A Quarterly Look at the Schedule

At the beginning of the year, I evaluated the Vikings' schedule, dividing it into four categories and coming up with a goal for each category that was both attainable and would give the Vikings the 9-7 record the Purple need to assure themselves a playoff spot. The Vikings are a quarter of the way through their schedule, and it's become apparent that I need to reevaluate, both because the Vikings have already failed to reach one of their goals (both the Chiefs game and the game at Detroit were part of the "Should Win" group, which had a goal of 3-1) and because Dallas was in the "Must Win" category and was projected to win a little more than 6 games. Considering they're 5-0, it's obvious that the difficulty of that game needs to be reevaluated.

Football Outsiders continues to project each team's mean wins after each week, using the new data from that week's games to create a more accurate projection. They come up with mean wins by calculating the average number of wins for each team over 50,000 simulations of the season. This time, however, I'm splitting the season into three groups of four games and lowering the overall record the Vikings are aiming for to 8-8. While 9-7 would almost guarantee a wild card spot, 8-8 will likely be good enough, especially if they are able to gain tiebreakers over likely competitors like the Giants and Eagles.

Must Win	3-1	Should Win	3-1	Can Win	1-3
Team	Mean Wins	Team	Mean Wins	Team	Mean Wins
@ CHI	6.3	DET	7.3	@ GB	10.9
CHI	6.3	PHI	8.0	@ DAL	11.3
@ SF	6.0	SD	7.8	WAS	9.2
@ DEN	6.5	OAK	6.9	@ NYG	8.7

Luckily for the Vikings, they have seven games remaining against teams projected to finish below .500 and another game against a team projected to finish at exactly .500. And what looked to be a murderous second quarter of the season (@ CHI, @ DAL, PHI, SD) includes three teams whose projections have dropped, and only Dallas is currently projected to have a winning season. And in the second half, the Vikings face five teams projected to finish below .500, which means that if they can go 2-2 in the next four games, they wouldn't have to beat another team projected to be above .500 to finish at 8-8 and have a shot at the playoffs.

The bar has been lowered, which is what happens when you start out 1-3 and fail to show any signs of an offense. If the Vikings can find a way to generate 6 or 7 more points a game, however, the Vikings still have a very good shot at the playoffs, thanks to a soft schedule.

Did the Vikings lose games they shouldn't have?

Due to the fact that the Vikings managed to drop three games, none by more than seven points, all three losses can be considered opportunities squandered. If the Vikings had managed to make one or two more plays in each game, they could easily be sitting at 4-0. Were they beaten by superior teams? Or did they drop games against teams that they should have beaten? To answer this question, I've used Football Outsiders' Mean Wins and DAVE and compared each teams to the Vikings' Mean Wins and DAVE. After their first four games, the Vikings currently sit at 7.1 Mean Wins and -0.4% DAVE (the higher the DAVE score, the better).

TEAM	Mean Wins	DAVE	Wasted Win?
@ Detroit	7.3	-18.7%	YES
@ Kansas City	6.6	-22.3%	YES
Green Bay	10.9	16.7%	NO

As you probably would have guessed, the Vikings first two losses came against teams that they should have beaten, while their loss to Green Bay, while frustrating, was against a better football team. One of the ways to check the usefulness of statistics is to see whether they confirm what your intuition would say. It's obviously not the only way, but the fact that Mean Wins and DAVE tell us that the Vikings losses to Detroit and Kansas City came against inferior teams, which I would agree with, shows us that it's likely that these statistics are useful ones.