The Math Says Probably Not

The Minnesota Vikings have lost their first two games for the first time since 2013. The historical outlook for teams that start 0-2 is bleak — it’s is often a death knell. There have been plenty of examples of an 0-2 team rising from the dead, even a couple who won the Super Bowl (the 2007 Giants and 2001 Patriots). Over the last 10 years, about 12% of 0-2 teams have gone on to make the playoffs. Justis Mosqueda went back and calculated that for the recent 14-team playoff expansion, and it looks like this:

But probability can be a tricky thing to navigate. Most 0-2 teams won’t make the playoffs. Almost no 0-2 teams will make a deep run, let alone take home a championship. But it’s not impossible, and that’s a strange thing for our binary lizard brains to compute.



A quick lesson in probability. There are currently 10 teams that are sitting at 0-2. If you give each of them a flat 12% chance of making the playoffs, you can calculate and get a sense for how likely it is for no 0-2 teams to make the postseason, and one 0-2 team, two 0-2 teams, and so on. This is called a binomial distribution or Bernoulli process. Obviously, that oversimplifies the differences between a good but chaotic team like Atlanta, and a simply struggling team like New York (Jets or Giants, your choice).



Using the chart linked above, we see the likeliest outcome is exactly one 0-2 team. Maybe there can be two, maybe there can be none. So let’s examine that special minority that gets to burst from its 0-2 grave and smack future opponents with its tombstone. Once we’ve gotten to know them, we can ask if the 2020 Vikings line up. We’ll start with the aforementioned Super Bowl teams.