Sshhhh, don't tell me how the second half ends...

[vike daddy]

1 hour ago, Vikes_Bolts1228 said:

Just can't pretend it didn't happen to make our stats look better.

the intent of the analysis is not an attempt to make stats look better, no one cares about stats other than the W-L one.

the point is that the game was an outlier, an anomaly relative to the behavior of all the other data points. there is enough data from the other games to expect better results than the one outlier.

[Vikes_Bolts1228]

42 minutes ago, vike daddy said:

 

the point is that the game was an outlier, an anomaly relative to the behavior of all the other data points. there is enough data from the other games to expect better results than the one outlier.

Yes the Rams game is an outlier but not how you think it is. It says to me that the Vikings can take care of bottom 5 offenses but struggled against a top offense.

Right now, the outlier is that we played dreadfully against a top offense (Rams) and played well against another top offense (Saints). 1-2 against elite offenses. 50% won't win you a Super Bowl.

I could care less how we've done against teams that a middle of the road defenses could handle easily. Right now, we're 50% against elite offenses that we'll be having to go against in January. The Bears will be a real challenge. The Patriots will be a real challenge. And right now, we're 1 for 2 against real challenges. 

Do I think we're on our way to an elite defense? Absolutely. But I'm not going to ignore a game where the defense stayed in MN rather than traveling to LA. It worries me. It does. You guys can be excited about stopping the 32nd or 29th ranked offense in the league but I'm worried how we did against the #2 offense

What happens if the Bears drop 34 on us Sunday? Do we post a tweet saying "Well if you get rid of the Rams game & the Bears game, the defense looks pretty good!"

Absolutely meaningless stats.

[Torchezim]

3 hours ago, Vikes_Bolts1228 said:

No offense but I hate when we say "Well if it wasn't for this game or that game, our stats would look a lot better!"

Pointless exercise. The defense failed to shut down a top-3 when we needed them to. If the defense even plays halfway decent, we win. Just can't pretend it didn't happen to make our stats look better.

Besides, those stats don't impress me when 5 of the other 7 of those games were against the #32, 31, 29, 23, 19 ranked offenses.

I am impressed with the defense controlling the Saints and somewhat impressed with the D vs. GB and we'll see how we do the next 3 weeks with 3 tough games.

I don't think it's about what the stats were compared to what we wanted them to be, and then using that as a platform to say, "Well if this or that bleh bleh". It's about realizing that it was early in the season and our defense hadn't rounded into form yet. It's about most fans getting excited, because barring injury, our defense is becoming what it was meant to be when the season started. It's about, that even though no one is saying that our defense would have completely dominated Los Angeles, that they were capable of doing so much more with the personnel available to them.

I would say we both failed to shut down a top 3 defense because of numerous reasons. If we had played up to our potential, does that mean that we would have won? No, not at all. But we are certainly a lot better than we showed that Thursday night. 

However, your main point is correct. It's a pointless exercise, but still necessary to uphold positive vibes for a very raucous fan base. Mostly when things don't go as planned.

I don't intend to speak for all fans but I feel strongly that this is the mindset they possess when they offer the shoulda coulda scenarios. We just know that what we displayed then, is not at all comparable to what we are capable of; it eats at us wondering what could have happened if we had begun the season as tightly knit with both our offense and defense. As it seems to be coming all together now. 

[Vikes_Bolts1228]

14 minutes ago, Torchezim said:

I don't think it's about what the stats were compared to what we wanted them to be, and then using that as a platform to say, "Well if this or that bleh bleh". It's about realizing that it was early in the season and our defense hadn't rounded into form yet.

See, this is my question.....

Did the defense really round into form or is it an illusion based off the offenses we've played of late sans New Orleans?

I said it earlier in this thread.....this team is still a complete mystery. I'm not confident like I was this time last year. Partly due to the schedule....partly due to them not beating a team over .500 yet. 

These next 3-4 weeks are going to reveal everything about this team. It's exciting but as Vikings fans....nerve racking at the same time!

[Krauser]

There’s no sharp distinction between elite offenses and other offenses, it’s a continuum. Being the best defense in the league based on 8 games work is useful information, if you’re trying to predict how the Vikings will do in important games for the rest of this year. 

Holding up the Rams game as specially diagnostic is disingenuous, especially if some of the mitigating factors (short week on TNF, cross country flight, defensive MVP and captain admitted to a psychiatric ward just days earlier) aren’t mentioned. 

Some fans take special pride in their skepticism (putting it as politely as possible) and will continue to doubt this team until they win a Super Bowl, if they ever do. That’s fine. If that’s you, that’s your prerogative. 

But the tone of aggrieved frustration about the supposed decline of the defense is misplaced, in my opinion. It’s based entirely on one game (since the stats show the defense has matched last year’s performance otherwise) — a game where the Vikings played poorly and got outschemed and ran into an opponent playing at an unusually high level in unusually unfavorable circumstances. 

The truth is the Vikings defense is still one of the best in the league, despite the high profile fiasco in the Rams game. The offense and special teams have been the real problem — both are performing much worse than they did last year:

...and have cost the team what would otherwise be a 6-3 (Carlson FG in OT), 7-2 (avoid fumbles against the Bills and mount a scoring drive before the 4th quarter) or possibly even 8-1 (Thielen fumble and pick 6 in the Saints game record). 

The defense should be expected to play well in the Bears game. Modern NFL being what it is, the defense playing well might still mean giving up 24 points and 350 yards, but if the offense can hold on to the ball, sustain drives and score (for a change), this is the game the Vikings should win. 

Maybe it won’t work out — predictions are hard, especially about the future. If the defense gives up 34 and get torched, I’m not going to be pretending they played well. I’m not trying to cheer you up, I’m trying to describe the situation to date accurately in order to make better predictions for the future.

But I think there’s good reason for Vikings fans to be optimistic the defense will play well enough that the team will win if the offense doesn’t give the game away. 

Feel free to write out your predictions ahead of time. If you don’t want to put your money where your mouth is, at least don’t complain when I do. 

[Vikes_Bolts1228]

30 minutes ago, Krauser said:

There’s no sharp distinction between elite offenses and other offenses, it’s a continuum. Being the best defense in the league based on 8 games work is useful information, if you’re trying to predict how the Vikings will do in important games for the rest of this year. 

Holding up the Rams game as specially diagnostic is disingenuous, especially if some of the mitigating factors (short week on TNF, cross country flight, defensive MVP and captain admitted to a psychiatric ward just days earlier) aren’t mentioned. 

 

Feel free to write out your predictions ahead of time. If you don’t want to put your money where your mouth is, at least don’t complain when I do. 

So now we make excuses as to why the defense played bad? Every team in the league face adversity. Whether it's bad travel, TNF games, missing players, injuries, deaths, etc. EVERY team deals with it so please let's not use that as a reason why they were dreadful. I'll buy it for the Buffalo game but not the Rams game.

Sorry, I can't look at a game against the 32nd ranked Cardinals offense and think "Huh....we shut them down! Bodes well against the Bears & Patriots!"

And what predictions did you make besides posting stats? Good job coming up with the stats but I'm just saying they're meaningless and meant to give us a flase sense of confidence. Not complaining in the least about them....they're just not for me. It's like looking at the 1st 3 games of a college football season and basing the rest of the season's success on how they played against Southern Blueball State. Good job beating the scrubs but get back to me when you play the conference games.

 Also, I already gave my predictions for the rest of the season. 10-5-1 if you don't want to go back to page 2. Like I said....I'm cautiously optimistic but not confident yet. We have A LOT of challenges coming up against very good teams. We've taken care of business against sub .500 teams but have yet to win a game against a team .500 or better.

If that makes me a "pessimist" in your eyes, so be it. 
 

[Krauser]

10 minutes ago, Vikes_Bolts1228 said:

See, this is my question.....

Did the defense really round into form or is it an illusion based off the offenses we've played of late sans New Orleans?

If you frame it as a question, I can answer that for you. 

The stat you want is DVOA, which is based on success rate (per play) and adjusted for quality of opponent. 

The Vikings defense was 10th in the league in DVOA after 3 games (Niners, Packers, Bills), at -13.4% (minus numbers are good for defenses). See here: https://www.footballoutsiders.com/dvoa-ratings/2018/week-3-dvoa-ratings

I don’t know what the defense’s DVOA was in the Rams game but it was super terrible, bad enough that they dropped from a good number and 10th place in the league, to a bad number for the season as a whole (+7.2%) and 25th in the league, after just that one game: https://www.footballoutsiders.com/dvoa-ratings/2018/week-4-dvoa-ratings

Expected points are a similar metric to DVOA and they put the Vikings defense’s performance in LA as clearly the worst of their year so far, and one of the worst of the season (the Panthers giving up 52 points to Pittsburgh without forcing a punt were only slightly worse). I posted a screenshot of the expected points per game in the “defense is offensive” thread, if you want to check that out.

Since the Rams game, the Vikings defense has steadily improved and is now 7th in the league, with a DVOA similarly good to where it was in week 3 (-8.4%, 7th): https://www.footballoutsiders.com/dvoa-ratings/2018/week-4-dvoa-ratings

It’s taken them 5 more games but they’ve managed to undo the damage from the Rams game. Just looking at the current ranking, it’s obvious that if the Rams game was excluded, they’d be no worse than top 3 (Texans are 3rd, only slightly better than the Vikings at -11.3%), along with the Bears and the Bills.

This gradual return to respectability if not quite excellence is indeed adjusted by opponent quality, and if anything those adjustments have hurt the Vikings: they’ve played better QBs for several teams (Allen better than Peterman, Garoppolo better than Beatherd etc, Rosen better than the husk of Sam Bradford), who’s changing level of quality during the year would tend to make the Vikings look worse by comparison (the Bears have benefitted from the opposite effect, facing Peterman and Osweiler instead of Allen and Tannehill will tend to inflate their DVOA since opponent adjustments are based on the opponent’s performance for the year as a whole). They’ve also played all their games except the Jets game in ideal conditions, which means stats are easier to rack up. So a super refined version of DVOA probably boosts the Vikings defense up further than 7th, even including the Rams game, and would make them roughly the best in the league without it.

Of course they could still fall apart in Chicago this weekend, but as I said, there’s reason to expect them to play well, given their very good to great performance in every other game this year except TNF in LA.

Quote

I said it earlier in this thread.....this team is still a complete mystery. I'm not confident like I was this time last year. Partly due to the schedule....partly due to them not beating a team over .500 yet. 

These next 3-4 weeks are going to reveal everything about this team. It's exciting but as Vikings fans....nerve racking at the same time!

I mean, it’s hard to beat a team over .500 if you’ve only played 2, the Rams and the Saints. It might be easier to gauge where they’re at if they’d had the Panthers at home, or the Seahawks game already, or the Bengals and Steelers instead of the Jets and Bills. But this is the schedule they’ve played, and a reasonable understanding of where they’re at is a top 5-10 team aside from the 5 day stretch after Griffen got admitted to hospital, where they didn’t show up for the Bills game and then got boat raced by the Rams.

They’re 5-1-1 otherwise: the loss to the best team in football right now, the tie at Lambeau where the Packers are unbeaten with Rodgers in 2 years despite being a mediocre to bad team on the road, a close win at Philly before their injury bug hit and where the score was only that close because they conceded a TD to run out the clock, and 4 wins by 8 points or more. 

They’re not a bad team even with the stretch when they played 2 games in 5 days after the best player on the team last year was admitted to a mental ward; they’re a very good team otherwise. 

I agree we’ll see what they’re made of over the month coming out of the bye.

That’s what we said last year, when they were 5-2 at the bye with only one somewhat impressive win (Saints in the season opener), and facing a “gauntlet”: @ WAS, Rams, @ DET, @ ATL, @ CAR. Few expected them to do better than 3-2 over that stretch, but they went 4-1. 

I think they’ll win 3 of the next 4. Hopefully that includes both divisional games.

[Vikes_Bolts1228]

8 minutes ago, Krauser said:

If you frame it as a question, I can answer that for you. 

The stat you want is DVOA, which is based on success rate (per play) and adjusted for quality of opponent. 

The Vikings defense was 10th in the league in DVOA after 3 games (Niners, Packers, Bills), at -13.4% (minus numbers are good for defenses). See here: https://www.footballoutsiders.com/dvoa-ratings/2018/week-3-dvoa-ratings

I don’t know what the defense’s DVOA was in the Rams game but it was super terrible, bad enough that they dropped from a good number and 10th place in the league, to a bad number for the season as a whole (+7.2%) and 25th in the league, after just that one game: https://www.footballoutsiders.com/dvoa-ratings/2018/week-4-dvoa-ratings

Expected points are a similar metric to DVOA and they put the Vikings defense’s performance in LA as clearly the worst of their year so far, and one of the worst of the season (the Panthers giving up 52 points to Pittsburgh without forcing a punt were only slightly worse). I posted a screenshot of the expected points per game in the “defense is offensive” thread, if you want to check that out.

Since the Rams game, the Vikings defense has steadily improved and is now 7th in the league, with a DVOA similarly good to where it was in week 3 (-8.4%, 7th): https://www.footballoutsiders.com/dvoa-ratings/2018/week-4-dvoa-ratings

It’s taken them 5 more games but they’ve managed to undo the damage from the Rams game. Just looking at the current ranking, it’s obvious that if the Rams game was excluded, they’d be no worse than top 3 (Texans are 3rd, only slightly better than the Vikings at -11.3%), along with the Bears and the Bills.

This gradual return to respectability if not quite excellence is indeed adjusted by opponent quality, and if anything those adjustments have hurt the Vikings: they’ve played better QBs for several teams (Allen better than Peterman, Garoppolo better than Beatherd etc, Rosen better than the husk of Sam Bradford), who’s changing level of quality during the year would tend to make the Vikings look worse by comparison (the Bears have benefitted from the opposite effect, facing Peterman and Osweiler instead of Allen and Tannehill will tend to inflate their DVOA since opponent adjustments are based on the opponent’s performance for the year as a whole). They’ve also played all their games except the Jets game in ideal conditions, which means stats are easier to rack up. So a super refined version of DVOA probably boosts the Vikings defense up further than 7th, even including the Rams game, and would make them roughly the best in the league without it.

Of course they could still fall apart in Chicago this weekend, but as I said, there’s reason to expect them to play well, given their very good to great performance in every other game this year except TNF in LA.

I mean, it’s hard to beat a team over .500 if you’ve only played 2, the Rams and the Saints. It might be easier to gauge where they’re at if they’d had the Panthers at home, or the Seahawks game already, or the Bengals and Steelers instead of the Jets and Bills. But this is the schedule they’ve played, and a reasonable understanding of where they’re at is a top 5-10 team aside from the 5 day stretch after Griffen got admitted to hospital, where they didn’t show up for the Bills game and then got boat raced by the Rams.

They’re 5-1-1 otherwise: the loss to the best team in football right now, the tie at Lambeau where the Packers are unbeaten with Rodgers in 2 years despite being a mediocre to bad team on the road, a close win at Philly before their injury bug hit and where the score was only that close because they conceded a TD to run out the clock, and 4 wins by 8 points or more. 

They’re not a bad team even with the stretch when they played 2 games in 5 days after the best player on the team last year was admitted to a mental ward; they’re a very good team otherwise. 

I agree we’ll see what they’re made of over the month coming out of the bye.

That’s what we said last year, when they were 5-2 at the bye with only one somewhat impressive win (Saints in the season opener), and facing a “gauntlet”: @ WAS, Rams, @ DET, @ ATL, @ CAR. Few expected them to do better than 3-2 over that stretch, but they went 4-1. 

I think they’ll win 3 of the next 4. Hopefully that includes both divisional games.

Great post. Makes more sense now with the explanation.

And I still think we're a good team. I'm fairly confident we're going to take the division at 10-5-1 but there's just not enough of a sample size (like you said) against quality opponents to say "Yep! We got this!" We've had a good win in Philly regardless of their record and we should have won in Lambeau.

I also have us beating Chicago, Green Bay, and Seattle but losing a close one to New England. So we agree 3 of the next 4.

Like I said, we're in for a challenge the rest of the season and I'm not sure the team has faced enough of these challenges to give a definitive, confident outcome. I honest to God wish I could say "Oh yeah....we're for sure going to take 3 of the next 4! Skol to the Bowl!" but more like "I think we have a good shot at taking 3 of 4."

 

 

[Krauser]

14 minutes ago, Vikes_Bolts1228 said:

So now we make excuses as to why the defense played bad? Every team in the league face adversity. Whether it's bad travel, TNF games, missing players, injuries, deaths, etc. EVERY team deals with it so please let's not use that as a reason why they were dreadful. I'll buy it for the Buffalo game but not the Rams game.

Again, Everson Griffen was placed under a mental health hold and admitted to a psychiatric hospital. That’s not something that happens to every team. 

Closest I can remember for the Vikings were Adrian Peterson’s son dying before the Vikings got blown out by the Panthers in 2013, and him being accused of child abuse before the Vikings got blown out by the Patriots. Those weren’t good Vikings teams, but even so, those were particularly bad performances.

Maybe you don’t think Griffen’s situation is relevant, but when the team’s 2 worst games by far followed immediately thereafter, I don’t think those results should condition our expectations too strongly going forward.

[Vikes_Bolts1228]

1 minute ago, Krauser said:

Again, Everson Griffen was placed under a mental health hold and admitted to a psychiatric hospital. That’s not something that happens to every team. 

Closest I can remember for the Vikings were Adrian Peterson’s son dying before the Vikings got blown out by the Panthers in 2013, and him being accused of child abuse before the Vikings got blown out by the Patriots. Those weren’t good Vikings teams, but even so, those were particularly bad performances.

Maybe you don’t think Griffen’s situation is relevant, but when the team’s 2 worst games by far followed immediately thereafter, I don’t think those results should condition our expectations too strongly going forward.

Sure it doesn't happen every day. It was certainly tough.

But Pittsburgh watched one of their starting linebackers get paralyzed on the field and finished the season 4-1 (including the game Shazier was injured in and winning the next week).

It's scary stuff but it's something teams can't use an excuse as to why they didn't win.

[Klomp]

6 hours ago, Vikes_Bolts1228 said:

No offense but I hate when we say "Well if it wasn't for this game or that game, our stats would look a lot better!"

Pointless exercise. The defense failed to shut down a top-3 when we needed them to. If the defense even plays halfway decent, we win. Just can't pretend it didn't happen to make our stats look better.

Besides, those stats don't impress me when 5 of the other 7 of those games were against the #32, 31, 29, 23, 19 ranked offenses.

So it's not fine to say "if it wasn't for this game our stats would look better" but fine to say "our stats don't look as good because they're against these teams"?

[Vikes_Bolts1228]

8 minutes ago, Klomp said:

So it's not fine to say "if it wasn't for this game our stats would look better" but fine to say "our stats don't look as good because they're against these teams"?

Who's saying our stats don't look good? Where did I say that? Not once did I say we should discredit the defense's play because it was against bad offenses.

We did what was expected against those garbage teams. Good job for doing that but not exactly impressive.

[Klomp]

27 minutes ago, Vikes_Bolts1228 said:

Who's saying our stats don't look good? Where did I say that? Not once did I say we should discredit the defense's play because it was against bad offenses.

Sorry, "those stats don't impress me"

[Vikes_Bolts1228]

13 minutes ago, Klomp said:

Sorry, "those stats don't impress me"

That's not saying they don't look good. It shows they got the job done when they were supposed to.

But I'm not impressed that we're the 7th best defense against bottom 5 offenses because we rule out the time where we played the #2 offense.

I'm more impressed with our stats when we include that game because they're still good despite not showing up defensively at all and I'm even more impressed that we had a legit shot at winning that game despite the defense. It's something I wasn't confident in last year at all.

Anyways, I'm done discussing those stats. If you guys enjoy looking at them, awesome! I just don't take stock into them.

[Krauser]

7 hours ago, Vikes_Bolts1228 said:

But I'm not impressed that we're the 7th best defense against bottom 5 offenses because we rule out the time where we played the #2 offense.

I'm more impressed with our stats when we include that game because they're still good despite not showing up defensively at all and I'm even more impressed that we had a legit shot at winning that game despite the defense. It's something I wasn't confident in last year at all.

Anyways, I'm done discussing those stats. If you guys enjoy looking at them, awesome! I just don't take stock into them.

They’re not the 7th best defense if you exclude the Rams game, they’re the 1st best, and probably by quite a bit. 

7th best is including the Rams game.

7th best is also adjusted for the quality of the opponents they’ve faced, and again, those adjustments are weighted further against them than they might otherwise: the Bills offense wasn’t good when the Vikings played them but it was better than the 3 game stretch with Peterman and Anderson starting where they scored zero TDs and had 11 turnovers, the Niners with Garoppolo and before some other key injuries on offense were much more potent than they were with CJ Beatherd or Nick Mullens, the Eagles OL was healthy for the Vikings game in a way it hasn’t been before or since, etc. So even 7th is probably a lowball estimate of how they’ve actually played.

The stats you don’t care about enough to bother to understand correctly first came up in a thread discussing the supposed overall decline of the defense this year (“How did our defense become so offensive”), a thread that had several comments about Zimmer and his defense being figured out. I agree, McVay and the Rams did outscheme and outplay them, but the results were an outlier (over 200 yards more given up in that game than any other, and -25 expected points worse from the defense than in any other game).

By “outlier” I don’t mean the results don’t count, or should be completely ignored, I mean that they’re so far off the map statistically that they can make it hard to understand what the rest of the year looks like, because they skew the rest of the sample so far in that one direction. If you were doing stats on a group of 9 people, and the group consisted of 8 11-year olds plus Linval Joseph, the fact that Joseph outweighs the 6th graders by over 200 pounds each is worth mentioning, and discussing that group in terms of their average numbers (they weigh an average of 120 pounds) is less informative than showing the statistical split within the group (the 11-year olds weigh an average of 90 pounds, and Joseph weighs 350). 

The Rams game was the big outlier.

The Vikings defense allowed 556 yards in LA. Their next highest total of yards allowed was the Eagles game where they allowed 364, but under 300 excluding the 75 yard prevent defense garbage time TD drive, next was 351 yards to the Packers, which included 55 yards in OT, and 4th worst was the Niners game in week one, where they allowed 327. They have 4 games where they allowed 250-300 yards (Bills, Saints, Cards, Jets) and then the Lions who gained only 209.

If you give the defense credit for playing 70 minutes in Lambeau and facing 2 more drives there than in a typical game, and then recognize that the Eagles last drive was a tactic to run out the clock and not an accurate reflection of the defense trying and failing to make a stop, 8 of their 9 games are clustered within about 100 yards, from Detroit at 209 to SF at 327, with an even tighter group of 6 between 263 (Jets) and 296 (Packers before OT), which would average roughly in the 280 range (dropping the lowest and highest totals, Lions and Rams, and adjusting for game script in PHI and GB).

That 280 yard per game average is interesting because it would be the best in the league this year, and while it includes 3 games against rookie QBs, it also includes full games against Brees and the Saints in world beating mode, Rodgers and Wentz on the road, and Stafford and Garoppolo. The fact that they played that well against good to great QBs on multiple other occasions makes the Rams game — where they allowed literally DOUBLE as many yards as their average for the rest of the year, makes that game look less like a dangerous trend of incompetence facing elite talent, and more like an outlier, an unusually bad game by the defense playing in unusual circumstances facing an offense having an unusually good day. 

You can do a similar exercise with scoring. The Vikings have only allowed 17 TDs from scrimmage (excluding returns and the blocked punt) this year, which is 2nd fewest in the league. 5 of them came in the Rams game, and only 12 in their other 8 games combined. The Bills scored 3 TDs (weird, right? Almost like the Vikings weren’t playing to their usual standard for some reason), and no one else on their schedule has scored more than 2 TDs against them, again including the Packers (who scored 3 TDs in Seattle), Lions (who scored 3 in Chicago), Saints (averaging over 4 TDs per game, only one other game held with less than 3 when they put up 2 TDs in Cleveland, they scored one TD on offense in the Vikings game) and Eagles. In other words, they allowed 8 TDs in 5 days after Griffen was hospitalized, and only 9 TDs for the rest of the year combined. 

Points tell a similar story. The Rams scored 38 and would have had 41 if they hadn’t missed a chip shot FG. Next highest point totals against the Vikings defense (excluding returns and special teams scores) were the Bills with 27 (Buffalo had 5 scoring drives but only 2 of those drives were longer than 25 yards thanks to Cousins fumbling and a bad game from the punt team), Saints with 23 (including an 18 yard TD drive after Thielen’s fumble and Treadwell’s penalty), Packers with 22 (through 70 minutes) and Eagles with 21 (14 before garbage time). The rest of their games were at 17 points allowed or fewer, meaning the rookie QBs plus the Lions only putting up 3 FGs.

Compare that to the Bears, the consensus best defense in the league this year.

Chicago allowed 3 TDs to the Packers in the 4th quarter to blow a big lead at Lambeau, giving up 24 points and 370 yards. They gave up 541 yards and 31 points to the Dolphins and Osweiler (!) in an OT game on the road, blowing leads of 21-10 in the late 3Q and 28-21 with 3 minutes to go — the Dolphins haven’t had another game with more than 375 yards all year, and their next highest points total was 28, against the Raiders. They gave up 24 points (excluding 2 return TDs) and 381 yards at home to the Patriots, including a 96 yard TD drive against in the 4th quarter to just about put the game away at 38-24. 

On the plus side, they held the Bucs to 10 points — TB has only had one other game where they scored less than 26, last week when Washington held them to 3 points — and 311 yards, the Bucs 2nd lowest total and one of only 2 games where they didn’t put up 400. They held Seattle to 17 points and 276 yards, both season lows, but then the Seahawks have had a few mediocre games on offense (17 points and 356 vs Chargers, 20 points and 331 at Cards, 24 points and 295 vs Dallas, etc). 

Chicago’s performance against common opponents has been very similar to the Vikings in almost every case: 24 points to GB (Vikings allowed 22 plus the blocked punt), 14 to Arizona (Vikings allowed 10 plus the fumble return), 10 to the Jets (Vikings allowed 17), and 22 to the Lions including a garbage time TD (Vikings allowed 9). The one exception was the Bills game, where Chicago faced Nathan Peterman instead of Josh Allen — as bad as the Bills are, they scored 20 against the Chargers with Allen, and 13 in a win against the Titans, compared to scoring 0 in the first half of the Ravens game with Peterman. 

All these are small sample sizes, and it’s possible to interpret the numbers differently, but the Vikings defense hasn’t been far behind the Bears even including the Rams game, and they’ve got a fair case to be even better than them if that game is considered an outlier — which it was, at least statistically.