Despite mounting a second straight furiously meaningless second half preseason comeback, the Seahawks lost to the Vikings 18-11 last night at CenturyLink Field in a rematch of the two teams' freezing cold playoff tilt from last season. That game ended with the Vikings missing a potential game winning chip shot to advance in the playoffs. This game ended with the Vikings picking off Trevone Boykin and returning the interception for a touchdown to win nothing. I'm sure that Vikings fans will feel vindicated having gritted out a close one over the Seahawks this preseason. Yup, I bet they all feel great.

Despite being a low scoring preseason slugfest, both teams were actually doing some interesting football type things on Thursday. Can we learn from this information? Maybe! Let's look at three big pieces of info to see what we can glean:

Troymaine Pope is this year's running back revelation:

It takes a village to replace Marshawn Lynch, and last year's breakout Thomas Rawls is clearly part of that village. That said, the Seahawks clearly want a workhorse running back to pair with the road grading of Rawls and the pass catching of rookie C.J. Prosise. That's why they drafted Alex Collins. Alex Collins though has looked just okay when compared to the undrafted Troymaine Pope who has done everything you could want from an NFL running back over two preseason games. Last night he had 86 yards on 10 carries and a touchdown, and he looked both nimble and strong in amassing those numbers. He also was a more reliable pass blocker than Collins (though admittedly playing against a less formidable set of rushers than the Vikings first teamers). Pope may still miss the Seahawks roster, but he also could feature heavily in the team's plans after flashing well in two straight preseason games.

Unrelated, but very related: in 2002 Hank Azaria was on a short lived sitcom called Imagine That. Really short lived. It only got two episodes before it was cancelled. I'm pretty sure no one but me and my friend Matt remember this show, and the only reason we remember is because the pilot had the catchphrase, "uh, tell it to the Pope!" The catchphrase was delivered with that Hank Azaria character flair that made it stick in our brains... And 15 years later I sometimes say, "uh, tell it to the Pope!" in polite conversation as if someone might get the reference (they never have and never will). Last night during the game I on two separate occasions yelled, "TELL IT TO THE POPE" as Troymaine Pope broke through into the second level on his runs. Again, no flashes of recognition from anyone, but that's not important.

What is important, very important, is that the next time I see Seahawks GM John Schneider (any day now, surely, we're due for a hang) I'm going to twist that really esoteric reference and tell him to give the Pope the ball. "Uh, John, the ball? Give it to the Pope!" And then I'll wait for the nod of recognition. A sage John Schneider, nod that says, "I too watched both episodes of Imagine That in 2002, and I will continue to give preseason touches to our best undrafted running back, and we can be friends forever now that we've bonded over this reference." John Schneider strikes me as an Imagine That fan. Right? Eh?

(It's preseason for me too dammit.)

The starting offensive line was all over the map:

This is not a bad thing. Some parts of the map are good! And the run blocking for Christine Michael was the good part, like a dope peninsula or an isthmus. Michael has 100 yards on 16 carries this preseason which is great given that he was going up against the Vikings formidable starting front seven. Mark Glowinski looked particularly good as a run blocker, and the oft-maligned Justin Britt looked solid at center. Also, Russell Wilson against non-blitz packages had a number of clean pockets. That's a great part of the map we didn't see much of last year, like a lost river or Canada.

That said, when the Vikings brought the house the line missed assignments and collapsed, meaning that in a preseason game Russell Wilson took some nasty hits. That was a bad part of the map, like that leper island in Hawaii or Kansas.

I have no clue about the defense:

The Seahawks defense largely looked good on Thursday. Despite some special teams blunders and penalties that gave the Vikings good field position all night long, the Seahawks limited them to 11 points on offense. That's good! In particular Frank Clark and Jarran Reed both impressed up front, and both players will need to be big factors this year if the Seahawks are going to push their way back into the Super Bowl.

Here's the huge caveat: the Vikings played without Teddy Bridgewater or Adrian Peterson making it really hard to judge the defense's overall performance. Was the run defense vastly improved, or were the runners the Seahawks faced just that bad? Same questions for the secondary. Aside from Richard Sherman who looked sharp as ever, the defensive backs again looked good but not great against a really bad passing unit. Are they ready to go week one, or are we going to struggle for a few weeks in pass defense before settling down like we did last year?

Answers: preseason football is silly, and I should stop trying to learn too much from it.