The Vikings are Stewards of Chaos

The Vikings are winning in anarchic joy. What can we glean from their enthusiastic embrace of disorder?

Photo by Brace Hemmelgarn/Getty Images

It is difficult to characterize the Minnesota Vikings as anything but chaotic. For many teams, and at many times throughout the history of the Vikings, that’s been a curse. At the moment, it’s a blessing.

Comfortable in the chaos, the 2024 Vikings have embraced the pandemonium of their playing style to eviscerate teams — first, the lowly New York Giants in their first truly big win since 2019 and now the well-regarded Houston Texans, having just beaten them 34-7.

Even their one-score win against NFC favorites San Francisco 49ers wasn’t particularly close, with a late-game score to bring it to within one possession before a failed onside kick ended the game.

The Vikings aren’t just difficult to understand from an observer’s perspective; they seem to stymie opponents as well. And though it’s always difficult to tell in small samples how good a team is, the 3-0 squad certainly seems to be one of the NFL’s best.

How they do it seems to change weekly, with different blitzers screaming off the edge, unusual route designs or an errant punt block to set up a score.

This chaos doesn’t exclude the audience, either; the wild cacophony of sound emerging from the stands, in concert with the visual noise from the Vikings pass rush, baited the Houston Texans into jumping the snap early on three separate — but consecutive — occasions during Houston’s most promising attempt at scoring in the first half. Shortly after that, there was an illegal formation penalty for lining up too far back.

Distracted by the overwhelming stimulus of US Bank Stadium, the Texans worked themselves out of field goal range.

The vagaries of the universe seemed to cooperate. The Vikings themselves were beset with brief — but worrisome — injury scares throughout the game. Star receiver Justin Jefferson had been injured the week before and had expressed confidence he could play through the knee contusion he had suffered against the 49ers.

Photo by Brace Hemmelgarn/Getty Images

At the top of the third quarter, he was held out of play as the Vikings instead fielded a receiver corps with Trishton Jackson on the field alongside Jalen Nailor.

Later, Sam Darnold limped towards the sideline after a big hit but couldn’t quite make it, instead sitting down on the field as trainers attended to him. Right tackle Brian O’Neill left the field of play very shortly thereafter to be replaced by David Quessenberry.

Jefferson, Darnold and O’Neill returned to play quickly after their absence was noted. But then Quessenberry was seen on the field again, this time at left tackle. Christian Darrisaw was in the medical tent.

The promising left tackle rejoined the offense in short order, but it seemed as if the cosmos was teasing Vikings fans with the fragility of hope.

Does this chaos mean the Vikings are unpredictable? Impossible to model? In some ways, sure. They can’t always rely on an accidental backwards pass turning into a seven-yard gain.

The individual molecules inside a gas move in ways that are impossible to predict. Were one to somehow tag a tracker on a single hydrogen atom, one couldn’t, using all of the information available at the time, figure out where that atom was going to go.

But in the billions, the behavior of the cloud of atoms — the hydrogen gas — is remarkably predictable. It is essentially stable. Anyone can, with very limited information, predict the behavior of that gas.

Out of this disorder comes order.

The Vikings hope to be the same, making their individual actions inscrutable but producing a stable, inexorable movement towards dominance.

How has that entropy produced stability?