It all looks glorious for Minnesota as they head into the NFL playoffs as NFC North champions for the first time in five years.
But under the surface, they’re living the greatest lie in league history, becoming the ultimate example of how a win-loss record doesn’t tell the whole story.
With one week left in the season, the Vikings are an impressive 12-4, sitting just one win back of Super Bowl favorites Philadelphia and having long ago clinched the division.
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The problem is it’s a record built on close wins and lucky bounces, and their overall performance is nowhere near as good.
The Guardian put it best: they’re “the worst Super Bowl contender ever”.
Despite having lost just four games this year, Minnesota has allowed more points than it has scored throughout the season – 414 to 395, to be precise – which is simply absurd.
Compare their differential (-19) to that of the Eagles (+127), Cowboys (+145) and 49ers (+148) and you can see just how far away they are from the NFC’s elite.
In fact Minnesota has a worse points differential than division mates Detroit and Green Bay (who are both 8-8), as well as New Orleans (7-9 and won’t win the horrific NFC South), Cleveland (7-9) , the New York Jets (7-9) or Las Vegas (6-10).
How does this happen? Well, when they win, they win close – by four points over Detroit, three over New Orleans, three over Washington, three over Buffalo, five over the Jets, three over Indianapolis and three over the Giants.
Those wins over the Bills (thanks to a Josh Allen fumble in the endzone) and Colts (the biggest comeback in NFL history, from 33 points down) were particularly wild.
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But when they lose, they get pumped, including in two of their highest-profile games of the season. Back in Week 11 against Dallas, the Vikings were victims of a 40-3 beatdown, while this week against Green Bay – with a chance to ruin their great rivals’ playoff chances – they were pumped 41-17.
Why does all of this matter? Well, it goes to a trend that is true across all sports – performance in close games is heavily dependent on luck.
There is no such thing as a clutch team that always knows how to win the close ones. They may happen to win a lot of close games, as the Vikings have, but that does not mean it is a skill – claiming it is simply the human instinct to find order in randomness.
If teams could consistently win close games, we’d see them do it consistently from season to season. None do that. Instead, teams bounce randomly from strong records in close games one year to terrible records the next.
And teams can even bounce around randomly in the same year. The prime example in recent times is Collingwood in the AFL, who went an absurd 11-1 in games decided by less than two goals in 2022… but then lost two very close finals.
If they possessed a skill at winning close games, they surely would have shown it in the most important games of the season, rather than against lowly opposition in June and July. The truth is they were just lucky to win as many close games as they did, and their final results showed that.
At the other end of the spectrum, big wins and losses expose the truth of a team. You cannot fluke your way into winning by 10 goals, or four touchdowns, or whatever it may be in your sport.
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This is where looking at how many points a team scores and concedes throughout a season is useful. It washes out the noise of game-by-game results, and gives us a bigger sample to examine.
You can even go deeper and look at something called Pythagorean wins, which explains how many games a team “should” have won based on its overall performance.
In the case of Minnesota, no team has outperformed its Pythagorean total in NFL history quite like them.
As Football Outsiders’ Aaron Schatz posted, the Vikings “should” have won 7.5 games this season (not 12). That 4.5-win gap is the largest in NFL history – no team has even been four games ahead of the record they “should” have recorded.
His outlet’s DVOA metric, which analyzes teams on a play-by-play basis, doesn’t just say Minnesota is average. It says they’re genuinely bad – 28th in the league, or fifth-worst.
Bookmakers look at advanced stats rather than just win-loss records – because the former tells you more about a team than the latter – which is why an otherwise bizarre-looking line has emerged for Week 18.
As Fansided’s Matt Verderame tweeted, Minnesota is as low as a one-point favorite to beat Chicago – despite the Bears being 3-13.
The Vikings will host a playoff game in a few weeks’ time – that looks very likely to be against the New York Giants, who are locked into the sixth seed.
The Giants aren’t great either; they have a season-long points differential of 0. So there’s every chance Minnesota wins that game and heads into the divisional round.
But there they’re almost certain to run into one of Philadelphia, San Francisco or Dallas. It should be an absolute bloodbath, based on what we know about all of these teams.
All of this negativity shouldn’t dissuade Vikings fans from enjoying this season – just as fans of the aforementioned Collingwood adored their team’s 2022 campaign. The ride is as important, if not more so, than the destination when only one team can win the championship. And winning close ones is thrilling.
But from an analytical perspective, there is little reason to believe in Minnesota’s chances of claiming a first Super Bowl title.
Maybe they’ll get into the playoffs Justin Jefferson will do remarkable things, or maybe the opposing coach will screw things up (this seems particularly likely if they’re against the Cowboys). Maybe they’ll just keep winning.
The odds will be heavily against them though. Because the facts are clear: they’re not that good.
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