Vikings make no apologies to Cowboys

Dallas linebacker Keith Brooking made one thing very clear last January before leaving the Metrodome following the Cowboys' 34-3 playoff loss to the Vikings.

He wasn't about to forget that Brett Favre's 11-yard touchdown pass to Visanthe Shiancoe with 1 minute, 55 seconds left had, in his mind, been nothing more than an attempt to run up the score. The play came on a fourth-and-3. Brooking ran toward the Vikings sideline following the touchdown and screamed at Vikings coach Brad Childress. He later called the touchdown "classless and disrespectful" and said he would circle the date of the Vikings-Cowboys game on his calendar. Well, that date is Sunday afternoon and while Brooking is no longer talking about the matter, the Vikings aren't exactly backing down from what they did. "We don't care what Brooking says," Vikings nose tackle Pat Williams said. "If he's still talking about last year that's his bad because last year is last year and we ain't worried about it. If he wants to cry like a little baby, he'll cry like a little baby but we aren't worried about what he's saying." The Vikings and Cowboys are both 1-3 and have much bigger concerns than what happened in that game, but the Vikings have an explanation for the late touchdown. The Cowboys continued to blitz and thus weren't exactly backing off and surrendering. "If they're slamming people into the formation, nothing says that you have to go in there and have everybody shorten their necks so they stop us," Vikings coach Brad Childress said. "Now you've got to make a decision whether you kick a field goal. So the easiest thing is to get another first down. That's all we were trying to do and we ended up scoring. It'd probably be a good idea to cover somebody. Generally on defense, you've got to cover the deep plays." Asked about that touchdown on Wednesday, Dallas coach Wade Phillips said: "People can do what they want. That's what they chose to do. It's not something I would've done." Williams, for one, is making no apologies. "This is the NFL, it ain't Pop Warner, it ain't high school," he said. "This is the pros. I figure if they were so good they would have stopped us from scoring but they didn't."