Last week, I was updating my notes based on Minnesota United FC’s off-season roster changes, including listing out the team by position to make sure I hadn’t missed anyone. And it was only then that I realized - and it was a genuine shock - something that hasn’t been true for years:

You know, the Loons might not play a 4-2-3-1 this year.

Former manager Adrian Heath liked to keep things pretty much steady, formation-wise, from year to year; he’d occasionally try other things, especially on the road, but I can only find a few examples from the past few years. We knew what we were going to see from his teams, to the point that if they even changed up something minor like their build-out, or their pressing shape, it felt unsettling to watch.

Now, of course, we’re into the - well, not the new era, but the in-between limbo between the eras, as interim manager Cameron Knowles takes charge, and we wait for Khaled El-Ahmad to figure out the team’s new direction. We don’t actually know for sure what the team is going to change on the field; on opening day, they may well line up in the exact same formation as they always have. But I do think it’s worth speculating on what else might change about MNUFC, beyond the lineup on the field.

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The NHL All-Star Break is not the season’s halfway point, of course. The Minnesota Wild have played 49 games and have 33 remaining. However, even though we’re long past halfway in this season, one thing seems pretty clear: this team stinks. It’s going nowhere.

You don’t have to dive deep into the numbers to see that. The standings show that the Wild are 21-28 this year, with five losing bonus points; just 16 of those wins are regulation wins. Remove the overtime and shootout circuses, and they’ve won fewer than one out of three games they’ve played this year.

That said, it’s worth a look at some of the underlying numbers to see why this team - which is much the same, personnel-wise, as the playoff teams of years prior - has fallen so far down the standings.

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Joe Mauer is a first-ballot Hall of Famer!

I admit that, when it was announced on TV, such was my excitement that I stood up almost involuntarily, like someone had hit a deep fly ball to left-center. I’d been tracking the public ballots for weeks, like a lot of Twins fans, but I was very nervous for the announcement; the type of Hall of Fame voters who don’t want to reveal their ballots were also, probably, the type to look down their noses at Mauer’s candidacy.

His value was obvious, but the pitfalls of his Hall of Fame candidacy were also obvious - the concussion that cut short his catching career, his five unremarkable years as a first baseman, career numbers that were light if you compared him to anyone but other catchers. And so, like almost everyone prior to this year’s process, I expected him to have to serve a sentence in purgatory - two or three or four years, atoning for the sin of getting a brain injury, before finally joining the Hall.

Like almost all Minnesotans, I was - and am - a huge Mauer fan, a fandom that was shot through with protectiveness as Mauer’s career proceeded. After the brain injury, I was ready to argue on Mauer’s behalf at any moment; after his final game, one of my overriding feelings was a huge feeling of relief.

So let’s start with that caveat, that I’m thrilled for Mauer, and desperately wanted him to get the call. But I also think it’s interesting to look back and try to figure out why there seemed to be so many people that were, somehow, anti-Joe.

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Here are three Minnesota sports stories that seem totally absurd.

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One of the best features of the weekly paper in my hometown, the Ortonville Independent, was a trawl through the paper’s archives. Each week, we’d get a rundown of what the news was in years gone by - usually for quarter-century milestones. (This was, of course, particularly exciting if you happened to have a milestone birthday that week.)

With this in mind, I decided to hit the archives, just to check out the Minnesota sports news for this date.

100 years ago: January 16, 1924

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We already know, two days into the Vikings offseason, that one topic is going to dominate Purple talk until September: is Kirk Cousins coming back? Should Cousins come back? Do the Vikings want him back? If he goes elsewhere, should the Vikings have brought him back?

He says, of course, that he wants to be back (and what athlete ever says anything else?) He even hinted that he might be willing to take less money to make it happen, though his agent probably would have some criticisms of that move.

The Vikings will be stuck in weird NFL-style salary cap jail no matter what; if you want your head to hurt, go look into Cousins’s current contract, which runs through 2027 but also voids on March 15, and somehow costs $28.5 million against the cap anyway in 2024, but $0 thereafter, and also from a pure accounting standpoint, all the money has already been paid. (Does any of that make sense to you? Good. It shouldn’t.)

But apart from the QB circus, there are three bigger problems that the Vikings need to worry about.

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Today’s a day that doesn’t happen all that often: it’s the first day of a new pro sports franchise in Minnesota. Tonight, PWHL Minnesota - the Cougars? - plays its first game, visiting Boston.

I presume that there will not be 406 penalty minutes and a coach punching a fan, but you never know in Minnesota-Boston games, I suppose.

A recap of other first-days-of-franchise for Minnesota’s pro teams:

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I love watching sports on TV, which I suppose is not surprising to anyone who’s reading this. Returning from holiday vacations on New Year’s Eve meant that I had the opportunity to get plenty of sports viewing in over the weekend - an NFL Sunday, the NHL Winter Classic, the college football playoffs, and so on - and it reminded me just how much I like to have a game on TV, even if it’s entirely random.

I have discovered something about myself, though, and it’s almost certainly not new, but for whatever reason I’m only now getting truly embarrassed about it: I am absolutely awful to watch a game with.

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It is important to me that my website, jonmarthaler.com, contains no cookies or tracking code or other added junk on the top of what I’m writing. This is for two reasons:

First, I believe that it’s extremely important that the web still retain something of its original character: a method for sharing information, rather than monetizing attention. And so I try to make sure that everything about this site, including the design (intentionally stripped-down and spare, so that the page size stays very small) and the underlying technology (a static site generator, not a database) and the methods of displaying (desktop web, but looks okay-ish on mobile too; a full RSS feed) are completely focused on sharing.

Second, knowing what people like and dislike has an editing effect; it’s way too easy to get caught up in chasing page views and clicks and likes and shares. It’s natural. Here is a number; let’s make that number go up!

But if I’m going to write this site solely to share it with people, then I need to know as little as possible, especially on a day-to-day basis, about whether are people are reading it. This is hard enough, just from posting links on social media, but social media is fragmented enough nowadays that I can convince myself that the numbers are meaningless.

Because of all this, I can’t tell you who reads the site itself; I have no way of tracking it. It’s possible nobody has visited the actual website in many years. It’s possible that no one but me subscribes to the RSS feed (which I do just so I can make sure it’s still working).

That said: you may well be reading this, right now, on Substack. I started publishing my writing on Substack because I couldn’t find a decent automated way to make my website email new posts to people (specifically my family) who wanted to read them, and Substack seemed like an easy way to make that happen.

And so, because of this, I actually have some numbers now. I try not to look at them, especially on a per-post basis, for the reasons mentioned above. But as we begin 2024, I will mention a couple of things.

First of all, I want to say thank you to everyone that has subscribed on Substack - more than 100 people now. Thank you all, for reading. It means a lot to me.

Second, this means that I can write a post like this: here are the top three posts I wrote this year, according to those new stats, since launching the newsletter in mid-June.

November 17: The end of Gopher football

December 8: A visit to Hutton Arena, and to basketball’s past

October 6: Heath Out

Thank you again for reading. I hope you’ll stick around for 2024, no matter how you read this site.

It’s not about the Vikings, it’s about a Viking

The Vikings lost 27-24 in overtime to Cincinnati last Saturday, a game that featured enough astonishing mistakes to fill a hundred hours of post-game call-ins. Kevin O’Connell calling an absolutely woebegone quarterback sneak in overtime, one that involved the smallest player on the roster trying to push the quarterback forward behind a famously undersized center, watching it fail, then calling the exact same play again, is probably the one that will live the longest in the memory.

But. The more I let this game settle, the more I realized that talking about the Minnesota Vikings this year - and, I’m starting to realize, every year - is not really a monologue about a team. In today’s NFL, talking about the team really means just talking about the quarterback.

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