Third Time’s A Charm for the Vikings? Don’t Get Your Hopes Up.
“I’ll see you in two weeks,” Lions HC Dan Campbell said to Vikings HC Kevin O’Connell after the Lions’ blowout win over the Vikings on Sunday.
Campbell’s declaration is a bit premature—not only would a divisional-round rematch require a Vikings win over the Rams, but it would also require wins by the Eagles and Buccaneers over the Packers and Commanders, respectively. Still, it is true that if the Vikings and Lions—the teams with the best records in the NFC—keep winning, they will invariably collide.
Already, many Vikings fans and pundits have looked to a longstanding football cliche for hope in the midst of a difficult situation: “It’s hard to win three games against the same team,” the saying goes, “so we’ll have an advantage if we play them again.”
The problem with this cliche is that it’s completely false, as proven definitively by John McMullen in a 2023 article for Sports Illustrated. As McMullen pointed out, teams who have won both regular season games against an opponent and subsequently faced them in the playoffs are 16-9 in those games, with a winning percentage of 64%.
When the 2-0 team was the home team, those odds increased even further to 70%. In short, the Vikings do not gain an advantage in a hypothetical matchup against the Lions by losing to them twice in the regular season.
It is true that a team rarely beats another three times in the same season, but that’s primarily because the opportunity rarely arises. It’s not every day that two divisional rivals meet in the postseason, and when they do, they are necessarily both playoff-caliber teams, so they are likely to have split in the regular season.
Even now, approximating the remaining games as 50-50 coin flips, the odds of a Vikings-Lions rematch occurring this postseason are just 22%.
The takeaway lesson, then, is that we Vikings fans should not be pulling for a rematch with the Lions. Call us scared, call us frauds, call us what you will: we’re not here to make friends, we’re here to win a Super Bowl. And the easier the path to the big game, the better.
In a perfect world, the three NFC wild card teams all win, and the Vikings get to host a divisional-round game against the Commanders at U.S. Bank stadium. After that, a Vikings’ win plus a Packers’ win over the Lions would give us a third game vs. the Packers at home for a shot at the Super Bowl.
Based on the statistics we’ve seen above, I’d like our odds in that game.
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