for not having it? Of course not. Any team can have Jeff George for $400K in the 1999 offseason, and every single team chooses to look the gift horse in the mouth, passing on the opportunity.

It’s really possible that Jeff’s NFL career is over right here, with the league colluding together to force him out, but a sequence of events we’ve covered before on this publication coalesces into the opportunity Jeff has been waiting for.

Trent Green is all set to resign with the Redskins, but he is wowed beyond belief by his meetings with the St Louis Rams, and ultimately goes there instead. This leaves Washington to trade for Viking backup QB Brad Johnson in a panic. It’s a good trade for Minnesota. They get a first round pick out of the deal, but the downside is that it leaves the team without a backup QB, and only 36 year old Randall Cunningham on the roster.

Everybody knows that Randall came just short of winning MVP last year on the legendary 1998 Vikings team, but with a 36 year old QB starting, you need a strong backup, regardless of how good that 36 year old may be, because you never know when the bottom is going to fall out. The problem is that this all happened as a result of the QB free agency dominoes falling. All the good options are gone, but this is a team that desperately needs a strong backup, who also can’t make much money, because being the great team that they are, Minnesota is running light on cap space.

A strong backup QB, still available at this late stage of free agency, willing to play for almost no money.

Where might the Vikings be able to find a player like that?

Our man has got his toe in the door.

For a while, it’s just a toe in the door, as Jeff does exactly what he’s expected to do, ride the bench while we run back the 1998 team. On offence, we’re almost exactly the same, with monsters at the skill positions, most notably the completely unfair WR trio of Jake Reed, Randy Moss, and Cris Carter, plus a pretty good RB in Robert Smith, in addition to an offensive line still anchored by Hall of Fame G Randall McDaniel, and Pro Bowl C Jeff Christy.

The cap crunch that always comes after a great season takes a bite out of our defence, which last year was a top ten unit but this year is going to finish 22nd in EPA/Play allowed, but the offence should be able to make up for it.

It isn’t.

Over the first six games of the season, things go okay on offence. We generate 0.001 EPA/Play, which is pretty good in a notoriously defensive 1999 season that sees just eight teams generate positive EPA on the year, but compared to last year, where we generated 0.188 EPA/Play over the whole season, this six game start on offence is an absolute disaster, especially looking across the league at Washington, where Brad Johnson is generating 0.37 EPA/Play through six games.

Randall is at only 0.067, which in the putrid offensive environment of 1999 is still a top ten QB, but not good enough to make it not look like a massive mistake that we traded Johnson to keep him, and it’s not just the vanity of making a bad trade in the offseason. The 1999 season is beginning to get away from us.

Our offence is still good, but our defence is miserable. As a result, every single one of our first six games have been one possession games. Partly due to poor one possession game luck, and partly due to notoriously poor late game situation manager Dennis Green, our record is just 2-4 in those six one possession games.

In an NFC Central that contains the big bad defence of the Tony Dungy Buccaneers, and contains Brett Favre’s Packers, and contains the remains of what once was a great 1990s Detroit Lions team, who are still good enough to beat you if you’re not careful, 2-4 is just not good enough.

In addition, Randy Moss (never one to keep quiet about anything) has made clear internally for each of the last two years that, despite the success, he’s never been a fan of Randall Cunningham as his QB. Once everybody got onto the practice field together, Randy made clear that he’s a fan of Jeff George, as did Cris Carter.

After the success of 1998, we could not come out for 1999 starting Jeff George, who was not even supposed to be here. He was supposed to be blackballed from the league. He just could not start week one. The fans would’ve set the Metrodome on fire if that happened, and everybody understood that, but the voices of Randy Moss and Cris Carter are loud enough when they’re apart. When aligned, these two voices become so loud that it’s difficult to ignore their wishes, and after a 2-4 start under Randall, Dennis Green finally gives in.

Even after the immense success in 1998, and being in the top ten on the EPA/Play leaderboard in the first six games of 1999, Randall Cunningham does not even get half a season. Is this fair to Randall’s legacy? No, but this is the NFL. Randy Moss and Cris Carter are not worried about fair. They’re worried about the better QB right now, and since training camp, it’s been clear that the best QB on the Vikings is Jeff George.

We’ve gone down a long and winding road to get here, from Indianapolis to Atlanta to Oakland to almost out of the league to Minnesota, but once you’re on an NFL roster, specifically on a team that’s trying to win, talent will carry the day, and Jeff’s talent has gotten him into this position. Starting QB for the Minnesota Vikings, trying to prevent the total disaster of missing the playoffs altogether after the already disappointing 1998 failure.

Jeff was not part of that 1998 failure, but there’s no doubt he feels the weight of it. If this team loses in the way we did in the 1998 playoffs, and comes out completely dead, missing the playoffs altogether in 1999, there will be hell to pay. With a 2-4 record in the first six games, readying to play three playoff teams from 1998 (San Francisco, Denver, Dallas) in the next three weeks, that’s the direction we’re doing. These next three weeks are massively impactful to the immediate future of the Minnesota Vikings as a franchise. We desperately need somebody to save our season, or we may just have to blow this team up altogether. With how successful we’ve been, that just can’t happen, but how exactly do we plan to stop it?

Welcome to Jeff George’s Year.

The difference is immediate. Right off the bat you can tell this is a different Minnesota team than we’ve been for the first six weeks. Week seven against San Francisco looks like we’re back in 1998 again. After six weeks in a row of one possession football under Randall Cunningham, we go into halftime of this one leading 24-13, and eventually win the football game by a score of 40-16, all the while leaning heavily on Jeff’s 0.383 EPA/Play.

Even a first rate opponent in Jeff Garcia has no chance of keeping up with the Viking onslaught. He tries, but runs into several turnovers pressing too hard, even making our defence look much better than it’s looked to start the year. This is what our offence used to do to people, and it feels very good to take advantage of opponents in this way once again.

Now that we’ve got the offence re-estabilished, this is a good time to take a step back and take stock of where we actually are in this conference. The 1999 NFC is uniquely (by which I literally mean unprecedented) strong at the top. The Rams have a positive 154 point differential through seven weeks, and will finish the season as the only team in the play tracking era to be number one on both offence and defence. They’re 6-0. We’re not catching them.

However, for as wickedly strong as the 1999 NFC is at the top, it makes up for it by being weak in the middle. As of week seven, everybody except the Rams has at least two losses, and there are teams with three losses in provisional playoff spots. Sitting at 3-4, we’re far from being in a good position, not even in the playoff spots at the moment, but we still have a chance at the second seed, and the first round bye that comes with it. That gives us something to shoot for, and as we roll into Denver for week eight, we get a better look at what this team with Jeff at the helm is actually going to look like.

In 1999, there is not the internalised lack of belief in Jeff George that exists in 2025. We go on the road to play the defending Super Bowl champion Denver Broncos as 2.5 point favourites, which gives a good indication of the vibes surrounding this Vikings team now that we’ve made the QB switch.

Against the defending Super Bowl champions, it is not and cannot be the domination we showcased against the 49ers. In fact, we struggle quite badly in this game, limping to just a 32.2 percent success rate on offence, largely because of a rush offence operating at 20.8 percent, that nevertheless gets to touch the ball 23 times.

Just look at our first drive. Leroy Hoard for -3. Leroy Hoard for 3. Randy Moss for an 84 yard TD, called back by penalty, Jeff sacked in the end zone for a safety. If you need an encapsulation of the 1999 Viking offence, that’s it in one drive. That’s similar to how this entire game goes. Just nine minutes in, we’re already down 12-0, and we have to spend the whole first half playing comeback.

The next few drives are very Vikings. More accurately, they’re very Dennis Green. Each feature unjustifiable punts from the unjustifiably conservative coach well inside Denver territory, all of which greatly hinder our comeback efforts. We don’t score our first points until a pick six finally gets us on the board at 7:06 of the second quarter, and if this Vikings team has to rely on our defence to score, we’re going to be in trouble. However, with the bad also comes the good, and our next offensive drive showcases our Vikings can get away with that no other team can.

It’s 5:38 of the second quarter. We start with fairly good field position on our own 37, but spend first down going backwards with a holding penalty on Randall McDaniel. We then go backwards again with a false start on Korey Stringer (RIP). Jeff completes a four yard pass on first and 25, but on second and 21 gets flagged for a 16 yard intentional grounding penalty.

From first and ten on our own 37 to third and 37 from our own ten. For a normal team, that would mean the drive is over, just not for this one. Our give up draw rush goes for 53 yards, converting the third and 37, and the next play is a 37 yard touchdown pass to Cris Carter. It takes just two plays to go from third and 37 to touchdown Vikings, and that’s a perfect example of what this Viking offence can do to people.

We’re not quite as good as we were in 1998, but in terms of strictly explosivity, Jeff provides something that Randall Cunningham never could. This TD (after a failed two point try) sets us up with a 13-12 lead, a dominating position that we never give up. Denver does end up tying this game at the score of 20-20 near the end of the fourth, but they never have the ball with the chance to take the lead, as we run the whole rest of the clock out before kicking a 23 yard FG to win this game 23-20.

Another one possession win, but after the 12-0 Denver start it was all Vikings, and might be the only game I’ve ever seen with two different third and 20+ conversions. The 32 percent success rate indicates that it was not always pretty, but with the explosivity on offence that the Jeff George-Randy Moss-Cris Carter combination provides, it does not have to be pretty. We defeat the defending Super Bowl champions in their stadium, and take a 4-4 into week nine, where we’re set to take on another iconic squad of the 1990s decade.

By 1999, the Cowboy dynasty of the earlier 1990s is long since over with, and at this specific point in time, they’re a team reeling from the spinal fracture of Michael Irvin, which ended his football career just four short weeks ago. They’ve won only one game since then, but this is still not a team to be taken lightly. They have the tenth ranked passing attack, tenth ranked rushing attack, and tenth ranked defence in all of football.

Dallas by 1999 is not a team that’s great at anything, but they’re good enough at everything to beat you with a thousand cuts if you let them stay in the game.

We do worse than that.

This week nine game looks very similar to last week’s game. Despite the Cowboys coming into our stadium as full touchdown underdogs to us, we cannot stop Emmitt Smith. Dallas spends the first 27 minutes of this game building a 17-0 lead on us, as we can’t get anything going. By the 3:25 mark of the second quarter, Jeff has one completed pass. Compare this to two sacks taken and four offensive penalties in the same opening 27 minutes, and you will get the true scope of the extent to which the Cowboys are shutting us down.

True to form though, once we get to the 3:25 mark of the second quarter, the change from the offence that can’t complete a pass back into one of the best offences in football is instant. Jeff completes only three balls (one each to Andrew Jordan, Cris Carter, and Randy Moss) on our drive which narrows the score to 17-7, but that’s because it takes only three, and from here, it’s over.

Our defence does manage to knock Troy Aikman out of the game, which helps, because with Jason Garrett under centre, the Cowboy offence is a non-factor, and does not ever get close to scoring. However, I don’t think this matters. Our offence scores every time we touch the ball in the second half, except once, and even that once is the Dennis Green special (punt from the Dallas 32).

The defence that held Jeff to just one completed pass in the first 27 minutes of the game managed to hold him to just six incomplete passes in the final 33, as this game ends up bein a runaway. We come all the way from 17-0 behind to a relatively easy 27-17 win, and suddenly, after our dreadful 2-4 start, we’ve won three in a row, and are beginning to be viewed as a serious team again.

We were three point favourites on the road in Denver, seven point favourites at home against Dallas, and these are games against real teams that we were rather heavily favoured to win. For week ten, when we go on the road to face what looks like a cupcake in Chicago, we get to go to Soldier Field as seven point road favourites, which for the NFL is extremely wide.

I wonder how Chicago head coach Dick Juaron is feeling right now. He could’ve had Jeff George on his team six months ago. The Chicago media begged for Jeff George on the team. He said no, because Jeff ‘never won,’ and now, he gets to reap what he sowed back in the offseason. Dick has to go at it with Jim Miller as his QB, against our white hot Vikings team on a three game win streak, led by the very same Jeff George who supposedly doesn’t know how to win games.

This game does not start well, with Jeff fumbling away a good chance to score on our first drive, and the Bears stealing from our playbook with a one play touchdown to begin the game with an immediate 7-0 lead. We’ve made obvious in just three games with Jeff at the helm that coming back is nothing to this offence. We do that in our sleep, so it doesn’t feel particularly surprising when we easily score in response to tie the score at seven.

However, Chicago has come to play on their home field, and I’d forgive you for confusing just which of these two teams features two of the best WRs in NFL history, as another 57 yard bomb puts the Bears back in front 14-7. This is shocking. There’s a lot of things the Bears are known for. Fighting back in this way against one of the best offences in the NFL has never been one of them.

All of this offence has happened in just the first 11 minutes by the way. Both teams have well over 100 yards of offence already. That’s a ton of offence even for the 2010s. In the 1990s, this offensive explosion coming out of the gate is rarely ever seen, so thankfully, we have the next 11 minutes to remind us what time period we’re in.

Our response possession is one 25 yard completion to Randy Moss, one three yard rush, four incompletions, and a punt from the Chicago 40 (groan). Chicago responds in kind by making it to, and punting from, our 37. We repay the favour by punting from their side of midfield for the second time in a row, and Jim Miller repays that favour by fumbling on his own seven yard line.

Don’t you love 90s football?

We recover that fumble, and it’s an easy one play pitch and catch to Cris Carter. We’ve eliminated the deficit, tying this game at 14, but the Bears just won’t go away. They hold the ball for the rest of the first half, scoring a FG to send us into the locker room with a deficit for the second week in a row.

I did not expect this. We fell behind early against both Denver and Dallas, but once we got our act together, it was smooth sailing. In this game, we ran onto the field ready to go (except for our head coach’s fourth down decision making), but we cannot manage to pull away from the 1999 Chicago Bears.

That’s the NFL for you. You never know which game will be the one requiring heroics. It’s ironic that we’re here, in Chicago, facing a second half deficit against the coach that said publicly Jeff George has never learned how to win football games. There’s only two ways this can go. Jeff can either prove Dick Juaron right, should we lose this game, or Jeff can prove him wrong, should we win it.

Initially, it goes extremely badly, as on our first drive of the second half, a 68 yard bomb to Cris Carter puts us in prime position to score, with an astounding five tries on the Chicago goal line (due to a defensive holding penalty resetting our downs). We can’t punch it in on any of these tries, and to make matters worse, Jeff fumbles away yet another prime opportunity to score.

That’s the second time in just this game. We’ve blown yet another chance, with Jeff fumbling the ball away in both instances. Thankfully, the Bears do not burn us this time, so we can walk right back down the field and tie the game at 17, but if Jeff wants to prove himself a winner after all, he simply cannot waste any more red zone chances like this.

To his credit, he does not waste any further chances, but to his detriment, that’s because we don’t get into the red zone at all until the seven minute mark of the fourth quarter. We score easily at 5:51, but I must give the Bears their credit. They’re not a very good team, but they’re playing with us today. They score a TD with 1:02 remaining to tie this game at 24, and here we go. This is another chance for Jeff to prove Dick Juaron wrong. All we need is a FG, and we can walk out of an unexpectedly difficult game 6-4.

There’s only 1:02 remaining, but with two timeouts and an offence like ours, it’s just not difficult. One 38 pass to Randy Moss and one 48 yard pass to Randy Moss seal the deal. We’re all the way on the Chicago two yard line. All that needs to happen is Gary Anderson to make a 20 yard field goal.

You know how this movie ends.

What I’ve neglected to tell you this entire time, because it’s not pertinent to Jeff George, is that this is the first NFL game played following the death of iconic Chicago Bear RB Walter Payton (start time moved to noon from one just for this purpose). This fact may explain a lot of the inexplicable fight the Bears have in them in this game, but it definitely explains this FG miss.

As Gary Anderson jogs onto the field, and it seems evident their Bears are about to lose, the Chicago crowd begins chanting ‘Walter! Walter! Walter!’ both in appreciation of the franchise legend lost too soon, and in appreciation of the fight that a bad 1999 Chicago team has shown today trying to honour his memory. It’s an amazing scene, so when Gary Anderson pulls this ball all the way from the right hash to miss a 20 yard FG left of the uprights, which is almost impossible even if you try to do it, it’s difficult not to think Walter Payton, wherever he is, had a distinct impact on this.

Chicago fans rejoice. They rejoice further when Jeff throws an INT on the very first play of the ensuing OT period. It’s a mob scene in Soldier Field. The Chicago faithful are going absolutely berserk. It’s louder than any November regular season game has any right to be, because this is no typical November regular season game.

This is great for the fans in Chicago, but the man who gets lost in all the fracas is Jeff George.

Jeff won this game already. He’s won it twice now. He won it when he scored a TD to take the lead with six minutes to go against a typically poor Chicago offence, and then he won it again when he got down the field in just 40 seconds to give Gary Anderson a 20 yard chip shot. It’s not Jeff’s fault our defence is so poor. It’s not his fault Gary Anderson missed the big FG, but of all these happenings, do you think any of them are going to cover up this OT INT?

Of course not. This is Jeff George. He’s a prickly guy. A basketball player in his mind, with all the arrogance that comes with that mentality. People dislike him, so anything bad that happens will find a way to blow back onto him. This is the furthest thing from Jeff’s fault, but it will play into his reputation of not knowing how to close games. Yes, he did throw an INT on the first play of OT, and it is his third turnover of the day, but give the man a break.

Nobody will give Jeff George a break, and parts of me wonder if Walter Payton in the sky takes note of all this, and believes he’s gone too hard on our guy. As Chris Boniol misses his game winning FG for the Bears by inches, which gives our offence another chance to win. We do not need a third one. We go down the field mostly on one 21 yard pass interference penalty. It’s not the perfect offensive drive, but it’s enough to get in range for a 38 yard FG, and a 27-24 win.

Not bad for a ‘draft bust’ who ‘doesn’t know how to win games.’ I know it’s the 5.42 Expected Win 1999 Chicago Bears we’re talking about here, but motivated football teams are tough to beat, no matter their talent level. These Bears fought us to the bitter end, trying to give their fans something to celebrate after the bad Walter Payton news, and it took everything we had to leave them with nothing to celebrate. This is a spot a lot of QBs would’ve failed, but Jeff George did not fail.

Despite two back breaking lost fumbles inside the ten yard line, plus an INT on his own side of the field in OT, Jeff still found a way to generate 0.235 EPA/Play in this game, so imagine how good he must’ve been the rest of the time. In the end, a team with Jim Miller at QB just couldn’t keep up with that level of offensive production. Further lost in the shuffle is the only 200 yard game of Randy Moss’s career, which also happened today, largely due to his 21 pass targets.

This will also become part of the larger narrative of the 1999 Vikings’ season. Jeff knows where his bread is buttered. He knows which two voices put him into the starting position, and he’s intent to feed those two guys over and over and over again. In this Chicago game, of 44 pass attempts, 33 of them went towards either Moss or Carter. That’s 75%, and it’s not atypical of what we’ll see the rest of the season.

This is an extreme concentration of a pass offence into just two guys, but under Jeff George, these Vikings believe that our guys are better than any defence’s guys, and they will beat you. You can’t double team both of them. Most offences are afraid to play this way, but we are not.

This is not only sound football strategy, but sound locker room strategy. As we all know, Randy Moss when he doesn’t lead a team in targets is prone to throwing temper tantrums. He will do everything in his power to tear a team apart, because to him, it’s all about getting the ball more. That’s what he believes to be the best way for his teams to win. Sometimes that’s correct. Sometimes that’s incorrect, but in Randy’s mind, it’s true in 100% of cases.

We’ve seen it already. Even with all the 1998 success, Randy angled for the team to get rid of Randall Cunningham, which is the main reason Jeff is here to begin with. It will be the impetus behind his demanding of trades out of Minnesota, and Oakland, and New England in the future. We know Randy’s pattern. However, with Jeff George in the fray, Randy takes a clear (albeit not very distant) second place in the passing offence to Cris Carter in terms of targets, and we don’t hear a peep out of him.

This is the only time in Randy’s prime that he fails to be a team’s number one receiver, and also fails to throw a temper tantrum about it. Maybe it’s just the case that Randy has more respect for Cris than any of his other partners, so doesn’t mind taking a mild second place behind a certain Hall of Famer, or, maybe Jeff George is better at marshalling a locker room than we thought he was. A third option is that Jeff is perhaps just compatible with a player like Randy Moss, a very important man to be compatible with, because Jeff is wired more like a WR than a QB anyway.

Whatever the case, these 1999 Vikings manage to do the impossible, and get Randy Moss to be okay with a number two receiver role. No other team (not even the 1998 Vikings) ever manages to do that. I have a hard time believing the unique man (in more ways than one) at the QB position has nothing to do with it. Tom Brady never could get Randy to not be a problem in a number two role. Daunte Culpepper couldn’t do it. Nor could Randall Cunningham, but Jeff George can, and does, throughout the second half of the 1999 season.

Some may wonder why anybody would ever even want to subjugate Randy to a number two role in the first place. The simple answer is that Jeff gets more out of Cris Carter than any QB ever has, so in 1999, the Vikings have a receiver better than Randy Moss on the roster, and intend to use him as such.

This Chicago game also brings us to our bye week, during which a lot of reflection is done on the football career of Jeff George. He had to take league minimum to be in this position. He’s already assured himself that he will not be playing for league minimum again in 2000, but it’s amazing the about-face the football world has done in just a few weeks.

Whereas the earlier sentiment around Jeff was that he was a malcontent who didn’t know how to win, now people say that he’s a player who doesn’t like to lose, constantly put into bad situations. In good situations, he can win. On an unrelated TV broadcast during our bye week, Boomer Esiason brings up the same stat I did earlier, about how Jeff has had two top 20 defences in his career, and two 9-7 records to go with them. Nobody is claiming Jeff George to be as good as Kurt Warner or Peyton Manning, but that’s winning football.

We continue winning coming out of the bye, as week 12 is one of the fakest shootouts in NFL history, with San Diego QB Jim Harbaugh throwing for 400+ yards, but negative EPA, and Jeff almost getting to 400, but stopping at just 0.117 EPA/Play. Nevertheless, 0.117 is a lot more than negative, as we almost blow a 28-7 lead, but hold onto a 35-28 win, our fifth in a row, to move our record to 7-4.

Don’t look now, but that NFC second seed we were shooting for has become ours to command. With five games to go, we now control our destiny to a first round bye in the NFC. However, our grip is tenuous. It’s a three-way fight within our own NFC Central division, with ourselves, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the Detroit Lions all standing strong at 7-4.

That’s what makes week 13 so important.

For week 13, we go on the road, on Monday Night Football, to play our divisional rivals, with the inside track to the NFC’s number two seed on the line. We beat Tampa earlier in the year under the Randall Cunningham administration, the only truly positive offensive performance we had in 1999 with Randall, so if we manage to beat them tonight, we’ll be able to effectively seal them out of contention for a bye in the conference.

Additionally, a Trent Dilfer injury forces Tampa into playing this game with rookie QB Shaun King, in his first career start. It’s difficult for any QB to play significantly worse than Dilfer post-1997, but Shaun is still a rookie getting his very first NFL snaps. This should tip the scales in our favour, and it does with the bettors, as we walk into Tampa as three point road favourites.

However, in this game, we also have to contend with the voracious Tony Dungy Tampa Bay defence, who seek to answer the question: What happens if a team does double team both Cris Carter and Randy Moss?

This leaves an opposing defence thin everywhere, which is why most opponents don’t dare try it, but Tony Dungy is a defensive mastermind. The bad thing about Jeff (a flaw common in most first overall picks) is that he believes enough in his talent that he’s going to force the ball to Cris Carter, whether he’s double teamed or not.

Yet more evidence of what I was talking about earlier is that Jeff does not work to force the ball to Randy Moss. Just Cris Carter, but the 14 targets thrown to an often doubled and sometimes tripled up Carter are simply disastrous. They hold our offence back all night long.

In all, we should win this game. Our offence is crazily productive doing everything other than throwing the ball to Moss and Carter. Jeff goes 18 for 24 throwing to every other target, and our rush offence is successful 47.8% of the time against the vaunted Tampa defensive front. However, the fable that offences with elite receivers often fall into (and especially this one) is that we have to use those elite players all the time. This is not true, but teams (especially this one) often act like it is.

The final drive is a solid example of how this entire game goes. We start it behind by seven, but with three and a half minutes left, so there’s plenty of time to do whatever we want. It goes as follows:

17 yard completion to Robert Smith; eight yard rush by Robert Smith, incompletion to Carter, one yard rush, false start by Randy Moss, 14 yard completion on fourth and six to Jake Reed. Then comes two incompletions and a false start before the third and 15 throw is converted to Leroy Hoard. This gets us all the way to the Tampa 25 with a chance to tie, but we stall here, as Moss and Carter are so locked up that Jeff’s fourth and 19 pass on the final play of the game goes to Matthew Hatchette, a man who finishes his career with 60 receptions at the NFL level, and not either of the two Hall of Famers. This is the kind of thing a Tony Dungy defence makes you do.

At the end of the night, our win streak comes crashing down hard. We’ve been beaten by the masters, losing 24-17 to a Tampa team weathering Shaun King’s very first NFL start at QB. We score 21 first downs to their 13. We put up 339 yards to their 190. We generate more EPA/Play than they do. The works. They did nothing to prove they’re a better team than we are. Jeff got caught with two crucial turnovers trying to force the ball to his two top guys (one hopeless throw each targeting Carter and Moss), and that kind of thing loses football games.

The QB is ultimately the one who chooses where the ball goes, so this is Jeff’s fault, but do keep in mind that this a minimum salary QB, throwing to two of the best five WRs in the NFL. Jeff was supposed to be blackballed from the league before this season began. These guys made him the starting QB. They can easily unmake him, and plus, this is the Tampa Bay defence under Tony Dungy. League MVP Kurt Warner plays against this same defence later in the 1999 season, and stinks the joint out, playing to a -0.104 EPA/Play that day, easily the worst offensive performance the Greatest Show on Turf ever had.

Jeff was well below his best today, but how can you not be against this defensive unit, and he still managed positive 0.029. That’s much better than Kurt Warner could do against this same defence. Is it a good game? No, but is it the reason we lost? I don’t think so. If we would’ve thrown to the lesser receivers more, we would’ve won the game, but for Jeff, it’s about more than winning the game. It’s also about preserving his NFL career, and he knows where his bread is buttered in Minnesota. We have to give him a break.

Jeff’s worst performance in His Year actually comes the week after we face the vaunted Tampa Bay defensive unit, although it’s not all that much easier. In week 14, we go on the road in primetime to face a top five defence for the second game in a row, and it all adds up. This time, we’re on Sunday Night Football in Arrowhead Stadium against the KC Chiefs.

Jeff struggles badly.

Due to an injury suffered in the first quarter, there is no Cris Carter in this one, and it’s visually obvious he’s not playing. Jeff completes two passes as we fall behind 21-0 in the first 27 minutes. We do try our ‘terrible offence turns unstoppable’ act again, as the game is tied 21-21 by 4:34 of the third quarter. This looks good, but our remaining offensive drives are a punt from the KC 43, a defensive touchdown against us, a Randy Moss fumble on the KC seven yard line, and that’s all the chances we get.

Even in our bad games, and even without our top receiver, we have no trouble moving the football when we’re going right, but for such an elite offence, we go completely silent shockingly often. Much more often than you would think. This was the case to a degree with the 1998 team too, but it is pronounced this year. It’s like there’s two completely different teams out there. We will go almost half a football game unable to move an inch on offence, and then we will be unstoppable for the last 33 minutes. It happened against Denver, and Dallas, and now Kansas City.

Most of the time, our offence is so elite that we can make these comebacks, but facing a team like the 1999 Chiefs, they got out just far enough ahead of us that we couldn’t catch them. We made up 12-0 and 17-0 deficits this way, and we even managed to tie this game at 21-21, but in the end, 21-0 was just too much of a gap to make up in 33 minutes.

This is not a formula for winning football games. Before you know it, we’ve now lost two games in a row. The good thing about the fight for the final first round bye being three teams all in the same division is that we got the chance to control our own destiny to it with a head to head matchup against Tampa. The bad thing about it is that our division is so strong that two losses in a row have almost dropped us out of the playoffs altogether.

If the playoffs began today, we would be in, but we’ve gone from the inside track to a first round bye to clinging to a tie for the final wild card position. In 1999, there are three divisions and three wild card teams. The first wild card position is occupied by 8-5 Detroit. That leaves us at 7-6, to fight for the final two with the 7-6 Cowboys, Packers, and Giants.

The Giants are a 6.41 Expected Win team, and won’t win again this season. They’re not to be worried about. We have a head to head tie break over Dallas, but in any tie more than two ways, head to head wins are useless, and we can’t beat them in any other tie break, because we have two AFC wins (useless in tie breaking scenarios) to their one.

We can beat the Packers in a tie break right now, putting us provisionally in the final wild card spot, but they beat us in one of Randall Cunningham’s one possession games. We have another game coming up against them. If we lose it, we almost certainly will not make the playoffs.

In week 15, this all comes to a head. We’re in primetime for the third week in a row, finally home in the comfy Metrodome, hosting the Green Bay Packers.

This is not the 90s Packers team you remember. Reggie White is not there anymore. The Super Bowl winning defence is much declined and won’t improve again for a while. The offence is much weaker than it once was also. Antonio Freeman by 1999 is not what he once was, although still a very good receiver, and Brett Favre only ranks 14th in EPA/Play right now.

Nevertheless, this is still the Packers. They’ve won more football games in the last five years than any other team, and have two Super Bowl appearances to go along with it. We’d be foolish to take them lightly, especially since our offensive momentum from the QB switch has been stopped in its tracks, to say the least, by a combination of the Cris Carter injury and top five defences in Tampa and Kansas City.

There is no top five defence coming to the Metrodome, but still no Carter, and there is all the pressure in the world coming with the Packers. If we lose this game, the likelihood of us making the playoffs becomes extremely slim. It’s also guaranteed Green Bay are going to be playing their very best, because they’re in the exact same situation. However, if we win this game, we pull one game ahead of both Green Bay and Dallas (who lost their game earlier), with two weeks to go, meaning we almost certainly will be making the playoffs.

Jeff has made the playoffs before, but he has never played a game like this before. The game the 1995 Falcons won as ten point underdogs against San Francisco to secure their playoff spot is legendary, but Jeff got injured early in that game, and his backup QB (Bobby Hebert) won it. It wasn’t Jeff’s glory that day, but if we plan to participate in the 1999 playoffs, it can only be his glory this day.

This game does not open that way. It’s more akin to football follies than any kind of glorious victory, as on the heels of a Brett Favre turnover, we begin at the GB 31, but Jeff gets sacked for an appalling 29 yard loss to scuttle this promising chance before it begins.

It becomes a familiar story. The first quarter features just three completed passes, one of them a seven yard checkdown on third and 50 after the aforementioned 29 yard sack. The unfamiliar part is that our defence holds, and we manage to close the first still tied at zero, but it’s clear as day that without our top receiver, this offence has serious issues.

We do find a FG to open the scoring at 3-0 at the beginning of the second quarter, but it comes on one deep shot instead of any kind of sustained offence. Jeff does not touch the ball again until we’re down 10-3 due to a special teams blunder. On that next touch, it’s again one deep shot rather than any kind of sustained offence, but that shot is a 57 yard TD pass to Randy Moss to tie the game at ten.

The Packers hold the ball for the rest of the first half, and finish it with a FG to force us into the locker room facing a 13-10 deficit.

There is a reason that no offence with Randy Moss as the undisputed number one ever worked very well. That reason is this. You will get the deep shot every now and then to keep up, but sustained offence is very difficult, unless you have another guy alongside him like Cris Carter to pick up the more mundane catches that Randy is not especially good at.

We’re struggling with that right now, partly because of the nature of our WR group, and partly because Jeff has played this way his entire career. High productivity on a somewhat low success rate has always been his game, and it’s that to the extreme in Minnesota. Nevertheless, we need to find a way to generate more sustained offence in the second half, or we are not going to win.

On our first drive coming out of the locker room, we fail miserably, going incompletion, incompletion, and then a checkdown on third and 15 after a false start penalty. There are no first downs on our second try either, which now takes us 39 minutes into a vitally important game, with only eight passes completed.

This simply happens too often. Even in a His Year article, I won’t sugar coat that, but what I will do is commend Jeff for never getting down on himself, and always finding a way to come back from these putrid starts to games. Our next drive is not easy. Jake Reed is no Cris Carter. It features three third down conversions, which is not a compliment, but it’s exactly the kind of sustained offence I’ve been looking for. It ends with a one yard TD pass to Randy Moss, and a 17-13 lead.

Green Bay immediately takes the lead back, 20-17, and suddenly, just like he’s been doing all year, the man who could not find a receiver for the life of him in the first 39 minutes of this game now finds it impossible to hit the ground. Jeff rockets us down the field. No third down conversions required this time, and we go up 24-20 with eight minutes remaining.

There are lots of things lots of people can say about Jeff George, but what nobody can say is that he wilts when the pressure gets high. In fact, I would say the opposite. If he would stop digging himself such deep holes early in all these games, he wouldn’t have to be so perfect at the end just to win, but nevertheless, he is perfect at the end, and we do win.

Some classic Dennis Green mismanagement gives the Packers two chances to beat us, without giving Jeff (now white hot) the chance to ice the game, but this time, our defence holds. We have taken this crucially important matchup 24-20, and especially with both Dallas and New York losing this week, our playoff spot has gone from precarious to virtually assured, all in the space of one game.

What a game it was. This is something of a backhanded compliment, but it was a very Jeff George performance. I don’t know what may have happened if the Packers ran up a double digit gap on us like several other teams have done, but the fact is they didn’t,. Jeff came back from his rocky start to blow by the Packers and win the football game, just like he’s been doing all season.

0.401 EPA/Play makes this one of the best games Jeff’s Year, particularly because even two of the passes in the early game struggle period were for 26 yards to Jake Reed and 57 yards to Randy Moss, and he did it in a big pressure spot, on Monday Night Football, without his number one target. If Jeff George were the draft bust and the failure at the NFL level who never figured out how to win, like everybody says he is, how do you explain a performance like this?

I don’t think you can. I don’t think Jeff is any of those things.

He is inconsistent. I will grant you that, as he struggles mightily against the New York Giants despite getting Cris Carter back for week 16, but we nevertheless beat them easily. This win makes our week 17 game against Detroit functionally meaningless, as both teams are assured of playoff positions regardless of the game’s outcome, although we do win it, which means (in an era before four divisions) we get a home playoff game as the top seeded wild card team.

I told you when Jeff came into the starting position all the way back in week seven that we needed somebody to save our season. Beginning at 2-4 under Randall Cunningham, I would say 10-6 and a home playoff game is a season saved. All of a sudden, after all the talk about Jeff in the 1999 offseason, it is now clear that a big contract is coming his way in the 2000 offseason.

That fact makes these 1999 playoffs bittersweet before they even begin, because the Vikings simply cannot afford Jeff moving forward. The team drafted Daunte Culpepper 11th overall in the 1999 draft, and to sign Jeff for big money plus have Daunte on the roster for an extended period simply would not fit. It worked with Young and Montana, but we’re in a salary cap era now. Jeff just can’t stay.

Despite his 0.177 EPA/Play and 7.03 ANY/A both ranking him third in the NFL in 1999, and both his big time WRs campaigning publicly for him to stay, there just is no realistic chance of Jeff being a Viking beyond 1999. For how good of a coach and even roster builder Dennis Green is in a football sense, he is horrendous as a salary cap manager, and this means that the 1999 playoffs are a now or never scenario for Jeff.

He’s only 32. He’s got plenty of time left, but it’s impossible for him not to think that he likely won’t get a chance this good again. He needs to convert on his good play now, otherwise he may never get the chance to win the Super Bowl again, and may never be able to kick that ‘Jeff George can’t win’ reputation.

This all moves us into the wild card round, where we get a rematch with the same Cowboy squad we beat back in week nine on Monday Night Football.

I would love to do more justice to the first playoff win of Jeff’s career, but there is not a lot to say about this game. True to form, Jeff completes zero passes in the first quarter as we build a quick deficit, but once he gets past the early game struggles, we beat up the Cowboys in the playoffs just like we beat them up back in November.

We come into this game as hefty (for the playoffs) seven point favourites, and we walk out as 27-10 winners. Jeff individually generates 0.213 EPA/Play, which in an era where offences used to generally get worse in the playoffs, instead of better like they do in 2025, is nothing to scoff at. Once again, I would love to dwell on this game more, but it’s just domination.

The 90s Cowboys were on life support even before this game, but they still had a top ten defence, a top ten rushing attack, and a top ten QB in Troy Aikman. Our offence just blanked all of it. Made it all meaningless, and in a way that’s the biggest compliment I can give Jeff George. When you make Troy Aikman in a playoff game an object simply swept aside in your story, you’re doing something very very right. The Cowboys’ mystique was broken in 1998, but they’re dead altogether after 1999, and the reason for that is a Minnesota offence led at QB by Jeff George.

That is a fact about NFL history that I refuse to get over. The 90s Cowboys were put in the ground by Jeff George.

Titans fall quickly in this game, and that bout of non-excitement moves us on to round two, where we have to take on a team the likes of which the NFL has never seen before. The 1999 St Louis Rams.

The Rams have been the spectre lurking in the background of the mediocre 1999 NFC throughout this entire piece. Everything that every team has been doing has been geared around avoiding the St Louis Rams for as long as possible, and the team that drew the short straw of meeting this behemoth in the second round is our poor old Minnesota Vikings.

Even the word ‘behemoth’ might perhaps be too small to describe the challenge Jeff and his Vikings are facing here. These 1999 Rams have a serious argument for being the best team in NFL history. They played three one possession games all year, and lost all three, which makes their record a pedestrian (among GOAT candidates) 13-3, but this is the only team in the play tracking era to be number one in both offence and defence, and these three one possession games are less than a team like the 2007 Patriots, who played four of them.

These Rams have not just been winning in 1999. They’ve been mauling their competition, in ways the NFL has very rarely (or perhaps never) seen before. In my opinion, the debate for the best team in football history has only three real candidates. It’s the 1991 Redskins, 1999 Rams, or 2007 Patriots, and what horrible luck Jeff has (just like Philip Rivers in 2007) to have the best chance he will ever have in his career to win a championship run into one of these three.

The difference between the Rams and all other teams is demonstrated in the spread for this game. It’s seven points against us. We have not been an underdog at all in any game all season. The Minnesota Vikings have not been favoured to lose any game since October 5, 1998. It is currently the year 2000. We are the real deal, and then some, and this St Louis team is still favoured to mop the floor with us. That’s the team Jeff has to try to go on the road and defeat.

To our credit, this is the only home game post-SF in week four (the game where everybody figured out what the 1999 Rams truly are) featuring a spread in the Rams’ favour narrow enough to be outside of the negative double digits. Negative seven is wide, but it’s still a prediction of a one possession game, which no other team has been able to say about these 1999 Rams.

The public in the 1999 season believes in our Jeff George quarterbacked team at least enough to believe that we’re going to be the most substantial challenge that the Rams will face all season long, and in the first half of this game, we make good on that promise.

There is no early game struggle. In this second round playoff game against perhaps the best team in league history, with the league’s number one defence opposing him, Jeff George throws only one incompletion, getting the game started well with a FG and a 3-0 lead. The next drive features only one incompletion also. Unfortunately, it comes on third and eight, so we punt the ball, and since we’re playing the Rams, it takes just two incomplete passes to get ourselves behind 14-3.

It’s brutal to have to say this, but after a first quarter featuring just two incomplete passes, it takes a stroke of luck to get us back in this game. Thankfully, and uncharacteristically for both the Vikings and for Jeff George, we find that luck, as Kurt Warner throws an INT on our four yard line to give us some life, and Jeff does not let that life go to waste.

24 yard pass to Randy Moss. 41 yard pass to Jake Reed. 22 yard pass to Cris Carter. Touchdown Vikings. We are not going away easily. Jeff does throw an INT on our next series, but the Rams don’t make us pay, and after a 31 yard pass to Randy Moss, it’s now 17-14 Vikings as both teams go into the locker room.

Don’t look now, but this is only the second time the Rams have had to deal with a halftime deficit all season. Jeff is not just matching Kurt Warner. He is outplaying Kurt Warner, to the tune of 0.353 EPA/Play in the first half, dropping bombs over the heads of unsuspecting St Louis defenders to Moss and Reed and Carter.

I don’t mean to be overdramatic, but the 1999 Rams are a team the likes of which a playoff win over will change the perception of a player’s entire career. Steve McNair built a reputation for himself as a playoff winner in large part due to just getting somewhat close to beating this team.

We’re not somewhat close to beating them. We are beating them. A team with Jeff George at QB is in the midst of defeating one of the best teams in the history of the league. We can argue about whether or not they’re number one, but if you have the 1999 Rams any lower than third place in the post-merger era, I think you’re crazy, and we are actually beating them.

If we manage to pull this win off, regardless of whether we win the Super Bowl or not, I may have to take back everything I said before. This will not be a one-shot deal with Jeff in Minneapolis. Dennis Green will find a way for the team to afford him, because the fans will burn the stadium down if he doesn’t. It’s the kind of win that means more than a Super Bowl championship. It is much easier to win a Super Bowl championship than to defeat the 1999 St Louis Rams, and we’re about to do it. Jeff George, of all people, is about to do it.

Until our dreaded inconsistency hits us one final time, in the worst possible way.

We’ve managed to avoid letting these extended dry stretches significantly hurt us through the year, but one shows up at the worst possible time, and ends our 1999 season. In the 22 minutes from the beginning of the second half to the 8:13 mark of the fourth quarter, Jeff only manages to complete two passes, both for negative yardage. In just 22 minutes of failing to produce on offence against the Rams, our 17-14 lead has become a 49-17 deficit, and it’s over.

Just like that.

Like we’ve been doing all season, once we get the offence back rolling, it snowballs in a big way. We score 20 points in eight minutes to narrow the score to an eventual 49-37 loss, but this is not Dallas. This is not Green Bay. Against an all-time great team like these St Louis Rams, you cannot afford to complete one pass in the third quarter, and just two passes in a 22 minute stretch.

Jeff George played fantastically in this game. I would like to reiterate that before I say anything else. Most players and even some Hall of Famers will go a whole career without generating 0.279 EPA/Play against the number one defence in football in a playoff scenario. In the 38 minutes of football surrounding the 22 minute dark patch, Jeff matched and probably even outplayed Kurt Warner. He played better than a man with Jeff George’s reputation had any right to play, but moments win games, and in the unholy 22 minutes, the Rams outscored us 35-0.

Even if in the other 38 minutes of the game we outscored them 37-14, you just cannot come back from a stretch like that.

Part of me does not pity for Jeff George, because his dry spells are ultimately his own fault, but on the other hand, 37 points scored against the best defence in football should be enough to get it done. The two best individual QB performances of the 1999 NFC playoffs come on both sides of this same game. It’s just the luck of the draw sometimes that the second best performance of the entire playoff bracket happens to find the best one, and loses to it. Think of Mahomes vs Allen in 2021 as I say that.

Is Jeff George comparable to either Patrick Mahomes or Josh Allen? No. Of course not, but after being inserted into the starting lineup for a struggling Randall Cunningham, did he play like them for a 12 game stretch in 1999?

He did.

Once again, 0.177 EPA/Play ranks third in the NFL in 1999. Jeff George was not just a solid producer. In 1999, he was the leader of the NFL’s third best offence in the span bridging weeks 7-17, worse only than the league’s best two teams in St Louis and Jacksonville, and marginally better in this span than the team quarterbacked by the sophomore breakout of Peyton Manning.

Did the big two WRs help out Jeff’s production numbers? Of course they did, but there are three points I would like to bring up to those who would raise that argument. First, Cris and Randy were together in their primes for three seasons in Minnesota, under three QBs (Cunningham in 1998, George in 1999, Culpepper in 2000), and each had their best individual season in 1999.

Carter in particular thrived better under Jeff George than under any of the other QBs he had in his Hall of Fame career. He does not even get close to matching his 1999 production (in a per target sense) at any other point in his career, including both 1998 and 2000. Randy Moss does go on to have a season even better than this one in 2007, but between 1998-2006, Randy had three different top five QBs, and his best numbers came with Jeff George at the helm.

This indicates to me that yes, these guys were helping Jeff’s production, but he was also helping theirs. Jeff got more out of Hall of Famer Cris Carter than anybody could, and Jeff got more out of Randy Moss than any season except one time with Tom Brady. Not multiple times. One time.

In addition to this first argument comes the second argument, which is that somehow, an environment was created in 1999 such that Jeff could get the very most out of Cris Carter, without Randy Moss demanding a trade in response. I sincerely doubt many QBs could’ve threaded this needle. Even Tom Brady, the master locker room manipulator that he is, could not figure a way to pivot more towards Wes Welker while keeping Randy Moss on the roster, but Jeff George found a way to pacify Randy in a number two role.

Yes, the 1999 Vikings did have two top five WRs on their roster, but a big part of this was the freedom to use Cris Carter to his fullest potential, which is almost impossible with Randy Moss on the field, because Randy wants the ball all the time. With most other QBs, this team would’ve had one top five receiver, because Carter would’ve been marginalised, just like he was in 1998.

Third and finally, what truly puts a dent in the idea that Jeff produced in such a big way only because of Minnesota’s WR group is the 2000 season, where like I said, Minnesota cannot afford Jeff. He signs a solid contract with Washington, and in the 2000 season ranks eighth in EPA/Play for Washington, with no Moss, no Carter, and no top 40 NFL receiver at all. He steals Brad Johnson’s starting job there just like he stole Randall Cunningham’s starting job here. Unfortunately, the Redskins elect to install a West Coast scheme (completely incompatible with Jeff’s style) for 2001, so he has to leave the Skins (who take over a decade to find another QB as good as Jeff George), and for some reason, can never find a job again.

This is why I used the term ‘blackball’ before. It’s even more egregious in 2001. At least in the 1999 offseason Jeff was coming off an injury, and had a highly publicised quitting on the team incident, although it was more a bad choice of words than anything. In 2001, there’s none of that.

Teams have a whole season to sign the man who ranked third in EPA/Play in 1999 and eighth in 2000 (fifth in the two year span), and simply elect not to do so. Once again, what people think the Colin Kaepernick situation was is what the Jeff George situation actually was. Fifth in EPA/Play over the 2023-2024 span is Tua Tagovailoa. Imagine if Tua got cut tomorrow, somehow made it through the entire 2025 regular season without being signed, and never got signed anywhere, ever again.

That’s basically the situation Jeff George found himself in in 2001. The NFL wanted no part of this guy, despite the complicating factor that he clearly remained a top ten QB in football at least as late as 2000. Does Jeff have consistency problems? Yes. Does he have a career losing record? Yes. Does he have ‘Trent Green disease’ of attracting bad defence wherever he goes? Yes, but as of at least the end of 2000, Jeff George is a top ten QB in football. That should’ve been enough to get him signed.

Now, the NFL is happy to perpetuate the narrative that Jeff George stunk, that he was a draft bust that never did anything anywhere, despite clear evidence to the contrary, because if you’re fooled into believing Jeff was actually a bad player, it covers up the obvious injustice that happened here.

Among number one picks, Jeff George is on the poorer end, but he’s by no means the worst, and in a career sense, he was better than the NFL’s median QB in the 1990-2000 span, and only got better as the years went along.

It felt like in 1999 he was at last getting the hang of it. He was being boring with the media. He had the team’s leaders on his side. He was finally starting to play the off-field games that need to be played. He was so good that Randy Moss and Cris Carter both publicly asked for him to stay, and I wonder if things would’ve worked out differently had he been able to stay in Minnesota.

Jeff generated 0.167 EPA/Play in Washington in 2000. It’s hard to envision it getting worse when you put him on a team with Moss and Carter, so in all likelihood, if he stays, he ends up in the 2001 offseason as a man who’s ranked top five in EPA/Play and likely won playoff games two seasons in a row, and can the league blackball him then?

It’s tough to say. It is the NFL’s ball after all. They can take it and go home if they’d like. They don’t have to let anyone play, but it would look every obviously personal if they were to boot Jeff out after a two season stretch like that. The NFL tends to want to avoid such a look whenever possible, so I believe Jeff would’ve landed somewhere in 2001, maybe back in Minnesota or maybe not, but he could’ve still been playing in the league his talent demanded he be playing in.

Instead, Jeff got an obvious lowball in the 2000 offseason, making clear the Vikings wanted him gone even after everything he’d done for the team in his 12 games there. He was forced to sign in Washington, and when they brought in Marty Schottenheimer, Jeff’s career ended. No period of decline. No victory lap. Jeff generated 0.167 EPA/Play in 2000, and was apparently not NFL material by 2001.

The NFL tries to bury this behind the narrative that Jeff’s NFL career was a total failure. They want you to forget everything Jeff ever did on an NFL football field, but I’ll never forget, and we’ll never forget.

Never forget Jeff George’s Year.

Thanks so much for reading.