Vikings should consider unloading All-Pro Culpepper

	The Vikings are 6-0 since Daunte Culpepper left the lineup because of a knee injury. Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images

Maybe they traded the wrong guy. Maybe in their zeal to turn the page on the team's troubled ways, the Minnesota Vikings exiled the wrong All-Pro by shipping renegade receiver Randy Moss to Oakland.

Or maybe they simply didn't do enough.

It's always dangerous -- and often simple-minded -- to credit (or blame) seismic change in sports to one play, one trade, and particularly, to one man. And yet it's hard not to trace the sports rebirth of the year -- the Vikings stunning run from butt-of-late-night-joke purgatory to potential playoff team -- to the team's loss of another dominating player: quarterback Daunte Culpepper.

Culpepper is a strong, talented and dynamic leader. He's a QB in a linebacker's body and the kind of guy you want your daughter to meet. It's widely known that Daunte was born in a jail and raised by a prison guard, who reluctantly agreed to take the baby after his mother pleaded with her to do so. Today, Culpepper is a national voice promoting adoption, particularly among African-American families.

A first-round pick out of Central Florida in 1999, he became a starter in his second season and led Minnesota to two playoff appearances over the next four years. In 2004, he had perhaps his best season and would have been MVP in a world without Peyton Manning.

But the Vikings were 2-5 this year when Culpepper went down in a heap of frayed knee ligaments on the day before Halloween and was lost for the year. Even worse, the Vikings had become the face of all that is wrong with today's overindulged, overpaid and out-of-control jocks when their titillating exploits aboard a couple of local party boats on Lake Minnetonka became national news.

The combination of on-the-field mediocrity and off-the-field frivolity was too much. Local officials considered legal action. And the team's new owner, Zygi Wilf, exploded. Wilf apologized to the world for his team's bawdy behavior, implemented a new code of conduct and promised heads would roll if there were further indiscretions. "Today marks a new day, a new era, a new season for this team," he said at the time.