Making Sense of the Vikings’ Vegas Win Total
Polls on PurplePTSD and our sister site, Vikings Territory, suggest that Vikings fans are extremely bullish on the 2025 season, with the vast majority expecting at least one playoff win and many believing this is the year the Vikings finally nab an elusive Lombardi trophy.
Meanwhile, Vegas puts Minnesota’s over/under right in the middle at 8.5 wins: not terrible, but well below the level of optimism among the Purple faithful.
What explains this skepticism towards the Vikes, a team that just won 14 games and upgraded its offensive line? It isn’t unusual for the national media to overlook the Vikings, but in this case, there are some good reasons why the franchise could be expected to end up somewhere in the middle of the pack.
Most obviously, the Vikings benefited from great QB play in 2024 and are now turning to a second-year QB who hasn’t played a single NFL snap. To be sure, Sam Darnold looked like a bust before Kevin O’Connell and the weapons around him resuscitated his career, so there is reason to hope for more out of J.J. McCarthy than one could typically expect from a rookie QB. Still, it’s unfair to expect that McCarthy will be able to immediately play at the level Darnold attained last season, so it’s natural to expect a dip in offensive production.
Furthermore, while they were a very good team last year, their underlying metrics suggest that they weren’t as stout as a typical 14-win team. The team’s point differential of +100 was good for a Pythagorean expected record of 11-6, and the Vikings’ EPA rankings suggest they were one somewhere around the 8th-best team in the league last season, which again places them somewhere in the range of 11 expected wins. This suggests that, even without any regression in skill, the Vikings should expect to win around three fewer games in 2025 than they did in 2024.
Finally, it’s worth remembering that the 2024 Vikings vastly outperformed their preseason expectations. This could be taken as yet another indication of the media’s bias against Minnesota, but most of the time, a team that drastically improves from one season to the next experiences some regression the year after.
Together, these suggest that an appropriate over/under for the 2025 Vikings would be somewhere around 9 wins. That said, it would be wrong to interpret this likely drop-off as evidence of mismanagement by the Vikings’ front office: by switching from Darnold to McCarthy, the team made a calculated decision to embrace a high variance approach.
There is a decent chance that the Vikings will fall flat on their faces this season, but there is also a real chance that they will finally make it over the hump and join the ranks of the elite NFL teams. 8.5 wins might be a reasonable average for the team, but in my opinion, the preseason likelihood of a Super Bowl is higher than it’s been in many years.