A trend of Minnesota Vikings heartbreak was nowhere to be found when Stefon Diggs shocked New Orleans and the rest of the world on Sunday night, but the Vikes' upcoming NFC Championship Game opponent, the Philadelphia Eagles, can point right back to history if they need encouragement in the wake of the "Minnesota Miracle."
Despite holding the NFC's No. 1 seed and coming off an upset of the defending conference champion Atlanta Falcons, the Eagles are early underdogs against the Vikings for the Jan. 21 title game.
And yet some numbers bode rather well for Philadelphia, which proved Saturday night that it really can benefit from the roar of its own crowd.
For one, No. 1 seeds playing at home in conference championship games are 28-12, according to SportsRadio 94 WIP's Howard Eskin. In the last eight of those title games across both the NFC and AFC, per ESPN, the home team owns an 8-0 record. Minnesota has struggled mightily when it comes to hitting the road for postseason matchups, too, as the Vikings have gone 3-13 in road playoff games since 1982, as Kevin Seifert pointed out.
This season, two of the Vikings' three losses came on the road on grass outdoor fields. The grass at Lincoln Financial Field was noticeably slippery in the Eagles' divisional-round matchup with the Falcons. These are not trivial matters.
Couple that with the fact that the Eagles are undefeated (4-0) when they are home underdogs in the playoffs, and consider Eskin's nugget about Vikings quarterback Case Keenum being 1-4 against road teams with a winning percentage of at least .666, and all of a sudden, the arrow doesn't necessarily point right in Minnesota's favor.
No amount of numbers, of course, is going to dictate just how today's Vikings match up with today's Eagles, who beat Minnesota early in 2016 at Lincoln Financial Field. But if anything is clear, it's that this one, regardless of the odds, is up for grabs.
