Rookie Viking raises the roof

There's a moose on the loose, and so far no one has figured out how to bring it down. Whether Minnesota's Daunte Culpepper represents a freak of nature or the wave of the future remains to be learned, but after three weeks on the job as a National Football League quarterback he is already threatening to revolutionise the position.

He is 6 ft 4 in, weighs (at least) 266 lb, has a cannon for an arm, and can run, well, if not like a deer, then at least like a very quick moose.

To put this in perspective, imagine if heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis were a full stone bigger and could run 40 yards from a standing start in 4.68 seconds. Dress him up in pads and football armour and turn him loose on the rest of the world.

Defensive backs bounce right off Culpepper, and linebackers, supposedly the great equaliser at the professional level, can't even catch him.

"He's unique," says New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, whose team became Culpepper's third victim last Sunday afternoon. "Randall Cunningham was probably a little quicker, but Culpepper, he's big, I mean this guy looks like a linebacker. He's big, he's fast, he runs over people and has a big arm. He's a horse."

A year ago Minnesota coach Denny Green was roasted by the Twin Cities press when he used his first-round draft choice to select Culpepper out of Central Florida instead of taking (just for instance) Jevon Kearse, who was also available. Kearse went to Tennessee and became the AFC's most disruptive defensive lineman.

Silly move, said the doubters, when the Vikings already had a pair of veteran quarterbacks hanging around in Jeff George and Cunningham.

Culpepper was inactive for 14 of Minnesota's games last year, and did not play in another because of illness. He finished the season with zero passes thrown and three rushes for six yards. Sitting down for 15 games and barely playing in the 16th wasn't what he had envisioned for his rookie season.

"It was tough," admitted Culpepper, "but I had the maturity to know what my role on the team was. Last year it was to get the defence ready every week - and I think running the scout team against our first-team defence made me a better player in the long run." Having already been blistered for picking Culpepper in the first place, Green watched himself get absolutely barbecued by the press this year when he allowed both George (to Washington) and Cunningham (Dallas) to escape to free agency and cast his lot with Culpepper, who had yet to throw an NFL pass.

The Minnesota coach looks prescient now, but even he had his doubts. He tried to sign Cunningham, albeit for less money. He offered George a one-year contract. And when both of those negotiations failed, he flew to Florida on a one-man mission and came within an ace of persuading Dan Marino to forestall his move to the broadcast booth and play one more year as a Viking. Only when that failed was Culpepper anointed the undisputed leader of the Vikings' offence.

Cris Carter had his doubts as well. The All-Pro receiver had considered re-signing George vital to the team's play-off chances this season, but once it became clear that Culpepper was going to be The Man, Carter took him under his wing in much the same manner he had the troubled Randy Moss two years earlier. He invited Culpepper to visit "Camp Carter" in Boca Raton, Florida, to participate in informal off-season workouts. Working out with Carter and Moss, his two all-world receivers, gave Culpepper an additional jump-start on the competition.

In what amounts to a three-game NFL career, Culpepper has already shown enough to scare the daylights out of every defensive co-ordinator in the NFL. Consider: on the Vikings' first possession against Chicago, Culpepper took off and ran, twice, gaining 24 and 21 yards. On another occasion he found himself encircled by Bears but wriggled loose and improvised a shovel pass to tight end John Davis which went for a nine-yard gain.

His final stats for his debut as an NFL starter were 13 carries, 73 yards, and 3 TDs, but it should be pointed out that four of the rushes were game-ending take-a-knees that went for minus eight yards.

A week later, early in the fourth quarter against the Dolphins, the Vikings were nursing a 6-0 lead at the two-minute warning. With the ball on the Miami 15, the play was supposed to be a dive for Robert Smith up the middle, but Culpepper saw the Dolphin defence had packed nine men in the box and called an audible at the line of scrimmage. The new play to which he switched was a dangerous pass - at this point, an interception could have meant the game - and his target, Moss, was isolated one-on-one with Sam Madison, one of the best cover corners in the game. Still, Culpepper hit him perfectly for the touchdown pass.

Culpepper answered the nay-sayers on Sunday in Foxboro. On the Vikings' first three possessions, the giant quarterback led his team to one touchdown and passed for two others. By intermission, he had completed 16-of-22 passes for 149 yards and rushed nine times for 57 more.

After half-time the Patriots basically ran up the white flag and, conceding that they couldn't contain Culpepper any other way, gave a linebacker the sole job of "spying," or man-marking, the quarterback for the final 30 minutes.

"I know what it does to a defence when it has to face a guy like that," said Sherman Lewis, the Vikings' offensive co-ordinator. "You can have the perfect defence called. You can cover everyone perfectly. You can execute your defence perfectly. And the guy pulls it down and runs for 15 or 20 yards. You say to yourself `what can you do?' What that kind of thing can do is affect a defence mentally. It can get to your psyche."