The Minnesota Vikings take on the Pittsburgh Steelers in the NFL Hall of Fame game in Canton, Ohio.
Advertisement
Before you scoff at the idea, predicting a preseason game is easily more hard than predicting regular season games.
More often than not, Tingelhoff succeeded with the iconic Butkus calling him the “toughest center I ever played against.”
The current Vikings will not attend the induction ceremony on Saturday night, when many former Vikings congregate for Tingelhoff’s enshrinement, but they won’t leave without some exposure to the game’s history. He started all 240 games over his 17-season career.
Tingelhoff is now 75 and was first eligible for the HOF in 1984.
Tingelhoff enters the Hall today alongside fellow inductees Jerome Bettis, Tim Brown, Charles Haley, Junior Seau, Will Shields, Bill Polian and Ron Wolf. With Tingelhoff, the Vikings won 10 division titles and played in four Super Bowls.
Some of the other slam-dunk Hall of Famers on those Minnesota clubs also had to wait for lengthy periods with defensive tackle Alan Page the notable exception.
I don’t think trends are something to put a whole lot of faith in when talking about the first preseason game of the year because we don’t have a clue of who is playing and for how long as teams want to exit these games healthy.
There are now 13 Hall of Fame members who spent all or most of their careers with the Vikings, as Tingelhoff joins Cris Carter, Chris Doleman, Carl Eller, Paul Krause, Randall McDaniel, Alan Page, John Randle, Fran Tarkenton, Ron Yary, Gary Zimmerman, Jim Finks and of course Bud Grant.
Did you know: Tingelhoff was one of 11 players to have played in all four Vikings Super Bowl appearances in the 1970s.
Advertisement
“Mick was a catalyst for our team and one of the most respected players on those teams”, Grant said. Mick’s intangibles were the thing that made him so great.
