There’s an accepted way to be the last unbeaten team in the NFL. You show up in late October like a cruise ship easing into a small harbor: huge, gleaming, a little absurd, scoring 40 a week while the rest of the league stands on the dock wondering what it did wrong.

And then there are the Minnesota Vikings, who beat the Bears 9-3.

That was Week 2, and it turned out to be less an accident than a statement of purpose. Minnesota is 6-0 after Sunday’s 16-10 win over the Colts. With the 49ers losing at Atlanta and the Chiefs losing 20-3 to Seattle, the list of NFL undefeated teams is now exactly one name long. The rest of the résumé reads 39-22 over Green Bay, 23-16 at Tampa Bay, 15-10 over Miami and 23-13 at New Orleans. Since that opener, no Vikings game has featured more than 39 combined points.

(For anyone checking for late developments: Monday night’s Cowboys-Eagles game changed nothing here. Philadelphia is 2-5, Dallas came in having dropped two straight, and neither team is on the Vikings’ remaining schedule. The perfect-record club is still a club of one.)

So the Vikings are undefeated. The question this week is whether they’re something more than that, and Yahoo has an answer. Writing for Yahoo’s Hot Read, SB Nation’s Jarrett Bailey put it plainly: “This Vikings defense is very good, but stop saying it’s historic – it isn’t.” His case is that Minnesota leads all defenses in EPA per play and ranks second in DVOA, but by his DVOA comparison the 2024 Vikings defense rates higher, and the offense ranks 31st in success rate.

I’ll take a side. Bailey’s right.

The Vikings are undefeated. They are not historic.

The figure that settles it comes from NFL.com: Minnesota’s 125 points through six games are tied for the second fewest by any team to start 6-0 since 1950. Only the 1978 Rams scored fewer, with 116. The team the Vikings are tied with is the 1973 Vikings, which is either a lovely bit of franchise symmetry or a sign that Minnesota simply has a type.

That’s the difference between historic and historical. A historic team rewrites the record book. A historical one turns up in it as a footnote, with a pleasant shrug.

Now, the obvious objection, delivered at volume from somewhere in the Upper Midwest: They haven’t lost. What more do you want?

Fair. Undefeated is a fact, and nobody gets to take it away from them on a Tuesday. “Not historic” also isn’t the same as “not good.” CBS’s Pete Prisco just moved Minnesota to No. 1 in his power rankings with a summary that’s hard to improve on: “They still don’t score enough on offense, but the defense is special.” I’ll confess I came close to typing the h-word myself this week, mostly because “historic” is the easiest word in the sports vocabulary to reach for, like the TV remote wedged in the couch cushions. You don’t think about it. You just grab it.

But the label matters, because it changes what a loss means. If the Vikings are historic, the first defeat is a fall from grace. If they’re a very good team with an elite defense and a stubbornly modest offense, it’s just a Sunday.

And look at how those two low-scoring precedents went. The 1973 Vikings won their first nine, lost 20-14 at Atlanta on Nov. 19, and still reached Super Bowl VIII, where Miami beat them 24-7. The 1978 Rams won their first seven, lost 10-3 to the Saints on Oct. 22, finished 12-4 and played in the NFC Championship Game. Neither team was perfect. Both were pretty good at football for a pretty long time.

Which brings us to the calendar, which has opinions of its own.

Week 8 sends Minnesota to Detroit on Sunday, Nov. 1, the day after Halloween, in a week CBS’s John Breech says “brings Halloween scares for several contenders,” the Vikings among them. The Lions are 4-2 and 3-point favorites, with a total of 46.5, per the DraftKings odds ESPN posted Tuesday. That’s the market’s read on the last unbeaten team in the league: an underdog, on the road, against a division rival. Detroit also happens to be the team that ended the 2024 Vikings’ 5-0 start, 31-29, on Oct. 20 of that year. Minnesota fans didn’t need reminding, so I apologize for reminding them.

Then it gets harder. Buffalo, 5-1 entering this week, comes to Minneapolis on Monday night, Nov. 9, the night before the trade deadline. After that it’s a trip to Green Bay on Nov. 15 and the 49ers at Estadio Banorte on Nov. 22. Breech calculates that from Week 8 through Week 11 the Vikings face the most difficult strength of schedule in the NFL, a .731 mark. Bailey adds that Minnesota has faced the second-easiest set of opposing offenses so far, and that the offenses still to come are the second-hardest.

Bailey thinks “the Vikings’ carriage is going to turn back into a pumpkin very soon.” Maybe. I’m not putting a date on it. The two precedents above lasted into Week 8 and Week 10, and this one will last exactly as long as the bounces allow. The market leans Detroit this weekend, and that’s as far as anyone should go. If you came here for Vikings odds to go undefeated, the only number I trust is the one on Sunday’s game, and it says the first serious test starts now.

Here’s what I’ll say with confidence. Back in August, DraftKings set Minnesota’s season win total at 8.5. The Vikings need three more wins to clear it, with 11 games left. Whatever happens in Detroit, the season has already outrun the people who set the numbers, which is the opposite of a scare.

They still aren’t a cruise ship, though. This team is a tugboat: low to the water, not much to look at, very hard to push off course. Tugboats don’t make the history books. They just keep pulling.