RandBall: Why are the Vikings projected to be mediocre in 2025?

The Vikings last season won 14 games and had a chance to earn the No. 1 seed in the NFC until a loss to Detroit in the final game of the regular season.

Even after that tough loss to Detroit and a disheartening early playoff exit against the Rams, the Vikings seemed to establish themselves as a perennial contender — a team that quite possibly was part of the NFL’s elite.

Are you surprised, then, to learn that analytics projections say the Vikings are expected to be utterly mediocre in 2025?

I am.

Having an emotional reaction to dispassionate and unemotional data creates an opportunity to ask questions, at least. Namely: Why might the numbers say one thing about the Vikings while those closest to the team might think another?

I started that search on Thursday’s Daily Delivery podcast and will continue it here at the top of today’s 10 things to know.

First, a few examples. ESPN’s Football Power Index has the Vikings winning 8.6 games this season. NFL.com’s projections say 8.7. And their betting over-under number is 8.5 wins.

One reason the Vikings have a relatively low number is simply the nature of the projections, which tend to flatten and bunch teams together. The highest projected ESPN win total, for example is 10.6 (Buffalo) and the lowest is 6.2 (Cleveland). Last year, seven teams (including the Vikings) won at least 12 games while 10 teams won five or fewer.

The real standings in 2025 almost certainly will be more spread out than the analytics projections, as things like injuries and small-sample variance change teams’ fortunes for the better or worse.

But that doesn’t explain why the Vikings’ projected win totals in those cases are still relatively mediocre (14th out of 32 teams in ESPN’s FPI, for instance).

For that, we have other explanations.

The most obvious one is quarterback uncertainty. At this time last year, the Vikings’ betting over-under for the 2024 season was 7.5 wins. A lot of that was QB uncertainty, and then Sam Darnold delivered an out-of-nowhere Pro Bowl season. Now he’s gone, and second-year quarterback J.J. McCarthy, coming off a season-ending injury and without a snap of regular-season NFL experience, is projected to be the starter. As NFL.com notes: “The Vikings’ season largely hinges” on McCarthy’s play.

We also must remember that the Vikings went 9-1 in one-score games last season. Even if you believe coach Kevin O’Connell has a knack for leading his team to close wins, that number will be hard to duplicate.

And the Vikings play in arguably the toughest division in the NFL. Even the Bears project to be better this season. NFL.com even has Chicago at 8.9 wins, meaning the Vikings have the lowest projected total of the four teams in the NFC North. The Vikings have six division games, and going 4-2 (as they did last year by sweeping the Packers and Bears while being swept by the Lions) in those games will not be easy.

Even given all of that, though, my head still says 10 wins is a better baseline than eight or nine for the Vikings. Even with QB uncertainty, this is a playoff-caliber roster. That’s a gut instinct with built-in biases vs. data that tries to remove such things.

Here are nine more things to know today: