RandBall: ‘Thursday Night Football’ was ultimate test of how much Vikings fans hate Packers

The “Thursday Night Football” offering this week was billed as a showdown between the Packers and Lions.

But for Vikings fans, it was a matchup of the head vs. the heart.

Pretty much since the emergence of Brett Favre in Green Bay more than three decades ago, the Packers have been the Vikings’ biggest rival. The Bears are a relatively close second in the division, while the Lions are a distant third — usually futile, sometimes entertaining, almost always harmless.

The Lions’ emergence as a true Super Bowl contender last season coincided with a weird 7-10 Vikings season, so it was kind of OK to be fine with their success. This year, of course, is a different story. Entering Thursday, the Lions were 11-1. The Vikings were 10-2. The Packers were 9-3.

The Vikings have already lost once to the Lions this season, and they play again in the season finale. If the Vikings are going to catch the Lions and have any chance at the No. 1 overall seed (plus the bye and home-field edge that go with it), Detroit getting tagged with at least one more loss along the way is essential.

So clearly the Vikings and their fans want Detroit to lose. But did they want it badly enough Thursday to root for the Packers? That’s where things got complicated and divided, as I talked about on Friday’s Daily Delivery podcast.

As the back-and-forth entered the final quarter, I asked Vikings fans who they were rooting for to win.

A couple of them could admit to voting with their heads: “Packers so we can have a first round bye and win a Super Bowl,” wrote one of them.

More of them, though, leaned into the heart over the head: “I can’t bring myself to cheer for a team from Wisconsin” was one response, along with this one: “Gotta go with Detroit simply because of the insufferability factor with Packer fans.”

The largest answer category, though, was some variation on “neither.” One responded “meteor,” while another hoped for a tie. “The schadenfreude of the losing team” was one particularly enjoyable response, indicating fans weren’t so much rooting for one team to win as they were for one team to lose.

Detroit, of course, ended up winning 34-31 on a last-second field goal. The exhausting Lions were an absurd 4-for-5 on fourth down, which told the story of the game.

They were aggressive on two fourth-and-goals and scored touchdowns. They gambled on a fourth-and-1 in their own territory in the second half, didn’t make it and gave the Packers a short field to score a go-ahead touchdown. And they went for it on fourth-and-1 with 43 seconds left at the Packers 21, eschewing a go-ahead field goal in hopes of draining the clock before the attempt.

It worked, making the heart-leaning Vikings crowd happy.

If it hadn’t, Green Bay might have gone down and won and cleared a better path for the Vikings to win the Super Bowl.