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The Vikings' insistence that they are a good football team was warranted in Weeks 2 and 3 of this season, when they should have defeated a quality Arizona team and rallied in fine fashion to dispatch Seattle.
I had a harder time believing their self-congratulations after Sunday's 14-7 home loss to a solid but not spectacular Browns team. As Jim Souhan pointed out in his post-game column and Ben Goessling wrote in his game story, the Browns thoroughly outplayed the Vikings and probably would have won by a couple of touchdowns had Baker Mayfield been able to throw in the vicinity of his receivers.
Nonetheless, this was wide receiver Justin Jefferson after a game in which the Vikings mustered just seven points (none after the first drive of the game, capped by a Jefferson TD grab) and 255 yards of offense.
"Every loss that we've had so far, it's been on ourselves. We've been killing ourselves, shooting ourselves in the foot so we've just got to finish," he said. "This team is very good."
And this was coach Mike Zimmer: "Like I told the team, I've been doing this 27 years, I know good teams and I know bad teams. I know this team has a chance to be pretty darn good."
Zimmer knows 100 times more about football than I do, and every one of his three playoff teams in Minnesota has started the year slowly and was no better than 2-2 after four games. So he gets a certain benefit of the doubt, some of which Patrick Reusse and I talked about on Monday's Daily Delivery podcast.
But here's what's not up for debate: Even if the Vikings are as good as they think they are, it might not matter.
A quick run through the remaining schedule leads me to conclude they will be wagering underdogs in at least seven games: road contests at Carolina, Baltimore, Los Angeles Chargers, 49ers and Packers, plus home games against the Packers and Rams.
The site FiveThirtyEight has them as predictive underdogs in nine games, adding the home game against Dallas and the road game at Chicago to that mix.
To get into the playoffs, even in a seven-team field, one would imagine 9-8 is a minimum requirement to be realistic.
So the Vikings need to go 8-5 the rest of the way, in games they will be the underdog the majority of the time, just to have a chance to sneak in.
That's how unforgiving the NFL is. Close losses are overly punitive, and the Vikings have had two of them already.
They might tell you it was three, but anyone who watched the game Sunday should have more questions than answers about where this is headed.
