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Midway through the 1984 season, the Chicago Bears were preparing for a game against the Los Angeles Raiders. During practice one day, defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan pulled aside cornerback Leslie Frazier.

"He starts telling me all about Cliff Branch," Frazier recalled recently. "He's telling me how he is an old guy and how I should play him and what I needed to do and all of that. But I watch tape, too, and I look at it and see this guy can still play."

So Frazier marched to Ryan's office and told him the Bears needed a different game plan for Branch, who at the time was 36 and one year away from retirement. "If that's the way you feel," Ryan responded, "go right ahead."

Frazier left Ryan's office proud, motivated and with an indelible impression that helped steer his post-playing career.

"I was like, 'Man, I've got to make this work,'" Frazier said. "He's empowering me in this way and trusting me to do it this way. He thinks I've studied enough and prepared enough to handle [Branch]. Because if I don't, it affects not only me but the entire defense and the entire team. I've always thought about that. Those players, they are the ones that have to go play. Why not listen sometimes?

"We had a system that everybody in America thought was a great system, the 46, blah, blah, blah. In that system, Buddy Ryan would let us make suggestions, let us tweak things and do things. And to me that was his genius."

Branch didn't have a catch in the Bears' 17-6 victory that afternoon. More important for us, 27 years later, Frazier has brought a similar mentality to his new role as the Minnesota Vikings' head coach. He hired offensive coordinator Bill Musgrave to tailor a new scheme around the Vikings' existing players, demanding that he seek input from veterans and maximize the strengths of skill players. Musgrave, in turn, has gone so far as to ask quarterbacks to nominate plays to run in preseason games.

Defensive coordinator Fred Pagac has followed suit in the role Frazier held for the previous four seasons, an important turn of events for a veteran-laden team that isn't likely to allow on-high direction to go unchallenged.

"Buddy's ego wasn't so big that he would say, 'Get out of my office we're just going to run the 46 this week, 60 downs,'" Frazier said. "He'd listen and if it made sense, he'd say, 'OK maybe we could give that a try.' Now as a player, you're like, 'Wow, I'm going to try to make this work, because he listened to me, and then you would go down to the locker room and sell it to your teammates.'"

Frazier's approach is hardly revolutionary and is, in fact, practiced to a degree in most NFL cities. But it's notable in Minnesota for its departure from the rigid and structured program of former coach Brad Childress, who held strongly to his personal convictions -- especially as it related to offense -- and left veteran players complaining about a lack of flexibility and input.

Childress' motivation was understandable; he had been hired with a mandate to clean up what owner Zygi Wilf believed was an undisciplined organization. Sometimes the inmates must be returned to the asylum with no questions asked. But from a schematic standpoint, scores of Vikings players were rendered robotic after finding Childress unwilling to make adjustments they had seen and used in other versions of the West Coast offense.

Musgrave, meanwhile, uses terminology derived from the offense developed by former New York Giants and Pittsburgh Steelers offensive coordinator Ron Erhardt. But the specific plays and formations will be dictated by his evaluation of the Vikings' in-house talent and supplemented by recommendations from players.

Case in point: Musgrave's first conversation with quarterback Donovan McNabb this summer.

"I told him from the get-go that we have a system that we intend to teach to him, the quarterbacks and all the players," Musgrave said. "But it's really his system. It's Donovan's system. So if something happens here ... that he would like to tweak -- maybe call something differently in the huddle, at the line of scrimmage, maybe want to teach differently -- [we want him] to definitely come and talk to us about it because we're open-minded about it. We like to tailor-make or customize our system to fit our players."

Many NFL coaches seek input from key players. On Wednesday, I'll tell you more about the way Green Bay Packers coach Mike McCarthy works with quarterback Aaron Rodgers. But trust me when I tell you it's a relative culture change in Minnesota.

"The thing about it," McNabb said, "is that when you have guys that can make plays, you try to find ways to create plays for them. Bill is going to do that, and he's done a great job with that out here. "

Before each preseason game this summer, in fact, Musgrave gave his quarterbacks a working version of his play-calling sheet. The sheet was divided into roughly nine situational categories. According to rookie Christian Ponder, each quarterback was asked to rank his favorite and second-favorite play in each category.

Musgrave would then update the sheet with numerical notations to remind him during the game which quarterback liked which play.

"So we choose what we want to do and those are the things we're going to run when we get in there," Ponder said. "It's great that we have input."

It's worth noting there is a difference between preseason and regular-season game planning. I'm not sure if McNabb will choose all the plays he runs this season.

There is also a distinction between seeking input and running a democracy. Frazier plans the former but has no intention of broaching the latter. As the Vikings' defensive coordinator, he listened often to suggestions from cornerback Antoine Winfield, defensive end Jared Allen and others -- to a point.

"There were times when I might not agree and I had to make the final decision," Frazier said. "Other times I would say, 'You know what, maybe they've got something. Maybe we'll try that.' With a Percy Harvin or an Adrian Peterson, if you just say, 'This is the system, what you're saying may work but it doesn't fit in our system,' man, it gets kind of tough sometimes.

"You need a system, but not to the point where it will impede certain players on the team just because they might struggle with this particular system. You don't want to see one of your players go somewhere else and thrive and then ask, 'Why couldn't they do this in Minnesota?'"

Not even Buddy Ryan was proud enough to let that happen. Good for Leslie Frazier. And good for the Vikings. And open mind always is preferable to the alternative.

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. -- I ventured over to the Minnesota Vikings' training camp Wednesday to gather information for a future (award-winning, game-changing) post and was surprised when the team stood in its post-practice huddle for upwards of 10 minutes. The group was about 100 yards away, and all I could see was a man moving purposefully in the middle. Based on the volume of his voice, I assumed linebackers coach Mike Singletary had blown a gasket.

As it turned out, the man in the middle was longtime NFL defensive back Aeneas Williams, who is now a pastor and a public speaker whom the Vikings invited to speak to their rookies during a scheduled life skills seminar Wednesday.

"I don't know if there is a better example of how to handle the NFL and then life off the field than him," coach Leslie Frazier said.

Frazier has known Williams since the mid-1990's, when Williams was playing for the Arizona Cardinals and Frazier was an intern coach under then Cardinals coach Buddy Ryan.

"We've kept in touch," Frazier said. "... His credibility as a player and then what he's doing now, we thought it would be a plus for our rookies to take them through how to handle life skills."

Lost amid helmet hysteria Tuesday was the second part of our Flash Point exercise, an effort to determine the most significant moment in each NFC North team's franchise history. In a video we added post-publication, ESPN's Mike Golic offered an alternative consideration for the Chicago Bears.

You chose the moment the Bears hired Buddy Ryan, architect of the 46 defense that led the team to a dominant 1985 season and ultimately victory in Super Bowl XX. I didn't disagree. Golic, on the other hand, suggested a moment we never discussed.

In the 1965, the Chicago Bears had three first-round draft picks. Their first choice: Linebacker Dick Butkus. Their second: Running back Gale Sayers.

Two Hall of Fame players chosen in the first round of one draft? Pretty impressive. I'll let you argue their franchise-wide impact among yourselves, noting the Bears were in the midst of a 14-year playoff drought at the time.

Examining the most crucial event in the history of every team in the division.

The most important moment in Green Bay Packers history was nearly scuttled by an unlikely source. Shortly after Vince Lombardi accepted the Packers' job as head coach/general manager in 1959, his wife was "distraught," according to historian David Maraniss.

Marie Lombardi approached New York Giants owner Wellington Mara, who owned Lombardi's contract as a Giants assistant coach. As Maraniss writes in "When Pride Still Mattered," Marie begged Mara to block her husband's move.

Mara declined, knowing Vince was ready to be a head coach. Marie stood by her husband. And the rest, as they say, is Packers history.

Lombardi's arrival in Green Bay was your overwhelming choice as the Packers' Flash Point, and it received a higher percentage of votes (69 percent) than any individual event offered in last week's series of polls. Lombardi won his first NFL title in 1961 and collected four more before giving up the job in 1967, building an unmatched legend and painting the franchise in gold mystique for generations to come.

Some of you made impassioned arguments for Curly Lambeau's push to sell stock and make the franchise a non-profit organization in 1923, a short-term fundraising effort that embedded a structure still in operation today. "How can it not be Curly?" wrote mallow420. "If Curly doesn't save the Packers then there's no Packers to hire Lombardi."

Hadessniper allowed that "Lambeau making the Packers public is more important for the Packers, as without that there is simply no way Green Bay keeps a team." But, wrote hadessniper, "Lombardi is probably more important for the NFL as a whole. The NFL was gaining popularity, but Lombardi gave the game a legend. Without Lombardi the NFL wouldn't be what it is today."

Timarquardt was more direct: "Get back to me when someone else wins five championships in seven years. That's Lombardi's legacy and with all due credit to Curly, he did it when there was a bunch of good teams. Curly saved the franchise, obviously important, but without those Lombardi years the team never would have had the following through the dark years of the '70s and '80s to be successful."

What's fascinating to me is that Lambeau actually wanted Lombardi's job in 1959, a decade after an internal power struggle led to Lambeau's ouster. As Maraniss recounts, Lambeau flew to Green Bay during the interview process and launched a campaign to capture at least the general manager position that Lombardi ultimately filled. Dominic Olejniczak, president of the Packers board of directors, resisted the urge to hire him despite heavy public support.

The Flash Point mandate was less clear for the NFC North's other three teams. Let's sort through them in alphabetical order:

BEARS: A hero of 1985

About half of you voted for the arrival of defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan, the architect of the 46 defense that led the Bears to a championship in 1985.

Lewie21982 was livid and wrote: "Who are these people voting?? Are you just idiot baby boomers, hippies, or the '80s mullet crowd??? I was born in the '80s and clearly know the decision of drafting Red Grange or instituting the T-Formation was the most significant thing the Bears have ever done. The Bears have nine championships and eight of them were before Buddy Ryan, Mike Ditka, or the 46 defense ever came around!!"

I hear ya, Lewie21982. Red Grange made the Bears an early heavy hitter in pro football, and George Halas' schematic innovations led to the golden age in franchise history -- four world titles in seven years between 1940-46. But I understand where the baby boomers, hippies and mulleteers were going.

The 1985 Bears were the best team in franchise history and one of the most dominant of the NFL's post-merger era. With all due respect to Ditka and running back Walter Payton, Ryan's 46 defense was the biggest reason. It's impossible for a single moment to spawn something so impactful, and I heard a suggestion for ex-general manager Jim Finks acquiring many of that team's stars. But without Buddy Ryan, the 46 defense doesn't exist and the 1985 Bears as they were known never come to be.

LIONS: Forgetting yesteryear

The Detroit Lions' Flash Point vote got more action than any team in the division, garnering more than 53,000 votes. On that, we can agree.

But did the decision to draft running back Barry Sanders have more impact than any other event in franchise history? About 60 percent of you thought so, although the comments reflected a wider disparity.

I'm not on board, and neither was j_sleik83. We agree that quarterback Bobby Layne brought the Lions what Sanders never did. J_sleik83: "Bobby Layne in combination with the Hall of Fame defensive backfield the Lions had during the entirety of the '50s IS their defining era. Barry Sanders didn't lead them to the promised land, Layne did."

I mean no disrespect to Sanders, who forged a Hall of Fame career on some otherwise undermanned teams. But with Layne behind center, the Lions won NFL titles in 1952 and 1953. He contributed to a third in 1957, and upon his subsequent departure, Layne placed a (possibly apocryphal) 50-year curse on the franchise. (For that reason, DWargs thought trading Layne away is the defining moment in franchise history: "Haven't gotten close to a championship since.")

Several of you pointed to the ownership of the Ford family as the primary reason for that dubious run. Regardless, I understand that Lions history is defined more by failure than success. But on an otherwise desultory landscape, the Lions once had a brilliant run. Bobby Layne was the single biggest reason why.

VIKINGS: Varied opinions

I did either an excellent or terrible job of choosing options for the Minnesota Vikings' Flash Point: All four possibilities received between 19 and 32 percent of the vote. Assembling the "Purple People Eaters" had the highest percentage, but its total was hardly a mandate among the 38,000 or so votes cast.

Scanning the comments, it was clear that you agreed on only one thing: A Vikings Flash Point needed to reflect a long history of dysfunction.

Even looking beyond the obvious, Ymacdaddy offered this litany: "Herschel Walker, Metrodome [collapse], Gary Anderson, Dimitrius Underwood, too many in huddle, big-game chokers, etc. How about Darrin Nelson before Marcus Allen?"

The 1989 Walker trade, in which the Vikings ultimately gave up five players and six draft choices, received multiple mentions. So did Gary Anderson's shocking field goal miss in the 1998 NFC Championship Game. BuckeyeVikes80 is "still reeling from that 12 years later."

Dbatten1 noted Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach's Hail Mary pass to Drew "Push" Pearson in the 1975 playoffs. TampaPacMan's moment was the final play of the 2003 season, when the Vikings lost the NFC North title and a playoff berth by giving up an improbable touchdown to Arizona Cardinals receiver Nathan Poole. It was "the signature moment in a franchise history littered with failures!" wrote TampaPacMan.

If it were up to me, Bud Grant's arrival would rank as the most significant moment in Vikings history. Many of us would agree that Grant has made the single-biggest impact in this franchise's 50 years. But what do I know? I just work here.

What key event significantly changed the fortunes of the Bears -- for better or worse? Give us your take and we'll give you our definitive moment on May 17.

The Chicago Bears have been in the pro football mix since it started in 1920, a fact now clearer given the team's new mailing address at 1920 Football Dr. George Halas founded the franchise as the Decatur Staleys, and two years later they became known as the Chicago Bears to match the Chicago Cubs' zoo animal theme.

There have been countless flash points over the ensuing 91 years, and we've done our best to narrow them to four. Halas' decision to sign halfback Harold "Red" Grange to a $100,000 contract in 1925 signaled the inception of modern-day football on the field and its economic impact off it. In his first game with the Bears, 36,000 fans showed up on Thanksgiving Day.

Halas debuted the "T-formation" offense in the 1940 NFL Championship Game, leading to a 73-0 victory over the Washington Redskins and setting in motion a change in offensive philosophy to put two running backs behind the quarterback.

Halas retired in 1967, ushering in a dark period for the Bears that didn't end until its Super Bowl season 18 years later.

Finally, in 1978, veteran coach Buddy Ryan arrived and began putting in place the famed "46 defense" that ultimately carried the Bears to one of the most dominating seasons in NFL history in 1985.

Use the module in this post to cast your vote. If you vote Other, give us your suggestion in the comments area below.

Notable players: Tailback Walter Payton; quarterback Jim McMahon; defensive linemen Richard Dent, William "The Refrigerator" Perry, Steve McMichael and Dan Hampton; linebacker Mike Singletary; safety Dave Duerson.

The 1985 Chicago Bears were known, in equal parts, for their dominant defense and outsized personalities. The Bears' blitz-happy "46" defense spurred them to a 12-0 start, a 15-1 regular season record and the largest margin of victory in a Super Bowl at the time. And a roster that included three Hall of Fame players, five All-Pros and nine Pro Bowlers gave us some lasting and unique images.

Who can forget Perry diving into the end zone on Monday Night Football or catching a touchdown pass at Lambeau Field? Many of us can still feel the tension between coach Mike Ditka and defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan, a dynamic that ultimately resulted in both men carried off the field after the Super Bowl. McMahon's message-laden headbands. And is there anything else to say beyond "Super Bowl Shuffle?"

Those sideshows were the grizzle on the meat of a team that was as talented, at least defensively, as any modern-day championship group. That collection of players gave the Bears the only championship they have known in the past 47 years.

Nearly half of the defensive starters made the Pro Bowl. Singletary and Hampton are in the Hall of Fame. One day, Dent will join them. Two players finished with double-digit sacks: Dent (17) and linebacker Otis Wilson (11). As a team, the Bears forced 54 turnovers. During one particularly dominant stretch, the Bears went two months without giving up more than 10 points in a game.

Their only loss came in Week 13 at Miami, which finished 12-4 that season. But the Bears rebounded from that loss, winning their final three games by an average margin of two touchdowns, and then elevated themselves to historic status in the playoffs.

On the way to Super Bowl XX, the Bears shut out the New York Giants (21-0) and Los Angeles Rams (24-0). The culmination of their season was a dominating 46-10 victory over New England in which the Bears set seven Super Bowl records.

Most impressive win: It's hard to look past a 36-point victory in a title game of any kind. At the time, it was the largest margin of victory in a Super Bowl.

Quotable: "In life, there are teams called Smith, and teams called 'Grabowski'....We're Grabowskis!" -- Ditka, painting his team as a blue-collar group that evoked Chicago's heritage. The nickname caught on.

Honorable mention:

1941: Six future Hall of Fame players contributed to a 10-1 record and an NFL Championship. All of its victories were by more than a touchdown, and its only loss was by two points to Green Bay.

1940: The same core of Hall of Fame players finished 8-3 and also won the NFL Championship. The title game was a legendary 73-0 defeat of Washington.

1942: An undefeated regular season (11-0) featured four shutouts over its final six games. But this team lost 14-6 to Washington in the NFL Championship Game.

Thanks to everyone who offered up their favorite NFC North Super Bowl moments. As you recall, I offered up three suggestions Wednesday and left two spaces open for you to reach a total of five. Well, as the Supreme Ruler of all NFC North blogs on ESPN.com, I’ve made an executive decision to expand the list.

You brought up three really cool moments that I think belong on this list. I’ve published all six below, including your comments on the latest additions.

I realize this list doesn’t include a moment from any of Minnesota’s four Super Bowl appearances. There are a few reasons for that. First, the Vikings lost all four games. Second, their last appearance was 33 years ago. For most of us, there is a generational gap that has probably muted the progression of any highlights from those games.

OK, on with it:

1. Play: Green Bay receiver Max McGee’s one-handed, 37-yard touchdown reception in the first quarter of Super Bowl I.
Comment: As the story goes, McGee didn’t expect to play in the game and missed curfew while spending the evening on the town. He was, uh, not at full capacity at kickoff.

2. Play: Green Bay kick returner Desmond Howard’s 99-yard kickoff return in Super Bowl XXXI.
Comment: The final score of the game sealed the Packers’ victory.

3. Play: Devin Hester’s 92-yard return of the opening kickoff in Super Bowl XLI.
Comment: You can’t start a game better than that.

4. Play: William Perry’s 1-yard touchdown run in Super Bowl XX.
Comment from Bshuma1: You just can't beat the big guy's celebration and toothless smile after he owned that linebacker.

5. Play: Brett Favre’s 54-yard touchdown pass to Andre Rison on the Packers’ second play in Super Bowl XXXI.
Comment from Capdogg13: One of the best NFC North moments, what with Favre running up the field. That image, along with being one of the best Super Bowl images, defines exactly how Favre approaches the game, no matter his age.

6. Play: Bears players carrying defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan off the field along with coach Mike Ditka after Super Bowl XX.
Comment from bcrawford85: Awesome moment in Bears history, let alone the NFC "Central" history.
Comment from me: I agree. It was the ultimate sign of respect and appreciation for the leader of one of the best defenses in NFL history.