Vikings make odd history in touchdown-less win over Jaguars

No team had done what the Vikings did on Sunday in nearly 20 years.

Nov 10, 2024; Jacksonville, Florida, USA; Jacksonville Jaguars safety Darnell Savage (6) makes an interception catch against the Minnesota Vikings during the third quarter at EverBank Stadium. / Morgan Tencza-Imagn Images

The Vikings did something on Sunday that no NFL team had done in nearly 20 years.

The last time a team won a game while scoring zero touchdowns and turning the ball over at least three times was in 2006, when the Packers did it against none other than the Vikings. Since then, coming into this weekend, teams had lost 195 straight regular season games (and 5 playoff games) when meeting that criteria.

The Vikings just snapped that streak. They didn't score any touchdowns and got three interceptions from Sam Darnold, but they still managed to beat the Jaguars 12-7 in Jacksonville behind three takeaways from their defense and four field goals from kicker John Parker Romo in his NFL debut.

That 2006 game, by the way, was a 9-7 Packers win over the Vikings on a late-December Thursday night at Lambeau Field. The Vikings got a Fred Smoot pick-six off of Brett Favre as one of their three takeaways, but Tarvaris Jackson and the offense managed just 104 total yards and Green Bay won it in the final minutes on Dave Rayner's third field goal of the night.

The extent to which the Vikings dominated the Jaguars on the stat sheet on Sunday is almost hard to fathom when you consider the final score of the game and how many opportunities the Jags had to change the outcome.

The Vikings possessed the ball for 42 minutes and 19 seconds of game time, which is the highest time of possession by a team all season. They ran 82 offensive plays to the Jaguars' 43. They won the total yards battle 402 to 143. And they had 28 first downs to Jacksonville's 10. That's the most first downs the Vikings have ever had without scoring a touchdown (the previous high was 23 in 1989).

If not for the three Darnold interceptions and a general inability to execute in Jaguars territory, this would've been a blowout. But in seven trips to at least the Jacksonville 30-yard-line, the Vikings threw three picks and settled for four field goals, so they needed their defense to bail them out numerous times to escape with their seventh victory of the season.

What a strange way to a win a football game.