60 years ago today!

[purplefaithful]

Sept. 17, 1961: The day Fran Tarkenton and the Vikings arrivedSixty years ago today, the expansion Vikings upset the Bears 37-13 behind four Tarkenton touchdown passes (and a fifth rushing) in their first regular-season home game.

The seed for what Fran Tarkenton likes to call the greatest upset in NFL history was planted three weeks earlier when upstart Vikings coach Norm Van Brocklin, fresh off the playing field as league MVP with the Eagles in 1960, ticked off George Halas, Bears owner, coach, league founder and an instrumental figure in awarding Minneapolis its expansion team in 1961.

Per NFL rules, Van Brocklin was supposed to deliver to Halas the game films of his team's first three exhibition games before the Vikings and Bears played a fourth exhibition game in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Sept. 2. Van Brocklin didn't, and Halas went public with the slight.
A 42-year veteran of the 42-year-old league, Halas mocked the 34-year-old Van Brocklin and his Vikings, saying sarcastically that he looked forward to seeing what "that rough-and-tough football team has been doing." Halas then snickered when the Bears whipped the Vikings 30-7 in front of 12,000 fans.
"We got destroyed," said Tarkenton, the Hall of Fame quarterback who was a 21-year-old rookie from Georgia at the time.
Fifteen days later, on Sept. 17, 1961 —60 years ago Friday — the Bears visited Metropolitan Stadium, the $8.5 million Bloomington prairie home of the Vikings and Twins, for the first regular-season game in Vikings history. A more curious than boisterous crowd of 32,326 fans —about 9,000 below capacity —showed up to see how the NFL's entertainment value would stack up to a wildly popular Gophers football team coming off the 1960 national championship.
Vikings 37, Bears 13.
Tarkenton didn't start, but he sure finished. Replacing George Shaw with the Vikings leading 3-0 in the first quarter, Tarkenton couldn't have started his record-setting career faster than this: 17-of-23 passing for 250 yards ("which was like 500 yards in 1961," said Tarkenton) and four touchdowns, no interceptions, a rushing touchdown and a 148.6 passer rating that stood as the second-highest in his 13 seasons as a Viking.
"I was a freak of nature," said Tarkenton, the league's first scrambling quarterback. "It was almost sacrilegious for a quarterback to run."
Halas was irate, cussing out his players and later telling reporters that he'd never seen so many things go wrong in one game. When Tarkenton wasn't weaving through Chicago's lumbering defenders, the Vikings defense was dominating with four interceptions and a fumble recovery.

"I do remember Halas stomping around and throwing a clipboard down," laughed Jim Marshall, whose streak of 270 consecutive starts as Vikings right defensive end began that day and didn't end until he retired in 1979. "One time, he almost threw down that famous hat of his. Yeah, he was kind of angry that day."
The Vikings would lose their next seven games and cap a 3-11 season with a 52-35 loss to the Bears in Chicago. But, for one perfect storm of an afternoon 60 years ago, the Vikings rejoiced in what remains the best of 61 season openers, and counting.
https://www.startribune.com/vikings-firs...600098049/

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