Eight days after becoming the last team to lose in this 2026 NFL regular season with a 19-15 defeat at the hands of the rival Detroit Lions, the Minnesota Vikings dropped their second straight on Monday night, this time taking a 23-6 loss to the Buffalo Bills.
To their credit, the Vikings did better than anyone has all year in containing the Bills' top-ranked offense, holding Josh Allen & Co. to season lows in both total yardage (339) and points (23). Those numbers may not look all that impressive, but as Buffalo was averaging 393.1 total yards and 33.3 points per contest coming in, Brian Flores' unit undoubtedly deserves a ton of credit. And even after this loss, Minnesota has still surrendered the second-fewest yards (280.0) and the fewest points (14.5) per game this season.
Unfortunately for the Purple & Gold, the offense was the worst it's been all year, posting a season-low 178 yards and a season-high three turnovers, and only putting points on the scoreboard on a pair of Will Reichard field goals, both in the first half.
Monday marked the third time the Vikes have failed to find the end zone, and they're the first team to have at least six wins while also going three games without a touchdown through their first eight games of a season since 1925. No, seriously, it's been 101 years since such an occurrence, and it was actually two teams that did it: the Detroit Panthers and the Frankford Yellow Jackets.
Fun fact about that Yellow Jackets season. With no set schedule back in those days, Frankford played 20 games (and another two against non-NFL opponents), and that was with no postseason. In those 20 contests against NFL teams, they went 13-7, and their +21-point differential was the lowest in league history for a team with at least 13 wins for nearly a century, until none other than the Minnesota Vikings went 13-4 with a -3 point differential in 2022.
So, that's fun. It's not the point here, but it's fun nonetheless.
Minnesota Vikings are turning back to Kirk Cousins in an attempt to kickstart the offense
The point here, of course, is that this just can't continue to happen if Minnesota wants to make a real run at the franchise's first Super Bowl appearance in half a century.
For those who didn't know, the Vikings' first failure to score a touchdown this season came in Week 2, when they needed just three Reichard field goals to take a 9-3 victory over the Chicago Bears. The second time came just two weeks later when Reichard drained five field goals in a 15-10 win over the Miami Dolphins.
In those two games, Minnesota at least moved the ball a little, gaining 246 yards against Chicago and 336 against Miami, with the latter representing the second-highest total of the season, bettered only by a 364-yard effort the following week in a 23-13 win over the New Orleans Saints.
As mentioned, the Vikings gained just 178 yards against the Bills, and the biggest reason for that is that Carson Wentz, filling in for an injured Kyler Murray, completed just eight of 25 passes for 81 yards with two interceptions, thus earning an abysmal 8.9 passer rating, which is the lowest of any quarterback with at least 25 pass attempts since Sam Darnold's infamous "seeing ghosts" game against the New England Patriots back in 2019, when he earned a 3.9. Wentz also lost a fumble, so he accounted for all three turnovers himself.
And the run game wasn't much better, as Jordan Mason and Aaron Jones combined for only 51 yards.
Truth be told, the only reason Minnesota even got all the way up to 178 was that the Bills went into prevent mode late in the game and allowed Max Brosmer to come in and complete six of seven passes for 58 yards.
Now, in a normal week, we might ask a cliché question like, "So, where do the Vikings go from here?" seeing as Murray wasn't exactly wowing when healthy. But with this not being a normal week, what with Tuesday being the trade deadline, we know what they're attempting to do, as they sent a third-round draft pick to the Las Vegas Raiders to reacquire Kirk Cousins.
Cousins, of course, spent six seasons in Minnesota from 2018 to 2023, earning three of his four career Pro Bowl selections, twice leading the team to the postseason, and leading the Vikes to their only playoff win since the 2017 campaign.
After two so-so seasons with the Atlanta Falcons, who ultimately benched him for Michael Penix Jr., Cousins was having a solid year for the Raiders as a placeholder for No. 1 overall pick Fernando Mendoza, completing 64.1 percent of his passes for 2,340 yards with 20 touchdowns, the second-most in the NFL, against eight interceptions.
For those scoring at home, Murray, Wentz, and now Brosmer have combined to complete 60.9 percent of their throws for 1,286 yards with eight touchdowns against five picks.
Now, we just have to wait and see whether Cousins is truly the answer to this offensive crisis or if the Vikings will continue to accomplish these sad, obscure, century-old feats.
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