Fraudulent ... 13-4 Lucky or Legit?!

We don't have much to go on, because nobody has even made the playoffs yet. But based on recent history and this season, the Bills, the Chiefs, the Bucs, GB, the Rams and perhaps the Eagles are the best bets.

Yet, like clockwork, Minnesota let an inferior opponent hang around long enough to keep eyeballs engaged and demand a certain level of resilience.

Is it illegal to call for a 4-yard pass on 3rd and 3? Asking for a friend who yelled himself horse.

There was the unlikely scene of Cousins barking and storming to the sidelines after a throwaway on third down. He almost looked mad enough to shotgun a quart of 2% milk before he and O’Connell debriefed and reached détente.

“We’re going to have intense conversations,” Cousins said. “I love when he coaches me hard and holds me to a high standard. The play caller-quarterback dynamic, you’re trying to get in each other’s head more and more and more, the longer you work together.”

The longer the Vikings can play complimentary football and flop golden horseshoes, the bigger the cushion in a division race that is theirs to lose.

I know, wake me in December.

But 5-1 is a whole lot better than the eternal struggle of autumns past.

Flashback to early September before the Minnesota Vikings had played a single regular season snap.

Projected with about a coin flip’s chance of making the playoffs for the first time in three years, the prospect of a 5-1 start was a possibility but hardly seemed probable.

“I think if you asked anybody in this organization or the fanbase if we could be 5-1 at this point before the season started I think everyone would be like ‘heck yeah, I’ll do whatever it takes to get to that point,’” said Adam Thielen after the Vikings 24-16 win over the Miami Dolphins Sunday did just that.

Two games ahead of the floundering Green Bay Packers in the NFC North, the Vikings now boast a 92 percent chance to make the playoffs and an 83 percent chance to win the division, per FiveThirtyEight. Yet before he even finished his sentence, Thielen reiterated a sentiment that was widely shared post-game in the visiting locker room of Hard Rock Stadium.

“But we know we’ve got to get a lot better,” he said.

Such is the territory when the Vikings’ number of three-and-outs on offense, 10, nearly matched the team’s total first downs, 11. Or when the Dolphins outgained Minnesota 458-234, ran 23 more plays and were on the field for nearly 10 more minutes and still found a way to lose the game.

It’s not just one game of evidence that has the coaching staff and players alike suggesting there’s work to do. Throughout the Vikings’ current four-game win streak (longest since 2019), each game could’ve slipped for their hands There was Dan Campbell’s 4th down decision in Week 3 that prompted Minnesota’s game-winning drive against the Lions. Without their starting quarterback and No. 1 running back and wide receiver, the Saints were within a double-doinked field goal of forcing overtime in Week 4 and a series of penalty calls in the Vikings’ favor flipped a nervy game against the Bears in Week 5.

More than what the Vikings’ opponents failed to do is what Minnesota itself has lacked – a semblance of consistency. For drives, quarters and even full games, Minnesota has looked dominant, particularly on offense, but without much warning or explanation, it disappears.

On Sunday, Minnesota's first four drives gained a total of 15 yards without a first down. Suddenly on the fourth drive, the team awoke. Kirk Cousins found Thielen for back-to-back catches of 14 and 11 yards, then connected with Justin Jefferson for a 20-yard catch. Four plays later Cousins connected with Irv Smith Jr. for the one-yard touchdown pass. The following five drives of offense resulted in four punts and a field goal in which the Vikings took over at Miami’s 41-yard line.

“We still haven’t played our best ball yet, honestly,” Jefferson said. “There’s so many more things that we need to fix. The plays are there, we just have to execute them. I feel like the game that we will play our best ball in is still yet to come.”

Kevin O’Connell admitted it was” way too much of a struggle today” and that from game to game the offense can seemingly have “different identities.” Sunday it struggled with both execution and playcalling, he said.

“Very much the inverse of '21,” said Cousins, who was visibly upset after several stalled drives Sunday. “I would walk off the field after we had lost and say, ‘we're playing so well. We're playing so well, and somehow, someway we lost, but we're playing at a very high level.’ This year I'm saying, ‘gosh, we can play better, but we won.’ It's just kind of an inverse, and I'll take this any day.”

“I'm really, really proud to be 5-1 right now. We talked last night about anyway it would take, any means necessary to get to 5-1 going into this bye. We've learned a lot about our football team. We also have learned, coaches included, we've got a long way to go and a lot of room to improve, which I'm really, really excited about,” O’Connell said.

They leave themselves vulnerable to losses to inferior opponents until they do. A loss to the air-raid Arizona Cardinals out of the break could lead to a trap game against the Washington Commanders on the road the week after. Then they must travel to Western New York, where Stefon Diggs and the Buffalo Bills will be looking to put one on them. Suddenly, they could enter a vicious cycle where a loss to Arizona leads to a bad loss in DC. Then a loss in Buffalo and at home against the Dallas Cowboys brings them to .500. Bill Belichick outcoaches O’Connell a week later, and suddenly, the Vikings are 5-6 heading into the New York Jets game on Dec. 4.

All the positive momentum is gone. The small margins of victory turn into close defeats. The O’Connell Vikings start to feel like the Zimmer Vikings. Cousins presses, Jefferson is upset, and teams are starting to score 30-plus on Ed Donatell’s defense. The focus turns to Adofo-Mensah, who hasn’t gotten much out of his draft yet. Many of the players on this year’s roster are on the books for the next couple of years – change will be difficult. It’s 2016 again, except Case Keenum isn’t sitting on the bench, ready to save everyone with a miracle run next year.

Take a deep breath. There’s another way this could go.

The Vikings almost beat the Cardinals in the desert last year. If Greg Joseph hits that field goal, they win a high-scoring, entertaining game and start the season 1-1. We know the blueprint of how to beat this Arizona team. Kliff Kingsbury always falls apart late in the season. It’s double-XP weekend, and Kyler Murray will be playing Call of Duty late into the night. The Cardinals were overrated last year, and teams are exposing them this season.

Minnesota can’t beat them by scoring 25 points. But they can if they open things up a little and score 30-plus. Maybe we will start to see shades of McVay in this offense after the bye. If they can get the offense going against Arizona, why not Washington? Someone needs to put Ron Rivera and Carson Wentz out of their misery. And 7-1 is enough of a cushion where they could drop the Buffalo and Dallas games and be fine. Would we be concerned that they lost to the Philadelphia Eagles and then the Bills and Cowboys? Of course, but let’s address that when we get there.

For now, I understand the anxiety and pressure to try to figure this team out. It’s a new regime. The Vikings have spent a lot of money on their team. We all want to know who they are, and usually, we do by the bye week. But we don’t. The scores kinda look like Zimmer’s scores, but the play is modern and exciting at times. The defense is certainly different. Cousins is playing more freely. Jefferson is getting the ball. The Miami and Philadelphia games aside, this team is fun to watch, and away games can be more of a grind anyway.

Everyone will want to convince you that they know what this team is. It’s comfortable to be pessimistic, to assume this is 2016 again — same old Vikings. There’s a bias to knowing, and it’s preferable to the vulnerability of admitting a lack of knowledge. But nobody knows what this team is. I’m not sure they do yet. They flew a little close to the sun in Miami. But they persevered through the heat and the humidity and came out winners. The Vikings need to take a week and figure out how to score 30-plus a game and ensure that the defense can continue to hold teams in the 20s.

If they can, this team will be different than the ones that came before it. If they cannot, someone will tell you they told you so. But they know nothing right now. They’ve just seen this team lose before when it matters. And so far, outside of the flop in Philadelphia, the Vikings have started to reverse that trend this year.