In their second home, and third overall, preseason game, the Vikings tromped the Ravens in a dominating 30-7 victory.

The Vikings scored through out the game, but the first-stringers ended up 10-0 near the end of the first half. Nearly a trouncing there.

I'm starting to realize I'm less of a fan of the game than I am of the hanging out and kibitzing about it later. The sport is a fine one, and I'm entertained by the gameplay, statistics, speculation, and all that surrounds it, but I've realized that I'm nothing of a sports fan.

Preseason exposes this underlying disinterest even more. The teams are bloated with hopefuls, about 40 of which will be cut before the season starts. There's a bunch of excellent college talent and players moving around the NFL or coming in from other football leagues trying to make the team. I don't know who they are, nor do I find myself interested enough to really learn who they are.

There are probably twenty guys who have a sure-thing contract, and another fifteen for whom it is already decided that they are going to make the team unless they get hurt or really screw up. The team only ends up with about 40 people on it, leaving, really, five positions that the other forty players are trying out for.

The "starters," those twenty guys who are sure-things mingled with some of the others who are pretty-sure-things, play for the first bit of the game. The deeper into preseason, the more they play, as a conditioning thing more than any kind of try-out. This, I'm sure, is partly because there are cuts after each pre-season week, and to minimize injury before the season begins. It's happened already that a few guys have been dinged enough to take 'em out of the rest of the game early, if not a few games, even into the season.

After the contracted guys play for a while, the pretty-sure players continue. As the game progresses, fewer of the Vikings we'll see in the games remain on the field, until at the end just the players that either need a lot of practice, or the ones that will be cut are playing. Even in the preseason, there are players that never leave the bench, though.

So with the team size around 80 people right now, there just are too many for my non-sports-oriented mind to wrap around. I have a hard enough time remembering all of the things about all of the people that are actually in my day to start sticking too many people that are in my entertainment, too. I've already got a bizarre allocation for television, music, and film celebrities. How did that happen?