The death of NFL Films co-founder Steve Sabol reminds us that the NFL we know today would not exist without the value provided by the vast archive of images that helped build the league's legacy. And the Vikings hold a place -- often unhappy -- in that archive.
In 1994, Sabol weighed in on Jim Marshall's famous "Wrong-Way Run" in 1964 when it topped the "NFL's 100 Greatest Follies," shown above. Scroll to the 8:20 mark.
"It was a landslide," Sabol told Rachel Blount. "But Jim is an enduring symbol of a lot of things that make NFL football great. Perhaps that's why we use [the blooper] so much; it's the story of someone who made a mistake, then bounced back to become one of the greatest players in NFL history. It's a blooper with a moral to it."
Another, nonembeddable bitter memory is directly chronicled by Sabol on NFL.com: The push-off by Drew Pearson that the rest of the world recalls as the Hail Mary. It not only notes the bottle that hit the referee, but two hits that Pearson took on the sidelines the play before the score.
And the Vikings filled two spots in the five-part series called "The Missing Rings" on the best NFL teams never to win the Super Bowl.
The 1969 Vikings set the stage for all those other great Vikings teams to fall short in the Super Bowl.
But for heartbreak, you might not be able to top the 1998 Vikings, whose documentary is chronicled in five parts on YouTube.
