The San Francisco 49ers, Kansas City Chiefs and Minnesota Vikings are the only remaining 4-0 teams in the NFL, but their play hasn’t been all that similar. The 49ers are on pace for record-breaking offensive efficiency, while the Chiefs have a top-5 offense and a top-10 defense by my adjusted numbers.
The Vikings are a contrast of opposites, with a top-3 defense through four games, but also a bottom-4 offense. Generally, offensive performance matters more, and is more stable than defensive play. Does that mean that the Vikings are frauds and will struggle the rest of the season? Or do good teams find a way to win in tough circumstances, meaning the Vikings will be successful the rest of the way as their offense improves?
To help answer this question, I looked back at 20 years of NFL advanced data, calculating the post-Week 4 power rankings for every team and every season to compare to the Vikings and the other 4-0 teams in 2026. You can find more info on the methodology for my power rankings here and get the current numbers for every team in the paid subscriber Google sheet.
First let’s take a quick look at the landscape of adjusted offensive and defensive performance throughout the NFL in 2026. You can see the Vikings in the top-left, the 49ers way over to the right, and the Chiefs in a crowded second tier of NFL teams. The diagonals reflect a 55/45 proportional weighting of offensive and defensive strength, with teams on the same diagonals being, roughly, equal in overall team strength.
While the simple takeaway is that the 49ers are really good overall, the Chiefs are above average and the Vikings are mid-tier, it doesn’t tell us a lot about what to expect going forward. For that purpose, I plotted all the team power rankings for 20 seasons from 2007–2026, highlighting teams that began the season 4-0 with darkened data points in that team’s primary color, and the 2026 teams represented by their team logos.
The non-4-0 teams are represented by fainter points, so as not to distract from the true comparative class of historical results. The historical 4-0 teams are also labeled with team abbreviations and season.
You can see that the Vikings are, indeed, one of the worst 4-0 teams over the last 20 years by these advanced metrics. The outlier on the downside is the 2012 Arizona Cardinals squad that had an average defense and one of the worst offenses over the entire 20-year period. The Vikings have a much better defense, but their offense is clearly low by the standard of 4-0 teams, residing near the bottom of the non-outlier results.
Let’s pull out the 10 teams surrounding the 2026 Vikings in overall power rankings, which combine adjusted offensive and defensive strength:
