What happened?

How far has this team fallen? 4 weeks ago we were sitting at 4-2, owned the top wild card playoff spot, we had just dominated the defending NFC Champions and we were heading into the easiest portion of our schedule. Here is the ugly recap post New England game...

San Francisco 3-9 (road) - If you were able to stay awake for this one, congratulations you got to watch all 60 min of arguably the worst game in the NFL this year. Looking back now, SanFran is improved and up to .500 but there is no excuse for scoring only 3 points against a defense that has allowed 34 or more points in half their games this year.

Green Bay 17-23 (home) - Brett Favre is closing in on the NFL interception record and his struggles in the metrodome are well documented, so one would have assumed this was going to be a certain W. But Brett Favre looked as good as he did when he was hyped up on pain killers and beer throwing for 347 yds and 2 TDs. Even with Favre's solid play, the Vikings made a couple critical mistakes that essentially cost them the game.

Miami 20-24 (road) - Miami is also one of the hotter teams in this middle portion of the season, but once again the offense was able to give this game away despite another brilliant performance by the defense. This time the Vikings offense accounted for 34 points! Unfortunately 14 of them were gifts to the Miami defense and those points counted for the wrong team on the scoreboard.

And that brings us to present day. 4-6 and needing to basically go 5-1 (at worst) to have a crack at the playoffs.

The Brad Childress era is starting to look eerily similar to the Tice era. We are unable to make adjustments and we are outcoached / out-schemed on a weekly basis. The NFL season is long and full of adjustments to keep your edge. We started strong but now teams have adjusted. You can't have a winning season if we zig, zig, zig every week; we have to zag sometime.

Ultimately it is far too early to adequately judge Childress. He has brought more discipline to this beleaguered franchise, he has been relatively prepared for the start of nearly every game and a good portion of the lack of production can be attributed to the quality of personnel. But he also has shown an inability to make offensive adjustments to counter defensive adjustments and his play calling is about as vanilla as it gets.

The season is not over and 5-1 is not out of the question if you look at the schedule. That would put us at 9-7, but we have some positive tie breakers and 9-7 just might get us into that wild card!