Daily Norseman FanPulse: Vikings fans ready to be hurt again

We’re just over three weeks away from the start of the 2019 NFL regular season, and after a season that ended with much weeping, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments, fans of the Minnesota Vikings are finally starting to feel good about their team again.

Of course we are.

We’re kicking off the second season of our SB Nation FanPulse surveys, and to get things started we’re taking a look, as we usually do, about how confident fans of the Vikings are in the direction of the team. If you’ll notice, there has been a pretty steady climb upwards.

When the 2018 regular season came to a most unceremonious end, only 22% of fans were confident in the direction of the team. That number rose to 42% when we got into free agency, and jumped up again to 60% by the time the 2019 NFL Draft came around. After the draft, the number went up to 70%, and now, on the cusp of the regular season, 83% of Vikings fans say that they’re confident of the direction the team is heading.

Now, that 83% may seem like a high number, but it actually puts the Vikings right in the middle of the pack among the SB Nation NFL blogs. There are 11 teams that have a confidence rating among their fan bases of 90% or higher, and 28 of the 32 NFL teams are sitting at 50% or above. Hope springs eternal in August, I suppose.

There was also a national question in our most recent FanPulse poll, this one asking which team readers thought was the least likely to repeat as division champions from the previous year.

The most popular choice was the Baltimore Ravens, who captured 27.37% of the vote. They were just ahead of the Dallas Cowboys at 26.52%. The Houston Texans were in third at 20.52%, and the NFC North champions, the Chicago Bears, came in a pretty distant fourth at 12.55%.

We’re going to be tracking all of the FanPulse results throughout the year for all the teams at SB Nation’s shiny new NFL FanPulse Hub.

If you would like to be a part of our FanPulse surveys going forward, you can hit this link here and get yourself signed up! Just make sure you select the Vikings as your favorite team so that you get the correct surveys.

What do you think of these most recent results, folks?