Adrian Peterson Should Not Play In Preseason for Minnesota Vikings
If you ignore everything that has happened off the football field pertaining to Adrian Peterson, he’s still a really, really good football player. At least he was when we last saw him and knowing his athletic pedigree, we have to assume he’s still one of the best running backs in the NFL and he doesn’t need to play in the preseason.
This will be Peterson’s ninth season in the NFL, so he’s been around the playing block a time or two. Peterson and the Vikings have nothing to gain from playing him any in games that don’t mean a thing in the grand scheme of the season for the team or the record books for Peterson.
It’s comparable to the debate of Triple Crown winner American Pharoah running again or not. As long as Pharoah is alive, he’ll be paid millions of dollars to do what winning horses do. That all goes down the drain if he’s injured. It’s the same thing with Adrian Peterson.
Don’t mortgage your future for something that doesn’t matter in the long run. For Adrian that’s totally ignoring the five, yes, five, preseason games the Vikings have on the schedule for this season. For American Pharoah’s owners and team, it’s resisting Canterbury in Shakopee and all the other horse tracks that want to sell out their stands for one night.
Canterbury is offering to up the stakes for one of its races to $2 million if American Pharoah comes which seems to now be chump change for the horse after his success.
Peterson has a couple years left in his body and he shouldn’t risk anything. It seems that he can tell you all about his contract not having guaranteed money. As much as we’d love to see American Pharoah and Adrian Peterson run as much as possible, sometimes the right move is to run away from running.