Vikings’ Green Is in a Hurry : Pro football: New coach talks and moves fast as he seeks to turn around a foundering franchise.

The charisma and charm being broadcast from Dennis Green is inescapable, but, truth be told, you have never met a man who talks so fast. Wewanttoworkhardandtrytowinandgettotheplayoffs. Bam! One Dennis Green sentence can last through breakfast and well into lunch. Let’s compare and contrast for one moment: Green is an orator of the first degree. The last coach of the Minnesota Vikings, Jerry Burns, thought good oratory was a strong belch.

But that’s what this story is about -- contrast and change. Many people around the league quietly say that change was needed in the Vikings organization.

That Burns’ time was up. That Green, a talented man who has worked with some of the best minds in the business, such as Bill Walsh when both were with the San Francisco 49ers, is the perfect person to try to get an organization with a fabled history out of the comics section and onto to the front page.

That he will make fans care about them again. And that, more importantly, he can get them back into the playoffs. Green, only the fifth Vikings coach and just the second black head coach in NFL history, is trying to get people to believe again.

Already he has seemingly ingratiated himself into the community, doing a daily radio show; he even has his own television show. Burns didn’t do radio because he was dangerous, having this tendency to use obscenities in every other sentence. Burns wouldn’t have looked good on television either, since he resembled a 175-year-old Smurf.

What Green may teach most to the Vikings is that there is more to winning football than how many Pro Bowls someone makes. At one point the Vikings had twice as many millionaires (six) as playoff victories in the last nine years. Is it corny to go back to basics and stress hard work? Green doesn’t think so. He is someone who watched his grandad get up at 3:30 every morning to work for the sanitation department. In high school, he worked at an airport, supervising a maintenance crew of four on the graveyard shift, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.

Can the Vikings win again? Green thinks so. And if the players need a blueprint for winning they can just look at what Green has overcome, including the death of his parents before his 16th birthday.

Already the Vikings, who play the Redskins in their final preseason game Saturday, have accomplished something few Vikings teams ever have. They are 3-0 in the preseason for the first time since 1973.

Minnesota has outscored its opponents 110-6 (the fewest points the Vikings have yielded in preseason was 40 in 1983), and the teams they have beaten are no sissies. There were the two-time defending AFC champion Buffalo Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs, also a playoff team last year. Monday night, Minnesota throttled the Cleveland Browns, 56-3.

But hark, what is that the doomsayers are chanting in the background?

“It’s only preseason. It’s only preseason. It’s only preseason.”

“You try to have a certain attitude, and it’s not necessarily a winning attitude, although that’s important,” said Green, sitting in his office, blues music playing in the background. “It’s a confident attitude, an effort attitude. And when you’re new you really have to try to work at it. I’m a positive type guy. I try to be realistic but I also try to be positive. I like to have fun. And I also like what I do. In my opinion, we are very well paid to do what we do, so we should have fun doing it and at the same time put out the best effort. Because people pay a lot of money to come watch us.

“The team is playing together. I think that’s the biggest thing. ... We’re playing with pretty good emotion as well. What we’re trying to do is establish our way of doing things I think. We want to put our brand on the Vikings.”

And while it is only preseason, and while the Redskins will offer a more realistic gauge of how the Vikings will do this year, it’s clear that even in the early stages of the Green era the coach has struck a chord with the players.

Maybe it’s just his energy level -- wide receiver Anthony Carter said Burns was “lackadaisical” -- or maybe it’s a talented staff that includes offensive coordinator Jack Burns (offensive assistant-receivers coach with the Redskins for the past three years) and defensive coordinator Tony Dungy (who has been with the Chiefs and Pittsburgh Steelers).

Whatever it is, when Green came to town change came rapidly, both in terms of records and personnel. Herschel. Browner. Millard. Wade. See ya. It didn’t matter how great they may have been, what mattered was that those former players didn’t fit into Green’s plans. “We needed a change,” said Carter.

“You keep it real simple,” Green said about the difficulty of letting veterans go. “First of all, regardless of who is on the team they deserve to have the best players on the team with them. In that regard, you don’t worry about being strapped about somebody’s reputation. You just look at their productivity, and what contribution they make to the success of the team. But it’s never easy releasing players.”

For all the enthusiasm, there is still some healthy skepticism. Although there is more talk about the Vikings now because of the 3-0 record, their first two home games drew only about 35,000 each.