The Minnesota Vikings went 13-4 this season, so why are experts salivating over the New York Giants and predicting them to upset the Vikings in Sunday’s wild-card game?
Simple: East Coast bias.
Let’s take a look at the Giants. They finished the regular season with a record of 9-7-1 after a 7-2 start. In their final 10 games, they went 3-7-1 with their only wins being against the Houston Texans, Washington Commanders and Indianapolis Colts. Throughout the season, they only beat two teams with winning records: the Baltimore Ravens and Jacksonville Jaguars. Against teams that finished at or above .500, the Giants were 3-7-1 on the season.
So why are the Giants getting so much love and are a trendy pick to beat the Vikings?
Not be the Vikings
— Tyler Forness (@TheRealForno) January 15, 2023
The national media have been calling the Vikings fraudulent this season and they want to be proven right, so they are doing anything they can to confirm their priors that the Vikings are frauds. The discussion about the first matchup has become nauseating:
“The Giants beat themselves.”
“The Vikings weren’t good and needed a 61-yard field goal to win.”
Why did the Vikings, who controlled most of their Week 16 matchup against the Giants, need a crazy long field goal to win a tied game? Yes, it’s the truth, but it’s the connotation behind it that is the issue. All anyone is doing is digging to discredit the Vikings at every turn.
Let’s look at how the Vikings have done this season compared to the Giants:
- 13-4 vs. 9-7-1 regular-season records.
- 7-3 vs. 3-6-1 in the last 10 games.
- 5-3 vs. 3-7-1 against teams at or above .500.
- Kirk Cousins is a Pro Bowler and Daniel Jones isn’t.
The narrative around the Vikings is that they don’t perform well in primetime games, or in this case, games that aren’t at noon. We looked into that earlier this week and found that, in games that begin at 3 p.m. CT or later, Cousins is better than Jones by a significant margin.
Quite the disparity, but the only narrative you hear is that Cousins struggles. Not exactly a lot of proof here, eh?
The narratives are getting spun only to confirm a prior and not to actually predict the game, and we can see right through it.
