NFL Declares Which Vikings Games Will Go On YouTube

A couple of weeks ago, we alerted you to the NFL opening up the voting for which three games for each NFL team would end up going on YouTube, courtesy of the league themselves. The voting has officially closed and things have been decided, with the NFL releasing the list of those games yesterday. Let’s take a look at which games came up for the Minnesota Vikings, shall we?

The game that received the highest percentage of votes in the FaceBook polling the NFL conducted was the 2012 regular season finale between the Vikings and the Green Bay Packers at the Metrodome. The game featured Adrian Peterson’s attempt to cap his MVP season by breaking Eric Dickerson’s single-season rushing record, as well as a win-and-get-in scenario for the Vikings to reach the post-season.

That game collected 38% of the voting in the NFL’s FaceBook poll. In our own poll, it finished a pretty distant third, picking up 160 of the 948 votes cast, or just shy of 17%. There’s probably a bit of recency bias that went into that one when it comes to the greater voting public.

In second place in the NFL’s voting, we have the Thanksgiving Day game between the Vikings and the Dallas Cowboys. The game was a 46-36 shootout in Dallas, with Randy Moss scoring three touchdowns of more than 50 yards in length. This is the game that won our poll, garnering 377 of the 948 votes cast, or a little less than 40%. It got 30% of the votes in the NFL’s FaceBook poll.

The third game on the NFL’s list was the game that featured the Vikings’ upset of the powerful San Francisco 49ers in the 1987 NFC Divisional Playoffs. The Vikings won 36-24 on the strength of a defense that sent Joe Montana to the bench and Anthony Carter catching 10 passes for 227 yards. That game got 16% of the votes in the NFL’s FaceBook polling, but finished second for us, receiving 283 of the 948 votes, just shy of 30%.

Neither the NFL’s polling nor ours showed much love for Fran Tarkenton’s final home game or the overtime contest against the Chicago Bears from 1994. Those games got 11% and 2% of the votes in our poll, respectively.

There are a few of the games that were chosen for other teams that see the Vikings on the short end of the stick. One of the Oakland Raiders’ selected games is their Super Bowl XI victory over the Vikings. The 1998 NFC Championship Game against the Atlanta Falcons is also going up (because why wouldn’t it), as well as the Vikings’ 2009 NFC Championship Game loss to the Bounty Hunters.

The press release from the league states that the games will be uploaded in August in conjunction with the start of the preseason.