The newest trend in 2018 is NFL fans stepping out and donating to the charity of an athlete who doesn't play for their favorite team. We've seen Bills fans thank Andy Dalton for a playoff berth with hundreds of thousands of $17 donations. Blake Bortles foundation got a pay-it-forward bump from Bengals fans grateful to see him ruin the Steelers season. But now there's a new twist going down, as Vikings fans are flooding Saints punter Thomas Morstead's charity with donations.

Unlike the previous two situations, Morstead did nothing to help the Vikings, but instead simply gutted through a tough situation to try and win a playoff game. The Vikings community on Reddit was appreciative of all the Saints players who came back out for the final, very unnecessary PAT situation and when they found out about Morstead coming back out with broken ribs, they decided to try and help Morstead's What You Give Will Grow charity reach its $150,000 donation goal.

According to Morstead, he could barely breathe and spent the entire game battling through excruciating pain.

"The whole first half was a grind," Morstead said. "I couldn't breathe and was just panting, short, shallow breaths the whole first half. I sounded like a dying dog.

"On that first punt [after the injury], I knew that I was about to electrocute myself. I said to myself, whether it's a good punt or a bad punt, either way it's going to hurt like hell, so I might as well make it work as good as I could."

Morstead was blown away about the news and decided to pay it forward himself, and announced a separate charitable giving page for Vikings fans. The money donated by Vikings fans will be given from Morstead to the Children's Minnesota Child Life Program.

The foundation's goal was $100,000 and Morstead promised to fly up and deliver the check himself if that happened.

He might as well start booking his flights -- and he knows it -- because the charity has moved quickly. As of around 11:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday, the campaign had raised about $25,000. As of 1:30 p.m. ET on Wednesday it had breezed past $46,000 and was really starting to pick up some steam, with hundreds of dollars in donations every minute were coming in -- before 1:40 p.m. ET it was already over $47,000.

The entire 2017 year was pretty full of vitriol and not necessarily chockfull of people being nice to one another. It's really refreshing to see 2018 starting off with a positive note, fueled in large part by some of these cool stories about NFL fans giving to unexpected charities.

Hopefully Morstead is forced to fly to Minny and hopefully this is a trend that continues.