Now that the Minnesota Vikings’ 2026 schedule is officially out there in the wild, I wanted to give a few initial thoughts on how things could, potentially, go for our favorite football team in 2026. I don’t want to do game-by-game predictions or anything like that, but I do want to put my initial record prediction out there.
If you want to reference the schedule, here’s the video that the team put out, featuring kicker Will Reichard and the Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah, Chris Jericho.
(Incidentally,
does anyone else find it a bit odd that U.S. Bank Stadium is hosting one of WWE’s flagship events here in a couple of months and the Vikings went and got arguably the biggest name employed by WWE’s biggest domestic rival to help with their schedule reveal? Just me? Okay, anyway.)
The Vikings have, once again, managed to avoid a lot of bad weather games, it would appear. Their annual trip to Soldier Field is out of the way in Week 2, and even Lambeau Field in mid-November usually isn’t that bad (usually). The Thursday night trip to New England in early December might be a bit tricky, as could the penultimate game of the year against the Jets. Other than that, however, Mother Nature seems like it could be on the Vikings’ side this year.
It appears the Vikings caught a bit of a break with their opener as well. The first time the Vikings faced the Packers last year, Micah Parsons absolutely wrecked things because. . .well, that’s sort of what he does. Parsons tore an ACL late in the 2025 season, and there’s a chance that he might not be ready to go for Week 1 when the Packers come to U.S. Bank Stadium. While you obviously don’t want teams to have excuses, the Packers potentially not having Parsons obviously works to the Vikings’ advantage, as they really weren’t the same defensively last year without him.
This team is going to get a lot of home cooking down the stretch, as five of the last seven games on the schedule will be played at U.S. Bank Stadium. That includes the team getting a bit of a mini-bye before they face off against the Lions on Sunday Night Football in what could be a huge divisional matchup in Week 15. The week prior is their one Thursday night matchup of the year as they travel to New England.
The Vikings will get an early bye week again this year, as they get the same week off as they did last year. Last season, the team took Week 6 off after back-to-back overseas games. This year, they’ll play another international game, but as we’ve already mentioned, the travel arrangements for that one may actually favor them more than they do the team that’s actually the “home” team for that contest, the San Francisco 49ers. Incidentally, Mexico City, where the Vikings’ international game is being played this year, is around 7,200 feet above sea level. I wonder what Will Reichard’s field goal range is at 7,200 feet above sea level.
As it stands right now, only nine of the Vikings’ games have the favored noon Central time on Sunday start, despite the fact that they are playing no games in the Mountain or Pacific time zones this season. The Vikings currently have four prime-time games (two Sunday nighters, a Monday nighter, and a Thursday nighter), and a handful of games that are slated for the late window on Sunday. Seems a bit unusual, but that’s just the way the schedule has worked out, I guess.
Our friends at FanDuel still have the Vikings sitting at 8.5 wins for the 2026 season, and man, I’m not afraid to tell you. . .biased though I might be, I have no reason to tell anybody to take the under on this one. I think this team is going to be significantly better than the Really Smart Football People™ are going to predict in a lot of the preseason magazines and on websites around the internet. If the offense is even mildly functional, regardless of who winds up starting at quarterback, this is an 11-win football team with Brian Flores running this defense.
In fact, that’s what I’m going to stake my record prediction at for this coming season as of today: 11-6. And if that doesn’t give them an NFC North divisional title, they will at least be fighting for it until the very last week of the season.
What do you think, folks? Do you have a way-too-early record prediction that you want to throw out there now that the schedule is official?
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