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MINNEAPOLIS -- Mike Zimmers team lost a second straight game by a double-digit margin, with a depleted offense sputtering badly.The next day he needed eye surgery.The following morning, his offensive coordinator came into his office at Minnesota Vikings headquarters to inform him of his resignation.All this after overcoming the absences of several injured starters to take the NFLs only 5-0 record this season into the bye week.I feel the roller coaster ride, Zimmer said, flashing a smile thats been rarely spotted on his grizzled face lately.Thats the life of a head coach. Even for assistants. Zimmer took some time after a recent practice to recall his second year in the league, 1995, when he was defensive backs coach for a Dallas team that won the Super Bowl trophy.Beaten by then-rival San Francisco in the previous NFC championship game and again that regular season, the Cowboys slumped a bit in December and needed a win and a one-point loss by the 49ers on the final weekend of play to gain home-field advantage throughout the playoffs. Green Bay knocked off San Francisco in the division round, and the Cowboys took down the Packers for the NFC title before beating the Pittsburgh Steelers for the championship.At the end of the year, regardless of what happens, I went in the locker room at the end of the game and said, `My God, that was a long season, Zimmer said. So I get it. Thats just how this thing works. Were not the only team to have ups and downs.Hey, its the NFL.The Vikings (5-2) host Detroit on Sunday, eager to return to raucous U.S. Bank Stadium where theyre unbeaten in three games. The Lions (4-4) know all about those ups and downs, of course, looking back to last years 1-7 start that rendered a 6-2 finish meaningless. This season, every game has been close, winning by four points or fewer each time for a cumulative margin of victory of 11 points. Four defeats, all by a touchdown or less, have come by a total of 18 points.Just take a look at it, and youve always got a chance at this point in time, right? Lions coach Jim Caldwell said. Goals are still in front of you.Here are some key angles to know about the game:MIDSEASON SWITCH: After losing to Minnesota 28-19 in Detroit last year, watching Matthew Stafford take seven sacks, Caldwell fired offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi and both offensive line coaches. Quarterbacks coach Jim Bob Cooter took over the play calling, and Stafford and the Lions were far more effective after that. Theyve kept up that success on offense this season.What we had to do was work extremely hard. You had to little by little kind of piece something new together that we wanted to do, and go from there, Stafford said, recalling the challenge of the change.Though the circumstances are different, the Vikings would love a similar boost for their offense after Norv Turner left and was replaced by Pat Shurmur.Its not on coaches. Were the ones out there. Were the ones that need to play better, tight end Kyle Rudolph said. Moving forward, weve just got to get everybody to do their job. We have the talent and ability to make that happen.PROTECTING THE PASSER: Theres no question about Shurmurs top priority in taking over the offense. Bradford needs better protection than he received the last two games if the Vikings are going to get back on track. Bradford was not only sacked 11 times but hit hard on several other throws, sending him out of sync after playing so crisply and effectively before the bye.I dont think its a good thing, Bradford said. I think weve got to figure out a way to bring that number down.GETTING THERE: Lions defensive end Ezekiel Ansah, who missed three earlier games because of a sprained ankle, is still without a sack. Ansah, who finished 2015 with 14+ sacks, has five sacks in six career games against the Vikings.Maybe the first week or so he got maybe a little bit rusty, but I think without question hes still who he is, Caldwell said.STOPPING THE RUN: The issues with the offense had already been exposed before the loss at Chicago on Monday night, so the ease with which Bears rookie Jordan Howard ran through Minnesotas front seven and secondary was more alarming. Howard rushed 26 times for 153 yards and caught four passes for 49 yards.Thats inexcusable for us on defense, linebacker Chad Greenway said. Thats what we pride ourselves on and have for a long time.STAFFORDS SURGE: Over the last 16 games, mirroring Cooters move into the offensive coordinator role, the Lions are in the top three in the NFL in passer rating, touchdown-to-interception ratio, completion percentage, passing touchdowns and offensive points scored among other categories.---For more NFL coverage: http://www.pro32.ap.org and http://www.twitter.com/AP-NFL Mathew Barzal Islanders Jersey . Burris threw two TD passes, including a key 15-yard fourth-quarter strike to Bakari Grant that effectively countered a Toronto comeback bid and led Hamilton to a 33-19 victory. Ryan Pulock Jersey . While hell be dialed in to that tournament on a course he loves, you can forgive him if his eyes glance down the calendar just a bit, towards April. http://www.islanderssale.com/authentic-nick-leddy-islanders-jersey/ . -- Anaheim Ducks captain and leading scorer Ryan Getzlaf has been scratched from Sunday nights game against the Vancouver Canucks because of an upper-body injury. Nick Leddy Jersey . -- Aaron Murray threw for 408 yards and three touchdowns, ran for another score, and led No. Denis Potvin Islanders Jersey . -- The Portland Timbers and Real Salt Lake played to a 0-0 tie Saturday night that left the top of the Western Conference standings unchanged. Inzamam-ul-Haq is not only a man of few words, he is a man of precise ones, unwilling to expend vocabulary just as he never used up more energy than was necessary while playing. Once, famously, when a reporter asked him about the possibility of a match having been fixed, he leaned over as slow and sure as he often did into a cover drive, gathered his thoughts and replied with no emotion or change in expression: Shut up.He was sauntering around Edgbaston on Thursday in his capacity as Pakistans chief selector, no doubt pleased that the two changes to Pakistans XI for this Test have reaped such immediate and healthy reward.Now, Inzamam had been out of cricket for a while until he became chief selector, and Inzamam being out of cricket means he was really out of it. There is little chance he would have seen too much of Sami Aslam as he was setting the U-19 world alight. Thursday would have been the first time he saw him bat in serious circumstances and it was certainly the toughest test he would have seen him undergo.His assessment was exact and worth paraphrasing here. There are some batsmen who are shot-makers, he said - and not revealing those he named does not make it any more difficult to know which names he meant - and some who know how to score runs. Aslam, he said, was the latter.No matter how many times we see Aslam bat over the rest of his career, this truth will be enough in guiding us. It is certainly not a dig and neither does it imply an incapability to play shots. He has them, as anyone who has seen his limited-overs performances at U-19 level will attest.In his 82 today there were a few you might want to GIF, chief among them a little straight drive off Chris Woakes. But they just do not seem as important - even of the two sixes Pakistan hit off Moeen Ali, it was probably Azhar Alis that will stick more in the mind. And, ask yourself, how often you can say that of any shot Azhar plays?No stroke of Aslams was as memorable as any other which got him runs, which is to say there were plenty. There were the bunts on the off, the easy pushes off his thighs and hips. And there were the leaves, which today were guaranteed greater attention than they might otherwise have had because it was something the man he replaced - Masood - was unable to do.That kind of judgment, and its suggestion of an intelligent batting mind, was present through the entirety of his innings. After he twice lap-swept Moeen for boundaries, even those did not seem as important as the effect they had on Englands field: duly they moved square leg to leg slip and Aslam dinked a little single into the newly--created vacancy.ddddddddddddTwice he went long periods without a boundary, first for 13 overs before lunch - brought to an end by that drive off Woakes - and then for over an hour after lunch. In that first period his scoring stalled, moving from 10 to 15. In the second he went from 23 to 47. But at no point during either did the fact of no boundaries, or even a supply of runs, seem to matter in the context of Pakistans innings, or, more importantly, did it perturb his. Throughout he knew where and how he would get his runs, and he did.You can go through this Pakistan batting order and, in conditions outside Asia and sometimes against the better bowlers inside Asia, feel that no matter how long some of them stay at the crease, they rarely look truly settled, or at least not in the sense that the best young batsmen of this age do.That is what would have pleased Pakistan the most, that at no stage after he was set did Aslam look like an implosion was a matter of inevitability, with only the details for that eventual demise to be inked in. As good a batsman as he has shown himself to be, to give off this sense of permanence in his first Test innings in England is what perhaps stood out - you have to go back a decade to find as assured an innings by a Pakistani opener in England (Mohammad Hafeez at The Oval, in case you felt like turning your mind inside-out briefly, and hes never had it so good here since) and maybe a decade before that for anyone to have done it with any regularity. Aslam batted as if completely ignorant of the not-so-pretty context of being a Pakistani opener in England.Such was the serenity that radiated out from Aslam, it actually helped Azhar Ali settle down, as he would later admit. For a man playing his ninth Test in England and 48th overall to say that about a man playing his first in England and third anywhere is, well ... it is something.The curse of history, of course, is unavoidable and so, to end on a note of caution is not only wise but necessary. Pakistan have burnt through way too many openers over the last 20 years even to begin to imagine that they might have found a permanent solution to a permanent problem. Too many have come, impressed like Aslam, maybe even for longer and with greater force, and then whoosh, gone, just like that.Perhaps it is enough to imagine that for now, a Pakistan opener may have changed the course of a Test in England - and even that is hardly set in stone - and with it, just maybe, the series. ' ' '