Rollercoasters and Card Counters: The Vikings Ride The Wave and Pull Out an Unlikely Win

It’s hard to imagine a bigger roller coaster than the Minnesota Vikings and, more than that, the performance they put together in their unlikely win over the Green Bay Packers. Some of it was intentional and much of it was not.

But, against good teams, that’s where they plan to live.

Is it sustainable? Is it going to take them to the playoffs? Is it going to restore Kevin O’Connell’s reputation as a quarterback whisperer? Who knows. All we can determine at this point is that the journey is going to be a heart attack.

The game opened with a Kyler Murray interception, a panic ball off of his back foot against pressure. The Packers didn’t do very much to capitalize on it, with the Vikings’ own pressure package harassing the backfield. That, and a false start penalty, held the Packers to a long field goal attempt despite the favorable field position.

At the conclusion of their opening series, both Jordan Love and Murray produced under negative-one EPA per play.

It really felt like that was going to be the story of the game, but a brutal injury to Murray on his fifth dropback and a nearly back-breaking big play from Christian Watson produced a new narrative direction for the game.

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From there, it felt like the best a Vikings fan could hope for was to hold on and hope the pain wouldn’t be too unbearable. Surely, it wouldn’t be — the fanbase has suffered worse than a humiliation from a rival on opening weekend.

In short, the repeated gut punches had prepared them for a swift kick in the teeth.

There wasn’t much throughout the first three quarters that dispelled that, though they did stem the bleeding — the quick strike in the middle of the first quarter wasn’t replicated and the Packers managed 2.17 points per drive following that. Not a drought, but not as brutal as how the game began.

And a truth emerged from that experience — Jordan Love was struggling. It didn’t seem like that at first; in the first half he was averaging 10.5 yards per attempt with a passer rating of 120.3 and +0.31 expected points per dropback.

But a typical Love dropback featured more problems than solutions, buttressed by an 81-yard catch-and-run from Watson, a speed/size wunderkind who had signed a new deal and out-angled safety Theo Jackson to the sideline and open space.

He was successful on only 36.8 percent of his dropbacks. The NFL average this week was 45 percent and the high-level quarterbacks were generating success at a 65 percent clip. He was completing just 47.4 percent of his passes, and a quarter of those completions weren’t even helping the offense.

Without that Watson catch — which is important to consider given that it counts on the scoreboard and tells us about the Vikings’ risk profile on defense — Love only generated 6.6 yards per attempt and produced negative expected points, even without throwing a pick. On average, his per-dropback EPA was -0.04 without one throw to Watson.

These aren’t mere outliers to eliminate when considering the nature of the Vikings defense — D.K. Metcalf torched the Vikings in just as embarrassing a manner last year, after all — but it does explain why the Vikings had a path to victory despite top-level statistics that suggested Love was dealing.

That opened the door for the Vikings to score 29 points unanswered. But it started with the defense.

So, let’s talk about that. What is the story of this defense?

The Vikings defensive strategy has always been to play the law of averages, a surprisingly steady-sounding approach until you realize what it entails. On average, quarterbacks do poorly under pressure, and one of the easiest ways to generate pressure is through effectively designed blitzes.

So, blitz.

But wait, hold on. If it’s that simple, why don’t all teams do this?

Well, aside from the fact that “effectively designed” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence, it’s also the case that blitzes create voids in the coverage, allowing teams to generate enormous gains when pressure doesn’t get home.

When the blitz doesn’t get home — which is to say when the quarterback completes a pass against the blitz — things get dicey. Since 2021, completions against the blitz have generated 11.9 yards per play, +1.00 EPA per play, a 9.9% touchdown rate and a success rate over 75 percent. 16.8 percent of those throws gain 20 yards or more.

Completions on non-blitzed passes are pretty effective too, of course. After all, we’re filtering for a generally successfully thrown ball. But it’s not nearly the same; the yards per play drops to 10.6, the EPA per plays drops to +0.70, the success rate drops to 68.7 percent and the touchdown rate plummets to 5.7 percent. 12.6 percent of them go for 20 yards or more.

So the risk is there. But the payoff for a successful defensive play is tremendous.

On plays where the offense fails, the likelihood that the failure is significant is much larger on a blitz than a non-blitz. We can visualize this as the rate of “big negative plays” for the offense, which we’ll define as plays worth -1.0 EPA or less — these are plays like a big incompletion on third down, a devastating second-down sack, or a turnover.

On blitzes, 36.7 percent of negative offensive plays were big. 0.6 percent of them saw a defensive score. On non-blitzes, 27.9 percent of negative offensive plays were big and 0.4 percent saw a defensive score.

So, if one is successful on defense, one is 50 more likely to create a big play on a blitz than a non-blitz. But the risk is that the offense is more likely to come up big, too.

If one is generally better at creating negatives on blitzes than non-blitzes, then it’s volatile but it’s not really gambling.

It’s card counting.

Card counters often do not like being called gamblers; they are playing in a very calculated way without the connotation of uncertainty suggested by “gambling.” After all, we rarely say that casinos are “gambling” with their assets when they put games out onto the casino floor.

In blackjack, the house “edge” is at its lowest about 0.4 percent, though that can expand all the way to 2.2% depending on the specific rules for any particular table. Over many hands and a long enough timeline, the house reliably earns thousands of dollars over its shifts, even if it loses big on individual hands or even in a single shift.

Card counters aim to reverse that edge by keeping track of the high cards in the shoe (the collection of cards the dealer uses, composed of multiple decks) and playing the odds as the count increases or decreases.

For example, if there aren’t many face cards left in the shoe, you can play more aggressively than normal when holding a 16 or when the dealer shows a ten. The edge is small but realizable over a large number of hands, flipping the house edge from +0.4% to -0.4% or more. Card counters are playing the long game.

In fact, there’s a reason it’s not actually called the law of averages.

It’s called the law of large numbers.

We have to wait a while for it to play out.

Assuming that two strategies are equal, the high-volatility strategy is going to be the one that pumps your heart up. Let’s use a hypothetical example of a blitz versus a four-man rush:

Wait, sorry. I meant this one:

Blitzing this often, of course, is more than a cold calculation of what works best. It’s a lifestyle. And it’s one the Vikings have been cultivating for years, allowing players to do what many would-be card counters can’t: emotionally accept the bad swings and volatility, knowing that it will work out in the end.

When emotions run high and capture your brain, it’s difficult to pay attention to details. Card counters tilt and chase losses just like any other gambler. Defenders abandon gap assignments to try and shoot the backfield and make a big play.

Fans (and sportswriters) don’t really have to worry about all that; when the Vikings engage in high-risk strategy and we see the negative end of that variance, we crash out. The players and coaches can’t — they have to trust the process or the whole thing falls apart.

Trust the count.

No one seemingly followed that through more than Brian Flores, the Vikings blitz-happy defensive coordinator.

Flores blitzed the Packers at a blistering 78.3 percent, according to Next Gen Stats, the highest rate for a team in a single game since Week 18 of 2023 … when Brian Flores blitzed the Detroit Lions at a 78.8 percent rate. That was the most since Week 3 of 2023 … when Brian Flores blitzed the Chargers at an 81.6 percent rate.

Extreme blitz rates — that is, blitz rates in the 95^th percentile and above — for an average team throughout an entire season fall just shy of 50 percent. That means, for most teams, one might never see a game all season where they send more than four pass rushers on half of opponents’ dropbacks.

The average blitz rate for a non-Flores team since 2016 has been 27.6 percent. For Flores? 42.6 percent. And in the last three years, it has been 47.4 percent.

That is to say that the average Flores game is the most extreme game a typical team might put together all year.

All of this together put the Vikings, then the Packers, in hell.

The brutal beauty of the Vikings blitz — the ones that saw Vikings defenders grasping to tackle receivers after the catch — demolished the Green Bay offense in the fourth quarter.

Love’s success rate wasn’t any different in the fourth quarter than it was in the first half, generating a positive play on 38.9 percent of dropbacks. But without a big play to make up for a dozen small losses, he averaged -0.45 EPA per dropback.

The raw passing was alright — 7.13 yards per passing attempt. But within that were three sacks on 18 dropbacks (16.7 percent) and a pick. He completed just 46.7 percent of his throws. Their drive success rate — that is, the ability to produce first downs per series — was just 42.9 percent in the fourth quarter, just one rank higher than the Las Vegas Raiders at 40.0 percent.

Last year, the last-place Cleveland Browns produced a drive success rate of 61.7 percent. So, for a moment, volatility swung in the Vikings’ favor, and they made the high-flying Packers, last year’s fourth-most efficient offense, look worse than the Browns.

Perhaps no player better authored this Vikings win than Dallas Turner. In the official statbook — or the closest one to it, the play-by-play logs used by the league, ESPN and Elias Sports Bureau — Turner finished with seven quarterback hits, the most any defensive player has logged since Gregory Rousseau did in Week 16 of last year. Before that, Trey Hendrickson hit that mark in Week 9 of 2024 against the Las Vegas Raiders.