Minnesota Vikings: Stingy defense has history on its side

While everyone has been (rightly) praising Case Keenum for his spectacular season, the Minnesota Vikings defense has quietly been one of the league’s best units in years.

Forget the hype surrounding the Jacksonville Jaguars defense (they played the easiest schedule in the NFL); the Minnesota Vikings had the best D in football this year — and it wasn’t particularly close. Though their defense blew a 17-point second half lead against the New Orleans Saints in the Divisional Round (they were subsequently bailed out by what’s being called, “The Minnesota Miracle”), history is squarely on their side as they prepare to face the Philadelphia Eagles this weekend.

The Vikings led the NFL in both points allowed and yards allowed. The 23 touchdowns they gave up defensively was the lowest total in the league in four years. And Minnesota allowed only 25.2 percent of third downs to be converted against them. The gap between them and the next best team (Denver Broncos, 31.6 percent) was as large as the gap between the second and 15th-best rates. In fact, no team has been stingier on third downs since Pro Football Reference began tracking the stat in 1991.

And though some of their numbers may have been padded a bit against three inferior opponents to close the season (they yielded an average of just 5.7 points and 200.3 yards per game against Cincinnati, Aaron Rodgers-less Green Bay and Chicago), their schedule as a whole was reasonably difficult. All told, they faced five playoff teams — including three division winners — with a total of 12 games against clubs that finished the year with at least seven wins. But there’s one metric that’s particularly impressive when it comes to the 2017 Vikings’ season.

Pro Football Reference displays a stat called Simple Rating System (SRS). It assigns a value to each team, taking into account its margin of victory and strength of schedule. SRS is also broken down into offensive (OSRS) and defensive (DSRS) ratings, relative to an average value of 0. Minnesota’s DSRS of 6.8 was among the top 40 defenses of the Super Bowl era.

Teams with such a high DSRS have had incredible success at this point of the postseason. Collectively, they’ve posted a 19-5 record (.792 winning percentage) in Conference Championship games. That includes a 7-3 mark on the road, which is certainly noteworthy in Minnesota’s case.

Standing in the Vikings’ path to the Super Bowl is a Philadelphia Eagles team that tied for second in the league in OSRS behind the Los Angeles Rams. However, Philly lost its starting quarterback, Carson Wentz, to a torn ACL in Week 14 and their offense hasn’t been nearly as formidable since.

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After a 34-point outburst against the last-place New York Giants, the Eagles have scored a total of just one offensive touchdown in their subsequent three games. Philadelphia is certainly not going to find it any easier to score against one of the best defensive units the NFL has seen in recent years.