Buried deep in Bill Simmons’ Friday podcast, which was headlined by potential Russell Westbrook trades, NFL playoff talk and a tribute to Alex Trebek, The Sports Guy went to bat for the Minnesota Vikings.
“I’m going to make a tiny case for the Vikings,” he told his guest, Ringer NFL writer Kevin Clark. “They’re 3-5. They actually have momentum. They beat Green Bay. They killed Detroit last week. They’re playing Chicago this week, Monday night.”
Go on.
“They get through that, they’re 4-5,” he continues. “Dallas next week, they’re 5-5. Carolina, Jacksonville [are] the next two.”
We’re all doing that here. We’re looking ahead at the Vikings schedule and going, ‘Well, now that they beat Green Bay and Detroit and can’t tank for a quarterback…can they make the playoffs?’
Simmons mentions the Monday night game and the three that come after. We all know how they can go wrong. Minnesota never wins in Chicago on Monday night. They might overlook the Dallas Cowboys or Jacksonville Jaguars. The Carolina Panthers will be a Teddy Bridgewater revenge game.
But the truth is, the Vikings have a pathway to the playoffs. Simmons sees it, and if you take a breath and just look at the schedule, it’s doable. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers game looked like a certain loss until they got smoked by the New Orleans Saints on Sunday Night Football. They might be able to take one from Tom Brady and the Bucs.
And the Saints game on Christmas seemed like a certain loss except, well, you know about the Minneapolis Miracle and the playoff win last year. Plus, Drew Brees is throwing with Chad Pennington-level arm strength, and the Superdome will only be a quarter full.
The Vikings could win out. Honestly, they should beat Nick Foles and the Bears, win the next three games and beat either the Bucs or the Saints. The only two games remaining on the schedule are against Chicago and Detroit — both winnable.
It’s unlikely they will, but they should sneak into the playoffs this year after starting 1-5.
Think I’m insane? Ask Simmons:
“I always used to write about the Week 8, Week 9 flip team, right?” he told Clark. “It was always a team that was 1-5, 2-5, 2-6, and in the second half of the year they came on like a freight train.
“Yeah, this Minnesota team starts out 1-5. There’s a world in which they’re 7-5 coming off that Jacksonville game in Week 13. … You split two of [the final four], you get to 9-7, and that might be a 7-seed. It might be.”
Here’s the thing: Clark agreed with him.
“So I want to talk about Minnesota, too, because I don’t even see them on the sportsbook to make the playoffs, because I think that wouldn’t be a bad long-shot,” he said, before clarifying that he only did a cursory search for them.
“With Cook, you know, this is an Occam’s razor season. I said this for four, five months. And if you could do one thing well, you can just keep doing it over and over again. Kirk Cousins is not going to single-handedly lift you to an elite second half of the season.”
Obviously Cousins isn’t going to single-handedly carry the Vikings to the playoffs, but Clark doesn’t think he needs to.
“Dalvin Cook had 206 yards last week, and 163 yards the week before,” he said. “He had over 200 all-purpose yards against the Packers. He set all sorts of records for yards in Lambeau Field, okay? And I kind of think he can do that for the next eight weeks.”
Clark says he “doesn’t want to be morbid,” but he mentions that the NFL has agreed to a contingency plan where there would be a 16-team playoffs if a COVID-19 outbreak causes the season to be shortened. That would obviously help the Vikings.
But he adds that we shouldn’t lose sight of the bigger picture here. The Vikings were supposed to be in the playoff mix this year. They were coming off a playoff loss to the team that represented the NFC in the Super Bowl. They were supposed to compete with Green Bay for the NFC North title. There were a lot of patsies on the schedule.
“I just like this Vikings team,” stated Clark. “There’s a reason I picked them…to make the playoffs, or close to it, at the beginning of the season, because I think they do have the talent.
“I’m generally higher on Kirk Cousins than most people, because I think that he can just sort of go as a supporting cast does, even though he makes some of these mistakes. I think you can put him in the position to succeed. And [with] Gary Kubiak, I kind of like it. I kind of like a nice little run here.”
Simmons mentions Cook’s injury history, which we all know about. And we all know that if he goes down, they have a .000001% chance of making it. But if he gets injured, he gets injured — nobody has any control over that.
As currently constructed, the Vikings are a good team. Entering the season, the general feeling among NFL coaches and GMs was that Cousins was the 15th-best quarterback in the league. Early this year, he became one of the league’s worst QBs. Now he seems to be back to being average, and an average Cousins should be enough to get to 9-7, 10-6 if they catch a break or two.
That’s a playoff team.
During the podcast, while Clark was talking, Simmons searched online and eventually found the betting odds on the Vikings making the playoffs.
“+140 to make the playoffs,” he said. “I kind of like that number.”
