Vikings

Green Bay has been the fixed point of the Minnesota Vikings' schedule since the franchise's earliest seasons in the NFC North. Detroit, Chicago and New Orleans have carried their own weight against Minnesota over the decades, but none of it compares to the Packers game twice a year.

The club started life in 1961 as an NFL expansion side out of Minneapolis, and it took barely a decade for its defense to become the thing people remembered it for. The "Purple People Eaters" line of the late 1960s and 1970s, built around Carl Eller, Jim Marshall and Alan Page, punished offenses across four Super Bowl runs. Minnesota never came home with the trophy from any of them, losing to Kansas City, Miami, Pittsburgh and Oakland in turn, and that gap has followed the franchise ever since despite three NFC Championships and a run of division titles that stretches from the 1960s to 2022. Bud Grant took the team to all four of those Super Bowl appearances, a stretch no other coach in the club's history has matched.

Fran Tarkenton ran that era's offense with a scrambling style few quarterbacks of his time attempted, and his name still sits above the franchise's passing record books. The purple and gold have since gone through eras built around Randy Moss's deep threat and Cris Carter's hands, and the roster has carried Hall of Famers at nearly every position without adding the one banner that eluded Grant's teams.

U.S. Bank Stadium has hosted the Vikings since 2016, seating just over 66,000 for league games after three earlier homes, including the Metrodome. The division has gone through Chicago and Detroit as much as Green Bay in recent seasons, and Minnesota's task each autumn stays the same: hold off the Packers long enough to matter in January.