You have probably seen a ton of content about regression this season. It’s only natural when following a 12-3 team that won 11 of those games by one score. One-score wins imply a degree of luck. After all, a different bounce on a fumble or a different referee call on pass interference could swing the game.
The Minnesota Vikings have gotten lucky, without a doubt. They’ve also gotten unlucky in a few ways you absolutely remember.
It’s a similar effect to gerrymandering in U.S. politics. If you win 51% of the vote, you get 100% of that district’s representation. In a 60%-40% state, five seats might all go to the party with 60% instead of a more representative 3-2 split. Now, in politics, those numbers are subject to many factors that aren’t relevant to football. In football, the difference between 51% of the win and 49% can be chalked up to luck.
You can absolutely argue that the Vikings would have lost their Christmas Eve game against the New York Giants if they were a little less lucky. If Greg Joseph doesn’t nail a 61-yard field goal, if Cordale Flott doesn’t drop a back-breaking interception in the third quarter, or if any number of things go New York’s way, we’d be talking about a different game.
This is where regression comes in. If the Vikings only won that game because they were lucky, what happens when the luck runs out? Can they win a game without Josh Allen fumbling in pseudo-victory formation? Or without Ihmir Smith-Marsette fumbling during a game-winning drive? It’s a valid question, but we are approaching it in a terrible way.
Too often, regression is presented as a reversion of the luck a team has already experienced. If you win 11 one-score games, you may think the Vikings “owe” 11 one-score losses. Or maybe you think this season is simply regression from last year’s slate of one-score losses. That’s not quite right either.
Regression is just the principle that luck will always even out. If you win 11 coin flips in a row, you are not due to lose the next 11 coin flips. That’s called the “gambler’s fallacy.” It’s why casinos display recent roulette wheel results — to trick you into seeing six black spins and think a red one is due or that black is somehow “hot.”
If you win 11 coin flips in a row, the 12th one’s odds will never change. Flip 200 more coins, and if they go evenly, your new total would be 111-100, 52% to 48%. That’s regression. The larger the sample gets, the more the results will match the true odds. That’s the whole idea behind a seven-game playoff series (in sports where seven consecutive games wouldn’t beat each player into a fine pulp).
So the way to approach regression with the Vikings isn’t to say that they “owe” one-score games back to the cosmos. They also don’t have magical powers that get them favorable ref calls or ball bounces. It’s to say that they are just as likely to win one-score games than they have always been. Rule of thumb, that’s a 50/50 proposition.
That’s just a rule of thumb. In reality, they can do plenty to keep their odds high, like managing the clock properly and holding to the “situational mastery” that Kevin O’Connell preaches. Those skills are notoriously difficult to repeat, so while the Vikings deserve credit for pulling it off, it will not show up in future projections. Good timeout decisions don’t add up like bowling frames; you must do it from scratch each time.
But the Vikings have had the proverbial high ground in many of these situations. Some of the one-score games are so in name only, like the one in Miami, where the Dolphins needed two touchdowns, two two-point conversions, and an onside kick. Hardly reliant on luck. In games against the Washington Commanders, Detroit Lions, New Orleans Saints, and New England Patriots, Minnesota’s opponent had less than a minute with no timeouts to get the score they needed. But even the real one-score games have seen the Vikings make some of their own luck with clock management.
The Vikings have only had to stop an opponent with any timeouts once, in Week 5 against the Chicago Bears. The Bears had one timeout remaining. It wasn’t enough to get the ball back after Cam Dantzler‘s game-winning strip. The Giants game may be the best example. Minnesota had 2:01 and one timeout in a tie game. New York had two timeouts, so if the Vikings got close, they could get the ball back.
Minnesota’s clock management felt very weird in that situation. They let most of it run off behind the 50 before kicking a 61-yard field goal. While I’d have preferred they get a little closer (taking a sack doesn’t help), they managed to set that field goal attempt up with Brian Daboll still holding on to both of his timeouts. Greg Joseph could miss, leading to overtime, or he could make it, leading to a win. That clock management left no outcome where the Vikings lose in regulation.
The Vikings have repeatedly put themselves in this situation. Even when they fail to get the stop (at the end of regulation in Buffalo, for example), they only give up the tie. They’ve only had two situations where the opponent had a true chance at a game-winning drive and not a game-tying drive: against the Lions and Bears in Weeks 3 and 5, respectively. Detroit came down to desperation heaves, and we’ve already covered Chicago.
The true question at the center of the regression conversation is whether or not the Vikings can win with average luck. It’s easy to see them at 11-0 in one-score games and assume they’ll be 5-5 in the next ones, but that’s just an average. The Vikings have won with good luck, average luck, and even in spite of bad luck this season. They’ve also made plenty of their own.
