Super Bowl XXXIII redux

I've been playing around with the NFL SimMatchup on WhatIfSports.com lately, where you can match up any two teams in history and play a simulated game with them, just to answer the question: If Denny Green (and not Gary Anderson) hadn't lost the 1998 NFC Championship Game for the Vikings, how would they have fared in the Super Bowl against the Denver Broncos? Better than the Falcons, who got hammered 34-19 in a game that wasn't even as close as the score indicated.

It's easy to set up and sim games (if you're setting up this particular game, set 1998 Denver as Away, 1998 Minnesota as Home and select Pro Player Stadium at 70 degrees), and my first result was this 24-17 Denver win.

All right, so that's not very encouraging. But at least it was a far more exciting game than the real result, with Denver scoring the go-ahead TD with just five seconds remaining.

Still, small sample size, blah blah blah, so I ran nine more sims to get a full 10-game sample to play with. The results were:

Denver 24-17
Minnesota 18-13 (six Gary Anderson field goals)
Minnesota 23-16 (Cris Carter TD catch with 0:25 left)
Denver 24-21
Denver 27-20 (24 of game's 47 points in the fourth quarter)
Minnesota 28-17
Minnesota 23-17
Denver 54-41 (!!!!)
Denver 44-24 (Terrell Davis 239 yards rushing)
Minnesota 17-14

That's five wins apiece for each Denver and Minnesota, with an average score of Denver 25, Minnesota 23.2. And nearly all of them exciting, close affairs.

A few more notes on that insane 54-41 game:

* The game started off slowly, with Denver leading just 7-0 after the first quarter. The single-quarter scores after that were Minnesota 17-13, Denver 14-3, and Minnesota 21-20.

* Terrell Davis ran for 292 yards, which would have been an NFL single-game record at the time, and three touchdowns.

* Randall Cunningham countered with 396 yards passing and 3 TDs, 141 of it going to Randy Moss.

* Total offense: Denver 567, Minnesota 493, for a total of 1,060 yards.

* In a game like this, you'd have expected to see a few turnovers and long returns setting up or outright creating scores, but there were no turnovers and didn't appear to be any TD returns on kicks or punts.

* In a show of poor sportsmanship (which can probably be chalked up to the game algorithm just trying to score as much as possible), Denver kicked a field goal on the final snap of the game while already possessing a 10-point lead, to inflate the final score from 51-41 to 54-41. Boo, Dan Reeves!

Anyway, this is just one of the cool things you can do with the SimMatchup, and thanks to the guys at the Pro-Football-Reference blog for pointing it out to me. They've got their own interesting application for the SimMatchup planned, and I can't wait to see how it turns out. I'll definitely be rooting for the 1998 Vikings!

Battle of the Purple, 1998

So, the Vikings play the Ravens tomorrow. Despite both teams having a reputation for defense, and both are doing fairly well defensively, neither has been as stifling as might have been predicted. The Vikings are 14th in the league in yards/game allowed, and 9th in points per game allowed. The Ravens are 10th and 12th in the same categories, respectively. There are certainly caveats in those numbers -- the Vikings have only played one good offensive team (Green Bay) but have also given up a lot of yards and points in garbage time -- but it's safe to say that neither team is at the top of the defensive ranks for fantasy football leagues.

Meanwhile, the Vikings are 3rd in the NFL in scoring and the Ravens 5th. At the start of the season, you might have thought the over/under for the game to be around 30, but I wouldn't be shocked if each team managed 30 points. Even so, we probably won't see anything as crazy as the first meeting between these two teams, a 1998 contest that the Vikings won 38-28.

Ah yes, the 1998 Vikings. We remember them well. And this December Vikings/Ravens contest was a typical game for a team that averaged 34.75 yards per game (surprisingly, just a hair more than the 31.2 this year's team is managing). But the offense sputtered a bit in this game, scoring "just" two touchdowns and getting six field goals from Gary Anderson.

Oh, and then there was that first quarter.

Take a look at the box score. After an Anderson field goal, Baltimore's Corey Harris returned the ensuing kickoff for a touchdown to put the Ravens up 7-3. The Vikings kicked another field goal on the ensuing drive and kicked off again. This time, it was Patrick Johnson who brought the kickoff back to the house, putting the Ravens up 14-6. At this point, the special teams looked so bad, you might have thought Paul Ferraro was the coach. (It was actually Gary Zauner.) But on the ensuing Baltimore kickoff, Minnesota's David Palmer (no, not the fictional president) took it back 88 yards for a touchdown of his own. One missed two-point conversion later (nice decision, Denny) and the quarter ended 14-12...

...with three kickoff-return touchdowns. I'm going to bet that's a record for a single quarter, if not a game.

The Vikings scored the next 23 points, part of a 29-point unanswered stretch, and the 10-point margin at the final gun belied the fact that this was a very lopsided game. I'm not betting on three kickoff-return touchdowns (or six+ field goals by Ryan Longwell), but a 38-28 score? Yeah, I could buy that.