It was a little less than two weeks ago that

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we passed along the word that Minnesota Vikings tight end Kyle Rudolph was the team’s nominee for this year’s Walter Payton Man of the Year Award. Now , he’s absolutely running away with the online vote for the award, but there’s still plenty of time left to ensure that he brings home the big prize.As of right now, Rudolph is sitting at a total of. . .refreshes browser again. . .146,512 votes. The second place contestant right now is Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback Dak Prescott with 83,950 votes. So, at this point , Rudolph is nearly lapping the field.However, if you’ve been tweeting or re-tweeting on Rudolph’s behalf, it isn’t time to stop or slow down yet, as the voting for this contest runs all the way through 13 January. So, how do you vote, if you haven’t been?Well , you go onto the Twitter machine and start tweeting (or retweeting) tweets with the hashtag #WPMOYChallenge and Rudolph’s last name, like this:#WPMOYChallenge RudolphMake sure there’s a space between the hashtag and the last name. . .the interwebs won’t count them if they’re all crunched together.Again, retweets count for this as well, so if you’d rather just retweet a bunch of other people’ tweets with the hashtag in them, you can do that as well.The nominee for the award that gets the most Twitter mentions will get $25,000 for their charity of choice. Yes , the runner-up get $10,000, which is nice, too. . .but come on. Doesn’t #82 deserve the extra money for the charity of his choice?You’re damn right he does.So, if you have a Twitter account and haven’t been throwing a few votes out there for Kyle Rudolph, we’d like to ask that you go ahead and do that. And if you have been , awesome. . .keep it up! Rookie seasons are full of firsts and Jets quarterback Sam Darnold got another one out of the way on Wednesday.Darnold made his first appearance on the team’s injury report. It looks like the first time we’ll have to wonder about whether Darnold will play will have to wait, however.Darnold was a full participant in practice on Wednesday and neither he nor head coach Todd Bowles expressed serious concern about the right elbow issue that led the team to put him on the list. Darnold said, via Brian Costello of the New York Post, that he hurt the elbow making a tackle after throwing an interception early in last Sunday’s game. Darnold played very well after throwing that pick, which suggests the elbow wasn’t causing him any big problems.Cornerback Buster Skrine, running back Isaiah Crowell , cornerback Trumaine Johnson, wide receiver Robby Anderson, defensive end Leonard Williams and wide receiver Terrelle Pryor were all out of practice. Skrine and Johnson didn’t play last Sunday and Bowles also confirmed that neither safety Marcus Maye nor wide receiver Quincy Enunwa will play this week.

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