Of all the pomp and circumstance of the NFL offseason, designed by the league office to keep us singularly focused on America’s favorite sport 365 days out of the year, the most silly event every year has got to be schedule release day. Still, the Minnesota Vikings’ schedule will have an early impact on their season.
Lots of people love to joke that the draft is silly, and that it “could’ve been an email.” I’ve always thought that undermined the insane and intoxicating ritual of the draft. But apply that same logic to the schedule release day? Yeah. That could just be an email, teams putting out a graphic on social media, and we call it a day. Instead, every team’s social media department now has to try to make an original sketch-comedy video, putting their athletes in starring roles as if they’re working on a high school video project.
And yet, it suckers me in. I watch them all. I clicked on every notification as Minnesota’s schedule slowly leaked one week at a time. I’d love to say I’m better than this silliness, but clearly I’m not.
The problem with looking at schedules in May and projecting into the regular season is that the NFL is such a year-to-year league. Our perceptions of what makes a tough schedule are so immensely difficult to predict when player development, coaching changes, and injury luck can completely flip a team’s outlook in a single season. But there are a few specific things I always look at.
Firstly, the division matchups. It may be nearly impossible to keep a finger on the pulse of all 32 teams to the intense degree necessary to project them accurately. Still, there is inherently a level of familiarity with the teams in our own backyard. Considering the stakes of those division games, where they land on the schedule, which stretches of matchups they fall into, and possible weather factors, all play a part in this. But I think there’s a really nice opportunity in how the league office set up the Vikings’ season kickoff.
Starting the year with back-to-back matchups against the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears comes with weighty stakes and a chance to make a big statement.
It’s worth noting that getting these two opponents early helps avoid facing them later in the season instead, and having no late-December trips into Green Bay or Chicago is a boon, especially when we don’t have a great sample size of Kyler Murray’s experience in cold-weather matchups. Playing in Chicago’s home opener also means that mud heap of a field should be in relatively acceptable conditions, or at least the best it’ll be all season. Couple that with taking care of both Green Bay games before Week 10, and that should allow Minnesota to dodge high-stakes games in cold weather.
From a football perspective, this is an interesting scenario. The Packers may be coming into Minneapolis in Week 1 without their best defensive player, Micah Parsons, as he finishes his rehabilitation from his season-ending ACL tear from Week 15 last year. That doesn’t mean the rest of the Green Bay defense is going to roll over without him. Still, I’d certainly prefer Kyler to get things rolling without Parsons breathing down his neck.
But speaking of Murray, the new quarterback is the biggest reason playing division opponents immediately intrigues me — specifically, the element of the unknown and the chance for the Vikings to use it to their advantage.
Remember the first game of Kevin O’Connell’s tenure in Minnesota, when Justin Jefferson launched a nuclear bomb on the Packers with KOC using shifts and motions to scheme him wide open all afternoon to the tune of nine catches, 184 yards, and two TDs? That game may be one of O’Connell’s best as a playcaller, and it caught the Packers completely off guard.
There’s a chance the Kyler Murray-led Vikings come with their own set of tendency breakers, new concepts, and the element of surprise, especially when they’ve had all offseason to gameplan for their division rivals. Even if it’s not as dramatic as O’Connell’s debut in 2023, I like striking deep into the division standing early before much tape is out on what to expect from this Kyler-O’Connell tandem.
I’ll acknowledge that I may be viewing the situation through purple-colored glasses, but I think that all the permutations where the Vikings catch fire involve a hot start, so you may as well get the jump on your rivals in the process. Of course, they might also crash and burn immediately, starting the year 0-2 in the NFC North and sending fans into a doom spiral. The stakes are certainly high, but May is the time to skew optimistic, so I advise ignoring that ingrained Minnesota sports pessimism for now.
