The Greatest Minnesota Vikings-Green Bay Packers Games of the Past Decade

(Photo by Brian Bahr/Getty Images)

If you’re an ESPN executive, the most exciting sentence in the English language right now probably goes a little something like this:

Brett Favre takes on the Green Bay Packers on Monday Night Football.

Combine a bitter rivalry with a hugely polarizing star, stick it in the most popular timeslot of the most popular sport in America, and what do you get?

One seriously popular product, that’s what. Dolphins-Colts drew nearly 15 million viewers a few weeks ago on Monday night. It's hard to imagine Vikings-Packers won't blow that number out of the water. Whatever the final score, the "Worldwide Leader" is poised to put up some seriously crooked numbers.

The craziest part? Monday night's game isn't even the most exciting showdown between the two teams this season. That won't come until Nov. 1, when Favre takes the stage in front of 72,000 of his scorned admirers at Lambeau Field. As Samuel L. Jackson might tell us, "Hold on to your butts."

On the eve of the opening act of one of most riveting regular-season dramas we can remember, we're compelled to look back at a handful of the classic Minnesota-Green Bay clashes that have paved the way.

Here, we highlight four such games. Our guess is that before the season is over, we'll have a strong candidate to round out the top five.

Oct. 5, 1998, Lambeau Field: Vikings 37, Packers 24

Between Sept. 3, 1995 and Oct. 5, 1998, the Packers played 25 regular-season games at Lambeau.

They won all of them.

That's a three-year stretch of dominance that rivals the length of the average NFL career. In other words, a whole generation of players came and went without seeing the Packers lose at home.

Then Randy Moss made his way into the league, and everything changed.

Moss made an impact from Week One of his rookie campaign, but this game served as his coming-out party: Five catches, 190 yards, two touchdowns, and one shattered winning streak.

Randall Cunningham threw for 442 yards and four scores on the day. Favre tossed three picks before getting the hook in favor of Doug Pederson, and a young Ryan Longwell kicked a field goal and three PATs in a losing effort.

Some Packer fans will tell you this game was the beginning of the end of the Holmgren era. For Vikings fans getting caught up in the magical 1998 season, it was the beginning of something special.

Nov. 6, 2000, Lambeau Field: Packers 26, Vikings 20 (OT)

If you read the box score, it looked simple: Antonio Freeman caught a 43-yard pass from Brett Favre to win the game.

If you remember the play that went down as "The Improbable Bobble," it was anything but.

On a messy night in Green Bay, Daunte Culpepper and the Vikings spent four quarters matching the Pack blow-for-blow. Both offenses were pass-happy, and neither moved the ball well in the rain. 

The Vikings nearly won the game in regulation, but as Gary Anderson lined up for a 33-yard field goal with seven seconds to play, Mitch Berger muffed the snap, then chucked up an ill-advised pass attempt that was picked off to send the game into overtime.

On 3rd-and-4 during Green Bay's first possession of OT, Minnesota pressured Favre into a long lob to Antonio Freeman. Vikings corner Chris Dishman broke it up.

Or so he thought.

Dishman whacked the ball out of the air and off of his body. Freeman, face-down on the ground, somehow came up with the ricochet on the fly.

Dishman didn't notice that Freeman wasn't down, and Freeman waltzed Scot-free into the endzone for the win.

As Favre tells it, he mobbed Freeman during the ensuing celebration before asking in a whisper, "Did you catch it?"

Freeman's reply: "Hell yeah, I got it."

Jan. 9, 2005, Lambeau Field: Vikings 31, Packers 14

In many respects, Minnesota's 2004 season was an affair to forget.

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