Packers Meet the Vikings for the First Time

Here's another chapter from Packers History in 100 Plays. This time, we explore the first time the Packers faced the Minnesota Vikings after the Vikings joined the NFL as an expansion team in 1961.

October 22, 1961

The play: Bart Starr goes deep to Boyd Dowler

With respect to a brief incursion by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Packers’ division rivals — their only true rivals, it could be argued — have been set since the 1961 arrival of the Minnesota Vikings.

The NFL’s expansion into the Twin Cities that year introduced the last of the group known today as the NFC North. And although they’ve never managed to overcome the hideous shade of purple they selected for their uniforms, nor have they managed to win a single one of their four Super Bowl appearances, the Vikings are a worthy, albeit tardy, member of the division.

Minneapolis specifically and the Twin Cities generally are good matches for the rest of the NFC North. It naturally shares the blue collar, Midwestern sensibilities of Green Bay, Chicago, and Detroit. And since the early 2000s divisional realignment banished Tampa Bay back to the south where they belong, the division is one of the NFL’s most geographically logical groupings: every team’s home state borders at least one other state occupied by a division rival.

The Packers first met the brand new Vikings in Week 6 of the 1961 NFL season, and curiously enough they’d turn around and play them again in Week 7, a quirk of the schedule if there ever was one.

Expansion teams can often have a bit of a rough go of it in their first season, and the Vikings were no exception. After winning the first regular season of their existence, the Vikings dropped their next four in a row and would welcome the Packers to Minnesota for the first time in proud possession of a 1-4 record.

But the Packers, for their part, were red hot to start the season. Spurned on by their near miss in the 1960 championship, the Packers blasted into the 1961 season with a vengeance — after getting an embarrassing Week 1 loss to the Detroit Lions out of the way, that is. Having fallen to the Lions to start the season, they bounced back with four straight dominant wins, beating the 49ers, Bears, Colts, and Browns by a combined score of 148-34.

Would their hot streak continue? Or would the upstart Vikings spoil the Packers’ dominant run?

It was decisively the former.

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