Close Games and Sustainability: The Narrative Tricks of Statistics

The Vikings, once again, have an astounding record in one-score games. Does that mean they're frauds?

Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Minnesota Vikings fans can never get enough of doubt. For most fanbases, this means loving to prove doubters wrong, but for this one means loving to doubt their own team.

That’s not a universal feature, and like with any fanbase, you’ll see diehards who believe their team has the goods and cynics who can’t buy into a team no matter what. But with the Vikings, it certainly seems like a larger proportion has protected themselves from emotional investment.

This year, however, the primary question marks seem to be coming from those outside of the Vikings fanbase – national analysts who have reasonable skepticism about a team led by draft bust Sam Darnold finding consistent ways to win.

It’s also tempting to compare this to previous “successful” Vikings teams like the 2022 and 2017 squads. The 2022 comparison is particularly intriguing – the one-score game talking point was particularly prescient as the team flamed out quickly in the playoffs.

Unsustainable Play

We’ve covered this before, of course. Not just in general, but with the 2024 squad. Luke Braun looked into some of the data and the film in his early October piece on the question when the Vikings were 4-0 and coming off of a “close” win against the Green Bay Packers.

We could spend time rehashing some of the measures in that piece and why they’re important and so on, but there’s no need to – read that and this piece on Jordan Love to get a sense of why some measures may be stable while others are unstable. Let’s do a quick update on some luck metrics to get it out of the way.

So, in terms of play-to-play performance, the Vikings are not particularly lucky. And, more than that, these measures are not absolute indicators of luck; rather, they isolate areas of play that are difficult to repeat from game to game, not traits that exist purely in the realm of coin flips. So the Vikings may indeed be better on third down than their contemporaries, just in a way that’s difficult to isolate using the measures we have on hand.

One Score Games