Introducing the ‘Minnesota Vikings All Time Greatest Playoff Victory’ Tournament

Hi kids, and welcome to March Madness. With the NCAA Tournament kicking into high gear today, I know a lot of you have taken the day off of work and are going to gorge yourself on about 15 or 16 straight hours of college basketball.

Whether you’re cheering for the Gophers, or you have another team, we’re all cheering against Duke, right? Because Duke.

May your bracket not be busted dinner time tonight.

In the spirit of the Madness, I thought it would be kind of fun to run our own Vikings-related tournament. We’ve done a couple of these in the past, so I thought this time it would be fun to talk playoffs.

/record scratch

Playoffs? PLAYOFFS?? Yes, yes, every time the VIkings have gone to the playoffs, it’s eventually ended in pain and misery, but that has overshadowed some fantastic games the Vikings have played...prior to ripping our hearts out and trampling them into dust. They have 21 playoff wins all time, dating from 1969, to the most recent one in 2017 with the Minneapolis Miracle.

In between, there have been some remarkable upsets, great performances, and riveting plays.

So...what determines the greatest playoff win in team history? There are a variety of factors, like I mentioned above, but there aren’t hard and fast rules. What’s more important for one person might not be for another. I’m a fan just like all of you, and I have some wins that are my personal favorites, where you may not see it that way. Since it’s the playoffs, importance is mitigated somewhat, since none of these wins resulted in a Super Bowl victory. But there are NFL and NFC Championship wins in here, and getting to the Super Bowl is a bigger deal than winning a wildcard or divisional game. So in making the 16 team bracket, I did give some more weight to how deep in the playoffs the win was. Using those factors I took 21 playoff wins and whittled them down to 16 for the tournament bracket.

From there, I used rivalries, comebacks, and general excitement to seed them, and from there I just ranked them in order of my favorite wins. The top four are essentially your number one seeds, if you will, the next four are your number two seeds, and so on.

Without any further delay, let’s take a look at the bracket for the Greatest Playoff Win of All Time Tournament Bracket:

How will this work? It’s pretty simple, actually. Starting either later today or tomorrow, I’ll do a post for a tournament game. I’ll give a brief recap of the playoff games that are competing against one another, and at the end of the post you’ll be able to vote for what you think was the better playoff win. The playoff win that has the most votes will advance, and we’ll do that until we have a single winner. As you can see, before the championship game, we’ll do a third place game, so when it’s all said and done, we’ll have what we consider to be the four best playoff wins in franchise history.

So, welcome to our little corner of March Madness, and I hope you’ll enjoy it!

I mean, it beats another one of my dumb mock drafts, right? Still totally doing those, though.