Peterson’s 2012 uniform displayed at the HOF

Adrian Peterson’s uniform from his 2012 MVP season is now part of the Hall of Fame’s displays.

It seems like Adrian Peterson has already put together a résumé good enough to put him in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but his historic 2012 season is already being memorialized in Canton.

The Hall of Fame museum curators announced this week that Peteron’s uniform from the 2012 season arrived at the museum and will be part of the display in the Pro Football Today Gallery in an exhibit featuring recent MVP players Peyton Manning and Aaron Rodgers.

Peterson already has items on display at the Hall of Fame. He submitted memorabilia from when he set the single-game rushing record with 296 yards as a rookie in 2007. The latest display will honor his body of work in 2012, when he became just the seventh player in league history to surpass the 2,000-yard rushing mark and fell just eight yards short of the all-time record set by Eric Dickerson in 1984. Peterson also tied the all-time single-season record for games with 150 or more rushing yards at seven – tying Hall of Famer Earl Campbell.

Peterson snapped a streak of five straight years in which a quarterback won the Most Valuable Player Award. In nine of the previous 11 years, a quarterback was named MVP, which is why A.P. winning was such an achievement. Peterson became just the third Viking to ever win league MVP honors, joining Alan Page (1971) and Fran Tarkenton (1975).

There aren’t many who question that Peterson will eventually have a bust at the Hall of Fame for his career achievements, but those visiting Canton will find that there is a place in the Hall that already contains Peterson memorabilia.

SUNDAY NOTES

First-round draft prospect Alec Ogletree saw his stock take a significant hit when it was made public this weekend that he was arrested in Arizona for DUI. It’s unclear whether it will impact his draft status, but, because it came after he declared for the NFL draft, he may find himself with a strike in the league’s personal conduct policy before he even has a team to call his own. It’s not the first time Ogletree has had problems with substances. He was suspended four games last season at Georgia after a positive drug test during the preseason mandatory drug tests of all athletes. It will make his team interviews at the Combine next week a little more dicey.

Now we know why the term “conditional” is put into trade language. When the Vikings swung the horrible trade with the Washington Redskins after the lockout in 2011, one of the caveats of the trade was a conditional sixth-round draft pick in this April’s draft. In order to satisfy that part of the trade, McNabb had to reach certain playing time incentives. Because he didn’t, the Redskins don’t get the Vikings’ sixth-round pick this year. It makes you wonder if that is why the Vikings released McNabb after making Christian Ponder became the starter and didn’t just keep him on the bench. As a vested veteran, the Vikings weren’t saving any money by making the move.

One thing you can say about Cris Carter is that he doesn’t take losing very well. Last year, Red McCombs told us that, following the 1998 NFC Championship Game loss to Atlanta, when Carter hit the floor in grief, McCombs thought he was having a seizure and rushed to his side yelling for medical staff to come over. It turned out C.C. was fine physically but was emotionally bereft from the loss. In a story in the St. Paul Pioneer Press this weekend, Carter said he had one significant regret. Not the drug problem that got him exiled out of Philadelphia, but the ineffectiveness of a couple of 1998 teammates.

“If I could change one thing about my life, Gary Anderson would make that damn kick and then Jimmy Hitchcock would not get beat on a third-and-9 play on an out and up.”

Even at a time of great joy in his life, Carter still has the player’s mentality – for better or worse.

From the “You’re Out of Your League When Dealing With Semantics” Department comes this: In the social media world, there is considerable debate about Vikings general manager Rick Spielman saying the team has no “intent” of trading Percy Harvin compared to having no “intention” of trading him. A lot of people with a lot of time on their hands (no offense, Keith Olbermann) have broken down the comment. It’s subject to debate whether Spielman, a stickler for detail, has formed an opinion of the razor-thin difference between the words.

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John Holler has been writing about the Vikings for more than a decade for Viking Update. Follow Viking Update on Twitter and discuss this topic on our message boards. To become a subscriber to the Viking Update web site or magazine, click here.

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