The Eagles can never take away that they were the team that made me want to stop watching the NFL.
So I used to be a Vikings fan. Had been a fan practically all my life. A very heartrending team to follow. I knew their history, of the 4 lost Super Bowls, Wrong Way Marshall, The Purple People Eaters, but the 1998 NFC Championship game against the Atlanta Falcons was my first brush with their special brand of yanking your heart out.
The loss to the Bountygate Saints (the year the Saints won the Super Bowl) in '09, the absolute dismantling by the '00 Giants to the tune of 41-0 in the NFC Conference Championship game, being outgunned by the Greatest Show on Turf in '99... Blair Walsh's missed gimmie against the Seahawks in 2012...
But the Eagles were the tipping point. 2018, a week after the Minneapolis Miracle, the Vikings got crushed 38-7 in a game that wasn't even that close. It was tied 7-7 after the first, and then they folded like a house of cards, giving up 17 points in the second quarter. I turned the game off at halftime, thought to myself "Am I really going to keep torturing myself emotionally and ethically over this?"
And haven't put a game on since. I used to do fantasy football every year, listened to several podcasts daily, and I just stopped. It was the point where I realized "this franchise and this league aren't worth it", and walked away cold turkey. I still get certain NFL podcasts in my feed, ones I have been too lazy to remove.
I should have abandoned the league after the initial handling of the Ray Rice and Josh Brown domestic abuses, and after the Kaepernick blackballing be he didn't stand for the anthem. It took nearly 5 years after that for me to just say enough, and it took my feelings getting hurt by the team I rooted for.
What I joke I was.