The Vikings are On Pace to Produce One of the Best Defenses of All Time

Much has been said about the Vikings’ unique approach to playing defense, and more will be said in the future. We’ll keep tracking their running blitz rate (depending on the charter, the season-long blitz rate is now 79.0 percent, 70.1 percent, or 62.9 percent — all league-leading by a blistering amount) and provide more context as we go.

For now, let’s look at the results.

Good lord! Look at all that space! And it’s more than just one-dimensional dominance; the Vikings are the only NFL team to perform more than one standard deviation better than the mean in both the passing game and the running game.

Through five games, the Vikings are on track to produce one of the best defenses in NFL history. There’s no guarantee that they will get there, but it’s worth pointing out, at least.

Going back to 1993, we can compare historical NFL defenses by points per drive and the 2026 Vikings — should their results through five games hold throughout the season — would rank 13th, behind the 2000 Baltimore Ravens, 2000 Tennessee Titans, 2002 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 2001 Chicago Bears, 2009 New York Jets, 2001 Philadelphia Eagles, 2019 New England Patriots, 2005 Chicago Bears, 2006 Baltimore Ravens, 1999 Tampa Bay Buccaneers and 1999 Baltimore Ravens.

That’s already incredibly impressive, but it raises something pretty important: why aren’t there any teams from the 2020s on that list? Why only one team from the 2010s? Well, offenses were scoring more.

In 2023, the average team scored 1.94 points per drive. In 2017, that number was 1.83. In 2009, it was 1.76, and it was 1.67 in 2000. It’s no surprise we saw most of these outstanding defenses in the early 2000s. So, let’s adjust for era.

Well, hold on. That’s also pretty unfair. The Vikings have benefited from playing pretty weak teams, like the Dolphins and Buccaneers, both bottom-five in points scored per drive so far this year. And the best team they’ve played, Chicago, fell off after a hot start and now ranks 12th in points per drive.

Let’s see if we can account for opponent but adjust for era so things are represented as if they were in a 2026 scoring environment.

Well, that closes the gap. With this adjustment, the Vikings are still first in the NFL since 1993.

And of course, using a five-game sample against a 16- or 17-game sample is itself a little unfair — though the exercise is about seeing what happens if results hold more than anything else. Still, we can look at other five-game samples, recognizing that the data only goes back to 1999 for per-game adjustments.

It turns out that five-game samples are difficult to sustain at extreme ends, though none of these defenses turned out to be bad by season’s end.

Some of these top-end defenses exited in the playoffs while others won the Super Bowl — there’s no one way to win it all — but the path is pretty clear for the Vikings. If they can pull it off, they’ll be mentioned alongside those historic defenses, maybe as feared as the old ’85 Bears or as epoch-changing as the ‘02 Buccaneers.

But to do that, they have to win. No one is writing odes about the 2000 Titans or the 2018 Jaguars.

For the Vikings, that means not only maintaining their outstanding defensive performances but also getting more from the offense than we saw in the first few weeks.

Against the Saints, they seemingly did that. Over the first two drives, Kyler Murray strung together 11 consecutive completions, with an outstanding 66.7 percent success rate on dropbacks.