Remember the ill-fated Josh Freeman experiment by the Vikings in 2013? Brought in after the team got off to a 1-4 start, Freeman lasted one game as the team's replacement for Christian Ponder and Matt Cassel. The game was an ugly 23-7 loss to the New York Giants in which (1) the Vikings ran the ball only 14 times, (2) the Giants entered the game 0-6 and (3) Freeman, looking overmatched, completed 20 passes in 53 attempts.
Former Vikings quarterback Josh Freeman's career ends (again) in Canada
Five years after his one awful game with the Vikings, quarterback Josh Freeman got a Canadian Football League tryout that lasted one game less.
May 29, 2018 at 1:50PM
Freeman had spent the previous four seasons with Tampa Bay before being cut that October after an assortment of issues with the team. He signed with the Vikings four days later and, among other things, stumbled through a conference call with reporters during which general manager Rick Spielman apparently was helping Freeman with some of his responses as questions were being asked.
Freeman played only one NFL game after that, for Indianapolis in 2015, after being signed and released by both the Giants and Miami Dolphins.
None of that seemed to matter earlier this year when the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football league signed Freeman with the intention of having him compete for their starting job. During the team's training camp in Vero Beach, Fla., Freeman explained to reporter Greg Stroud from the Tampa Bay Times why he'd come down from his home in Kansas City for another shot at pro football: "I mean, you can go to the gym and, like, play basketball as hard as you can. But you can't really compete. You don't sit and prepare all week to go kick some kid's (butt) in basketball. What kind of loser is that?"
Montreal had high enough hopes for Freeman that he was one of the players brought to Winnipeg earlier this month for a CFL media day.
Again, things didn't work out. Freeman was one of five quarterbacks with the Alouettes and it became apparently that he was closer to the bottom than the top of the depth chart. In announcing his release, the CFL's web site politely said that Freeman "had removed himself from the running" to be the starting quarterback.
The Montreal Gazette wasn't so kind. Quarterback Josh Freeman retires after zero-game career with Alouettes was the headline on this story.
If you need a reminder of Freeman's game with the Vikings, take a look below:
Mike Conley was in Minneapolis, where he sounded the Gjallarhorn at the Vikings game, on Sunday during the robbery.
