Through four games, the Minnesota Vikings are a hard team to gauge.
They’ve shown flashes of dominance, like the fourth quarter of the season opener against the Chicago Bears, and the first half of their Week 3 home game against the Cincinnati Bengals.
But over the balance of this young 2025 season to date, the Vikings have found themselves locked in tight football games — and playing from behind — against a bunch of teams that should be below their weight class.
Injuries have piled up at a frustrating clip. It’s barely October, and Minnesota could be without opening day starters at quarterback, running back, right tackle, left guard, center, middle linebacker, and edge defender.
That kind of attrition would seriously impact any NFL roster, and for the Vikings, a team blessed with talent from their personnel to their coaching staff and front office, the impact has been hard to watch at times. Minnesota currently ranks among the NFL leaders in quarterback sacks allowed and penalties, which is not a recipe for winning football.
Minnesota Vikings tumble in recent Week 5 NFL power rankings
NFL Spin Zone's Sayre Bedinger recently released his latest power rankings, and he dropped the Vikings (2-2) to No. 19 after they were outclassed by a middling Pittsburgh Steelers team in Dublin.
Bedinger essentially termed the team’s current state in a way Vikings fans will have a hard time stomaching — frontrunners.
“I don’t know how much more you could have expected out of the Minnesota Vikings in their game against the Steelers in Dublin. The Vikings have Carson Wentz in the lineup, and they obviously were coming off of an absolutely dominant performance last week against the Bengals.
They didn’t have the same good fortune against the Steelers, and with the ball late in the game after a boneheaded mistake by the Steelers, the Vikings had a chance to at least tie, if not go and win the game. And with the offensive line playing the way it is right now, who really expected Carson Wentz to get the job done?”
The Isaiah Rodgers legacy game against Cincinnati was a lot of fun, but to Bedinger’s point, it’s not sustainable. The brutal truth is that the Vikings have trailed on the scoreboard for 10 full quarters against the Chicago Bears, Atlanta Falcons, and Steelers combined.
They’ve been snakebitten by injuries and can’t protect the passer, and that’s led to an offense that struggles to sustain drives in the first half, never mind gotta-have-it drives in the fourth quarter.
Can it be fixed? When you’re potentially down to your third-string center in Week 5, with one of the NFL’s most feared defensive fronts in the Cleveland Browns on deck in London, it’s hard to have a ton of confidence.
Minnesota completely outclassed the previous second-string quarterback it faced. It could need a similar performance against rookie QB Dillon Gabriel on Sunday to get to the bye week with a winning record.