Minnesota Vikings Smother Will Levis and the Tennessee Titans to Advance to 8-2

Though the final score against a weak Tennessee Titans team won't convince many to fully buy into the Minnesota Vikings as a playoff threat, this game demonstrated why they keep winning

Photo by Wesley Hitt/Getty Images

The Minnesota Vikings advanced to an 8-2 record with a 23-13 win against the Tennessee Titans, once again producing a multi-score victory in a way that doesn’t entice Vikings fans or convince viewers that they deserve to remain atop the NFC power rankings, especially as division-rival Detroit Lions dismantled last week’s opponent, the Jacksonville Jaguars, 52-6.

There are some weeks where the general feeling that the Vikings overperformed is fairly accurate, but in this case, there’s more reason to be happy about this win than worried. Good teams put bad teams away and the Vikings didn’t do that, but there’s more than meets the eye with this one.

As it stands, the Vikings have blown past preseason expectations, having exceeded eight wins early into the season with the bulk of their high-quality opponents behind them. Ultimately, this team is better than most observers reasonably expected and that’s a good place to be.

But winning raises expectations and the Vikings are now in a position where fans demand that they do more than continuously eke out wins against bad teams. As playoffs loom over the horizon, Vikings fans are worried about what the Brian Flores defense – ripped apart by the Lions – will look like when they once again find themselves up against competent quarterbacks.

Did this game give more reason to be concerned?

Vikings Defense Dominates

Not quite. Certainly, it’s worth noting that a number of big plays for the Titans were called back due to penalty, making the baseline statistics appear misleading. On top of that, a big 98-yard passing touchdown ensured that Levis finished with some of his best production all year – he finished with minus-0.05 EPA per play, his second-best performance in the metric this year.

It was also his second-best performance by passer rating, his best performance – by a good margin – in yards per attempt and so on.

But there’s a reason the Titans only scored 13 points – and it has nothing to do with the issues that plagued the Vikings last week when they scored just 12. Rather, the Titans couldn’t sustain drives and were wholly reliant on explosives. That reliance is what doomed them.