For Struggling Vikings and Packers, .471 is the New .500
Tom Woldum
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The Vikings face off against the rival Green Bay Packers tonight, a New Year’s Eve Sunday Night Football battle for football mediocrity.
Both the Vikings and Packers sit at 7-8. At stake: a .500 record, an outside-shot at a playoff game against one of the conference’s top teams (presumed to be a loss waiting to happen), and bragging rights within the small geographic area encompassing Wisconsin and Minnesota until the next meeting in 2024.
.471 Is the New .500 for Struggling Vikings and Packers
Minnesota finds themselves precisely where they have been in four of the past seven years: with a chance to close the season at, or within a game of, .500. Since the NFL added a 17th game to each team’s schedule the only true .500 teams are those who somehow finish with an 8-8-1 record.
Since ties are an extreme rarity in today’s NFL, we’ll have to look at 9-8 and 8-9 teams as equally average—though the 9-8 teams can still hope for postseason activity while the 8-9 ones making the playoffs are about as rare as a tie. The Sunday Night winner. The loser will need to win their final game in order to secure the 8-9 mark necessary to claim true averageness.
Both teams appeared to be dead by the side of the road earlier this season, with the Vikings starting out 1-4 while the Pack bottomed out at 2-5 following their loss to Minnesota at Lambeau Field on October 29. Both teams followed up on their poor starts with an impressive run that led their fans and pundits alike (but especially the fans) to believe they were contenders.
For the Vikings, it was a 5-0 sprint behind a succession of starting quarterbacks and a defense that grew by leaps and bounds with each win. For the Packers, it was an impressive run with 4 wins in 5 starts in November and early December highlighted by convincing victories on Thanksgiving Day at Detroit and at home versus the defending Super Bowl Champion Chiefs.
Each team has won just once since their big run, with the Packers going 1-2 including a loss to a miserable New York Giants squad, while the Vikings have gone 1-4 while cycling through backup quarterbacks and watching their injury reports grow week by week. Considering how they started, both teams should really consider a near-.500 record a successful season, but surely, they’ll each be haunted by what might have been.
What’s Ahead For Packers, Vikings
If the Packers can turn the tables on Minnesota, and take care of business against the last-place Chicago Bears to close the season 9-8, Green Bay fans will be looking at that Giants loss on Monday Night Football with consternation. The Giants, currently 5-10 in 2023, led the whole game until Jordan Love completed a pass to Malik Heath for a touchdown with just 1:33 remaining in the game to take a 22-21 lead.
Their attempt at a 2-point conversion failed, their defense allowed a subsequent New York drive and the Giants won the game on a 37-yard field goal as time expired. If the Packers had taken care of business there, they could easily be looking at an 8-2 season-ending run and a 10-7 season overall—easily enough for playoff qualification. Jordan Love has been a different man in the second half of the season, and that scenario could well have included post-season heroics and an upset or two along the way.
As it stands, their best-case 8-7 is highly unlikely to qualify them, and their middling defense will be reason enough for fans to be wringing their hands as they look forward to 2024. The good news for Green Bay is their draft capital: the Packers own 5 picks in the first two rounds of the 2024 draft, and the future is beginning to look bright.
If the Vikings can successfully protect their home turf on New Year’s night, they would be 8-8 entering their season finale, a rematch with Detroit. At this point in their season the squad is drastically depleted, with injuries up and down their roster. Fully healthy, the Detroit game would be compelling, but as it stands, Minnesota will be hard-pressed to avoid a loss.
The Vikings will look back on the Bengals game, with the two failed quarterback sneaks in Cincinnati territory, on third and fourth downs in overtime. They’ll look back on losses to Tampa Bay, Denver, and Chicago, each by a margin of three or less, that included a combined 10 Viking turnovers to two for their opponents.
Win just two of those four imminently winnable games, and they too could imagine a 10-7 playoff-eligible record. Instead, they’ll look ahead to 2024 with a newfound faith in their defense, and a big Kirk Cousins question mark going into the offseason. The injuries will heal, and there’s reasons to consider the Vikings future to be bright as well.
The predictions here are a Vikings victory on New Year’s Eve, followed by a win for Green Bay and a loss for Minnesota to close the season. Both teams end with identical records of 8-9 and a winning percentage of .471. For optimists, it’s the new .500. For pessimists, it’s just another year without a Super Bowl victory.
The best news is that, just over an hour after the Vikings-Packers game concludes, it will be a fresh beginning to a new year. Happy New Year, everyone!
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