Can a Week 1 game be must-win? For the Vikings, it might be
Historically, Week 1 hasn’t been very predictive of what’s going to happen over a long season. Maybe you remember, for example, Chris Weinke and the 2001 Carolina Panthers beating the Vikings 24-13 at Metrodome and then losing 15 straight games after that. How about the Vikings’ 20-3 loss to the San Francisco 49ers in 2015? They couldn’t have looked worse and then ended up winning the division.
However, there have been a few times along the way that there were hints about the season to come. In 1998, the Vikings opened the season with a 31-7 smashing of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — a game in which a rookie receiver from Marshall went for 95 yards and two touchdowns. In 2017 we got a sense for how good the Vikings defense and weapons could be when they defeated a stacked New Orleans Saints team. And even last year, Justin Jefferson went for 184 yards vs. Green Bay and went on to have a historic season.
We won’t really know until we have the benefit of hindsight whether Week 1 was telling or not but this year Week 1 appears to carry more weight than usual.
In almost every case if the Vikings lost Week 1 there would be shrugs of shoulders and cries not to overreact. Plenty of time to get rolling. Remember last year when the 49ers feel to the Bears in the opener and then the losing team in that game went to the NFC Championship game and the winner of the Monsoon Bowl earned the No. 1 overall pick? That’s how it goes. But the Vikings’ schedule doesn’t leave much room for an aww-shucks loss, especially to a team that has the third worst Super Bowl odds in the NFL (per DraftKings).
The Vikings enter as six point favorites with lots of advantages, from Brian Flores’s defense getting the US Bank Stadium noise boost to the fact Baker Mayfield is 8-16 with an 81.3 quarterback rating since the start of 2021. He’s been sacked 79 times in that span.
Following the matchup against Tampa Bay, there aren’t as many advantages. The Vikings fly to Philadelphia three days later to face off with the Super Bowl runners up on Thursday Night Football. While the home-field edge isn’t that it used to be in the NFL, the Eagles have outscored opponents by 121 points at Lincoln Financial Field over the last two seasons. Philly also has the second best Super Bowl odds.
The Vikings have an extra couple days break prior to playing the Los Angeles Chargers in Week 3, but a healthy Justin Herbert and Co. make up another potential Super Bowl contender (10th best odds). The Vikings have struggled in recent years against new Chargers OC Kellen Moore, whose Cowboys club shredded them for 40 points last season.
After a stop in Carolina vs. rookie QB Bryce Young, the Vikings then return home to face off with Patrick Mahomes and the champion/2023 Super Bowl favorite Kansas City Chiefs.
ESPN’s Mike Clay projects the Vikings to have a 25% chance to win vs. the Eagles, 38% against Los Angeles and 29% to beat KC.
In total, based on Vegas win totals, the Vikings have one of the most difficult schedules in the NFL.
Of course, those numbers are not guarantees that the Vikings will lose those games — they upset the Bills last year, after all — but it does show how the pressure could ramp up quickly if they don’t win against Tampa Bay and how quickly it could roll downhill. Certainly 0-1 isn’t a big deal historically but 0-3 definitely is.
The schedule evens out toward the middle of the season with Clay’s projections leaning Vikings in six out of eight games after Kansas City. But if they fall behind early, there is little room for error.
There’s also the off chance that the Vikings could be battling for a playoff spot with the Bucs. Prognostications have them as a team struggling to reach the postseason but Tampa Bay is still sporting one of the best receiver duos in the NFL and a number of veteran defensive players who were in the Super Bowl not too long ago. In a weak NFC South, it’s not impossible that they could win enough to be jockeying for a wild card spot in December.
If there is a comparison from recent years, it’s probably 2021. The Vikings lost an overtime game to Cincinnati in Week 1, which meant that the ugly loss to the Cleveland Browns a few weeks later crushed the beginning of their season. Even a run of 6-4 in the middle of the year couldn’t help them reach the postseason.
Week 1 games usually don’t give us the answers to many offseason questions either but the Bucs’ roster should provide more insight than you’d expect. The Vikings’ two inexperienced cornerbacks go up against two 1,000-yard receivers. The interior offensive linemen, who both ranked top five in pressures allowed last year, will go up against Pro Bowler Vita Vea and aggressive defensive mind Todd Bowles. Rookie Jordan Addison will take on a solid secondary and we will get a look at how opponents have spent their offseasons game planning against Justin Jefferson.
So even if it’s a noon game without the top broadcast pair and only a small portion of the country seeing the game, the results will tell us how steep the hill is going to be during the first portion of the season and shed light on how many problems need to be solved along the way.
