Super Bowl: Five Vikings teams that should have won it all
By Dan Zinski
3. 1974 (10-4 regular season, lost Super Bowl to Steelers)
Which of the Vikings’ four Super Bowl losing teams was the most gut-wrenchingly disappointing? I would argue it was the 1974 team, the one that lost Super Bowl IX to the Steelers.
The 1969 team with its all-time-great D was probably the best squad among the Vikings’ four Super Bowl teams, but that team was not so great on offense, and had to face a Chiefs team in the Super Bowl that was arguably their near-equal defensively and was led offensively by a great QB in Len Dawson (a man who truly liked a smoke).
The 1973 Vikings team was very good on both sides of the ball and had Fran Tarkenton at the helm, but in the Super Bowl they faced a murder-machine Miami Dolphins team one year removed from going undefeated. That Dolphins teams wasn’t losing, period.
The 1976 Vikings were a very good team as well, but some of their great players were getting up there in age, and they had to face an Oakland Raiders team that went 16-1 overall on the season and is regarded as one of the great teams in NFL history. John Madden was not going to be denied that year.
The 1974 Vikings team doesn’t have the excuse of facing a legitimately great team in the Super Bowl. The Steelers’ roster was filled with future Hall of Famers but the squad had not yet established its dominating identity. The Vikings that year arguably had the better team, if only by a small margin.
Yes the Vikings finished just 10-4 in 1974, hardly a dominating mark, but the record doesn’t tell the whole story. That team outscored their opponents 310-195, a point differential on-par with some of their great seasons. They may have been a little off defensively that season, finishing only 10th overall and just 18th against the pass, but their offense made up for it by finishing 3rd overall and 2nd through the air.
That Super Bowl was a show-down between two good-but-not-great teams, with the Vikings holding a distinct edge in terms of experience. Of the four Super Bowls the Vikings played between 1970 and 1977, that one to me is the one they should have won. But they didn’t. Because they never do.