With the regular season coming to an end on Sunday night, you might be wondering what comes next? Unlike many European leagues, the NFL champions are decided not by the overall standings from the regular season, but by a mini knockout tournament that leads all the way to the Super Bowl in early February.
But how does this postseason system work? Which teams make it? Who gets to play at home? For answers to all these questions and more, read on!
Mímir, how do teams get into the playoffs?
Ah, the NFL playoffs, as close as you will get to Valhalla in the mortal world. If you are used to soccer leagues, you might be confused as to how the NFL champions are decided. In this league, there are no prizes for winning the most games in the regular season. Instead, the best teams from the regular season play in a knockout tournament, culminating with the Super Bowl, where the winners of the National Football Conference (NFC) and the American Football Conference (AFC) compete for ultimate bragging rights.
The two conferences are each broken down into four roughly geographical divisions. The Vikings, of course, play in the NFC North along with the Bears, the Lions and the Packers. At the end of the regular season, when each team has played its 17 games, the winners of the eight divisions all receive a guaranteed place in the playoffs. After that, out of the remaining teams, the three from each conference with the best win-loss records also qualify as so-called ‘wild cards’.
So how are the matchups decided?
The NFL playoffs are unlike tournaments that have an open draw like the FA Cup, instead ranking the teams by their overall record and assigning them a seed. Division winners are given the top four seeds in each conference, while the wild card teams are given seeds 5-7, even if a wild card team has a better record than one of the division winners.
The teams with the highest seeds always play the teams with the lowest seeds, as well as having home field advantage in any matchup. The #1 seed is given a bye in the first round of the playoffs, which means the matchups are organised as follows:
- #7 vs #2
- #6 vs #3
- #5 vs #4
From there on, it’s a straight knockout through the divisional round and the conference championships, with the teams redistributed in each round so that the highest-ranked team plays the lowest-ranked team remaining. The AFC and the NFC then finally meet in the Super Bowl, which is played at a neutral venue on the second Sunday in February.
How do the Vikings usually do in the playoffs?
You had to ask! As of the 2024 season, the Vikings have reached the postseason 32 times, including 21 times as division champions, which is the most in the NFC North (previously the NFC Central). However, out of those 31 previous attempts, they’ve only made it to the Super Bowl on four occasions, the last of which was all the way back in 1976. In fact, no team has been to the Super Bowl more times than the Vikings without winning it, although we did win the last NFL Championship before it merged with the AFL in 1969, beating the Cleveland Browns 27-7 before losing 23-7 to the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl IV.
Who have we got this season?
In 2024, the Vikings finished with a 14-3 record in the regular season. Normally, this would be enough to win a division, but unfortunately our week 18 loss to Detroit meant they claimed the NFC North with a 15-2 record. Therefore the Vikings went into the postseason as a wild card, albeit with the most wins of any wild card team in history, which gave us the number 5 seed. Our opponents in the first week of the postseason will be the number 4 seeded Los Angeles Rams, with the game taking place on Monday night/Tuesday morning at 1am UK time.
Is there a topic you’d like Mímir to cover in a future article? Let us know by sending an email to UKVikingsFanClub@gmail.com or drop us a DM on any of our social channels.