In their first game post-9/11, the Minnesota Vikings traveled to Soldier Field to face the Chicago Bears with much of the same team that made the NFC Championship Game the year prior.
The Three Deep passing attack was still intact with Randy Moss, Cris Carter and Jake Reed catching balls from Daunte Culpepper, but the Vikings only scored 10 points that day. It looked for a while like it might be enough to win as the Vikings led 10-0 in the third quarter, but the Bears stormed back and won the game with a touchdown catch by future Viking Marcus Robinson inside of four minutes remaining. Bears 17, Vikings 10.
It was a microcosm of the struggles the Vikings would eventually face over the next two decades. Monday night’s tilt in Chicago will be the 20th meeting since that 2001 game between the division rivals at Soldier Field. The Bears have won 16; the Vikings just three. An absentee Vikings offense has become the norm, as have late, heartbreaking touchdowns by the Bears. Minnesota has averaged a feeble 17.5 points in their last 19 in the Windy City, held to 13 or fewer in 10 of those games. Eight have been lost by one possession, four of which came on go-ahead fourth-quarter touchdowns by Chicago.
“I wasn’t here for all of the struggles, I guess,” said head coach Mike Zimmer, who is 2-4 at Soldier Field. “I think the biggest struggle is they’re really good. Their guys are really good. They’ve got good players and they’re coached well.
“That will be the biggest struggle for us, playing against a really good football team.”
The last relatively comfortable win by a Vikings team at Soldier Field was in 2000, a 28-16 victory. Only the 2007, 2015 and 2017 groups have escaped Chicago with a win since, and each time only by three points.
So what was the common thread that led to those victories? Let’s take a look back.
LEANING ON THE GROUND GAME
Vikings quarterbacks haven’t had much luck in Chicago. Even in their three victories, they haven’t had a quarterback reach 200 yards passing. Tarvaris Jackson went 9 of 23 back in 2007 (a 34-31 win), Teddy Bridgewater threw for 187 yards with one touchdown and one interception in 2015 (23-20), and Sam Bradford got replaced by Case Keenum for the second half of the 2017 game (20-17). The running game has carried the water in those instances with Adrian Peterson (twice) and Jerick McKinnon setting the tone for big days on the ground.
In the 2007 game, the Vikings required a historically good rushing performance from Peterson to win the game. It was just the rookie’s fifth career NFL game, and while it was clear already that Peterson was special, he delivered his first monster game against the Bears that day with 224 yards rushing and three touchdowns of 67, 73 and 35 yards, respectively. At the time, he became the seventh rookie in history to rush for 220 yards or better (and he’d do it again three weeks later).
The rushing stats in Minnesota’s other two wins were more modest but still impressive. Peterson carried 20 times for 103 yards in the Vikings’ 2015 win where team ran for 147 as a whole. The 2017 win was highlighted by Jerick McKinnon’s 58-yard touchdown run in the third quarter that propelled him to 95 yards on the day, while the team rushed for 159 yards.
Nobody would be surprised if this trend continued Monday night with Dalvin Cook, who’s rushed for 369 yards combined the last two weeks. But Cook has played two miserable games at Chicago, rushing for just 12 yards and 35 yards in Minnesota’s losses the past two seasons.
A BIG PLAY BY THE DEFENSE OR SPECIAL TEAMS
Without a handful of momentum-turning plays by specialists or defensive players, the Vikings may be riding a 19-game losing streak in Chicago.
The 2007 game was slipping away as the Bears stormed back with two touchdowns in the final three minutes to tie the game at 31. But this was Peterson’s big day, not just as a rusher but also as a kick returner. The Vikings used Peterson 16 times that year as a returner (and only once the rest of his career), including on the Bears final kickoff that afternoon. Peterson took the ball from the 9-yard line and returned it 54 yards to the Bears’ 37, setting up a game-winning field goal.
It was the punt return game that sparked the Vikings in 2015 with Marcus Sherels taking one 65 yards for a touchdown to give Minnesota its first lead. The Vikings didn’t score an offensive touchdown until the final two minutes of that game, so Sherels’ return was a must-have on an otherwise stagnant day for the offense.
And in 2017, it was a massive defensive play that helped decide the outcome. In fact, the Bears were the ones with the big special teams play that night as Benny Cunningham threw a touchdown off a fake punt in the third quarter. But ultimately it was Harrison Smith who came up with the game-altering play.
Then-rookie Mitch Trubisky was making his first-career start and, with the game tied at 17, took over at his own 10-yard line with over two minutes remaining. It felt like another classic Soldier Field setup for the Vikings to lose in heartbreaking fashion, but Trubisky delivered a gift in the form of a rookie mistake, an unwise pass on the run that Smith undercut for an interception that teed the Vikings up for a possible walk-off.
The 2020 Vikings could use a special teams boost, since they haven’t gotten many this season. The return game has been lackluster in both kickoff and punt, and the team is coming off a game against the Detroit Lions where Dan Bailey missed an extra point and Britton Colquitt had two punts blocked.
A CLUTCH FIELD GOAL
Along the same special teams lines, the Vikings needed last-second kicks to log all three of their wins at Soldier Field over the last 13 years. True to form, the 2007 game provided the most dramatic walk-off moment as Ryan Longwell set a career high with a 55-yard field goal as time expired.
The other two game-winners had a lower degree of difficulty. Blair Walsh made a 36-yard game-winning field goal in 2015 after Bridgewater set them up with a risky prayer to Charles Johnson along the right sideline. Two years later, Kai Forbath chipped in a 26-yarder to sneak by the Bears, also on Monday Night Football.
Amazingly, the Vikings haven’t made a game-winning field goal since that Forbath kick back in 2017.
If history is any indication, the Vikings won’t have an easy time Monday night, regardless of how poorly Bears quarterback Nick Foles is playing at the moment. Even in victory, the Vikings have struggled to find balance offensively and have been on the wrong end of blown leads and trick plays. Kirk Cousins could make things more comfortable with his own breakout performance, but it’s likelier that a Vikings win resembles those of the past: run-heavy, nail-biting and probably a bit ugly.
