Do Playoff Wins Matter?
For years now, Vikings fans have complained about a lack of playoff wins:
“Six years of Kirk Cousins, and only one playoff win!”
“Four years of Kevin O’Connell, and not a single playoff win!”
These complaints have always felt a bit strange to me. After all, the ultimate goal of an NFL season isn’t to win a playoff game or two, it’s to win a Super Bowl. Most Vikings fans alive today have experienced the thrill of playing in an NFC Championship game. Vikings fans of a certain age have even gotten to witness the Purple People Eaters in a Super Bowl.
Just about all of us agree that isn’t enough: we desperately want to see the Vikings hoist a Lombardi trophy at least once in our lifetime. And by this metric, there’s no difference between a Kirk Cousins and a Josh Allen, a KOC and a Kyle Shanahan: none have won a Super Bowl ring as a QB or head coach.
On the other hand, NFL analysis is very boring and unhelpful if the only goal is counting up past Super Bowl wins. Yes, we care about legacy, but more than anything, we care about predicting the future. Wikipedia can tell you the names of the QBs and coaches who have won a Super Bowl: the far more interesting and debate-worthy question is, who’s good enough to win one in the years to come?
Playoff wins are often held up as a crucial piece of evidence for answering this question: if a player or coach can win in the regular season but not the playoffs, the logic goes, then they’re fraudulent, middle-of-the-road, incapable of winning when it really matters. Both Kirk Cousins and Kevin O’Connell have been accused of this, along with many others.
But what do the data say? In the plot below, I explored how regular season winning percentage, point differential, and playoff wins in one season correlate with playoff wins* the next.
The conclusion: there is a lot of instability from year to year, so no statistic is a great predictor of future success. However, regular-season point differential and win percentage are better than postseason win percentage.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise: the playoffs are short, and very few teams get a chance to play more than 1-2 playoff games per year. With such a small sample size, there are inherently going to be large statistical fluctuations, so a dominant team might just have a really bad day (cf. the 2024 Lions loss to the Commanders), and a mediocre team might get hot at just the right time (cf. the 2011 Giants).
This means that one can’t just shrug off Kevin O’Connell’s excellent regular-season record of 43-25 based on a sample of two playoff losses. There are legitimate criticisms of Kevin O’Connell, and if the team has another lackluster season devoid of competent QB play in 2026, he’ll likely be shown the door.
But like Peyton Manning’s Colts or Steve Young’s 49ers, this era of Vikings football might just be the team that can’t win the big game…until they do.