The 1998 Vikings: 15-1 and a Missed Kick

Some near-misses hurt because a team was one loss short of a perfect regular season. The 1998 Minnesota Vikings hurt for a different reason: they got the 15-1 record and the historic offense, then lost the only game that mattered on a kick that had been automatic all year.

The most explosive offense of its time

The 1998 Vikings scored 556 points — the most any NFL team had ever scored in a season to that point. The engine was a 21-year-old rookie: Randy Moss, who fell to the 21st pick and spent the fall humiliating the cornerbacks assigned to him. Alongside him, Cris Carter kept working the middle of the field, Robert Smith ran, and Randall Cunningham — a quarterback many assumed was finished — put together the best season of his career under head coach Dennis Green.

They lost exactly once in the regular season, a three-point road game at Tampa Bay in Week 9. Everything else, they won, most of it comfortably. By January they looked like the best team in football and a Super Bowl formality.

A perfect kicker, one imperfect kick

Minnesota’s kicker that year was Gary Anderson, a 16-year veteran having the season of a lifetime. He made every field goal and every extra point he attempted — 35 of 35 on field goals — becoming the first placekicker in NFL history to finish a season without a single miss. In a year defined by the offense, the kicker was quietly perfect too.

Then came the NFC Championship Game against the Atlanta Falcons at home. Leading 27-20 late in the fourth quarter, the Vikings lined up for a 38-yard field goal that would have made it a two-score game and, almost certainly, ended it. Anderson — 35 for 35 — missed. The kick sailed wide, Atlanta drove for the tying touchdown, and the Falcons won 30-27 in overtime.

The cruelest kind of near-miss

The 1998 Vikings never got the chance to chase a perfect record into the Super Bowl, because the game turned on a single swing of a leg that had not failed all season. It is the near-miss that best captures how thin the margins are at the top: a record-setting team, a flawless kicker, and one attempt that erased both.

Their 15-1 sits alongside the other great almosts — proof that dominance across seventeen weeks guarantees nothing in the eighteenth. One game, sometimes one play, is all it takes.

Why it belongs in the archive

The Vikings are a reminder that “perfect” is a knife’s edge in every direction — record, playoffs, even the kicking game. The offense was good enough to be remembered forever; one miss is why it’s remembered as a near-miss instead of a champion.

For the full company of teams that came up a game short, see the closest teams to a perfect regular season. For another dominant club undone late, read about the 1985 Bears, and for the arithmetic that makes any perfect run so fragile, see why 16-0 is so rare. Then draft a roster and see how long you can keep a season clean.