The Vikings, looking to rebound from two straight losses, return from the bye in the thick of a heated playoff race in the NFC. Minnesota’s bitter rival, the Green Bay Packers, are also in that race and the two teams occupy very different ends of the luck spectrum this season.

Touched by the football gods in 2022, Kevin O’Connell’s Vikings have so far been hounded by football demons this season, with a league-high 18.3%of their drives ending in a turnover. That high of a clip hasn’t been seen since Jameis Winston threw 30 interceptions for the Bucs in 2019, resulting in Tampa Bay’s 20.2% turnover rate.

Meanwhile, across the border in Green Bay, the Packers have a turnover rate of 9.4%, good for 11th lowest in the NFL.

Diving further into the numbers and analytics the Vikings have been the unluckiest team through 13 weeks, while the Packers have been the luckiest, according to NFL NextGen Stats. Both teams are on pace to set three-year highs in their respective categories.

In the chart below, you can see that the Vikings’ opponents don’t drop interceptions or passes, they make hard field goals and they recover most of the fumbles. Green Bay’s opponents, meanwhile, drop a ton of passes, miss field goals and fail to recover the ball when the Packers fumble.

If those numbers don’t mean a whole lot to you, here is how each category is described..

The Vikings have lost 14 of 23 fumbles while the Packers have lost just two of 15 fumbles. While opponents are completing an eye-watering 70% of passes against the Minnesota defense, QBs are slightly less accurate against Green Bay, completing 64.4% of passes.

Despite three seasons worth of bad luck the Vikings are sixth in the NFC with the ability to control their own destiny over the final five weeks of the season.

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The Vikings are expected to part ways with their standout pass rusher

The Minnesota Vikings are going to have a tough time extending edge-rusher Danielle Hunter, and he isn’t the only one.

Hunter presents the Vikings with problems because has been awesome in 2023, can’t be franchise-tagged next offseason and is probably going to be too expensive heading into his age-30 campaign for Minnesota to justify a new contract.

DJ Wonnum, on the other hand, should be relatively affordable in free agency by comparison, but may not be worth the money he can get elsewhere across the league.

Alec Lewis of The Athletic on Monday, December 4, authored a mailbag in which he answered a question about the Vikings’ “appetite” to bring Wonnum back on an extension. Lewis’ answer was more or less that a deeper dive into the outside linebacker’s numbers doesn’t bode well for his return to Minneapolis.

The way this season has played out for Wonnum has driven up his value in a traditional sense, though perhaps not in the ways particularly appreciated by analytics stat-head/general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah.

Wonnum, a fourth-round draft pick of the Vikings in 2020, is playing the final season of a four-year, $4 million contract. With a salary cap number under $3 million in 2023, Wonnum represents significant value as a player who has stepped in for Marcus Davenport as the team’s second starting outside linebacker alongside Hunter.

Davenport, hampered by injury for much of the year and fresh off the IR, has played in just four games this season after signing a one-year, $13 million contract to join Minnesota in the spring. As a result, Wonnum has started 11 of the 12 games in which he has appeared and is on pace for a career year in both sacks and QB hits. He is also on pace for the second-most quarterback pressures of his NFL tenure.

Because of his accomplishment, Over The Cap has set Wonnum’s 2023 worth at $8.2 million, over three times the amount of his cap hit this season and more than eight times the annual average pay on his current deal. As a result, his present market value is enormous.

Wonnum’s play-in and play-out production, however, has actually decreased since last season, as Lewis pointed out. That could be a tiny regression for a 26-year-old still in his prime, or it could be an indication that Wonnum has peaked and will not be worth the money his estimate predicts he should make on his next contract.