KO's Offense Discussion 2024

O’Connell realizes now, as a third-year head coach whose 4-0 Vikings are the talk of the league, how similar the last two quarters of the Super Bowl were to the hot, grueling days of training camp. Then, he would sometimes daydream about one day installing his own offense as a head coach. He thought about the language he would use, how he would collaborate with his own assistants and players, how he would create answers to their questions.

Hours after winning the Super Bowl, O’Connell accepted Minnesota’s head coaching job. Later that week, he stepped off a parade bus sticky with beer and confetti and into his future. He brimmed with positivity, a sunbeam pouring into Vikings offices still cloaked in winter.

O’Connell had a vision. He had a plan. He had a playbook and a sound teaching process.

Yet he couldn’t have predicted how often he’d be reminded of football’s inherent chaos — and how crucial his knack for adaptation would be — over the next two seasons.

O’Connell’s young children are really into Legos. He and his wife, Leah, have a massive tub in their home containing hundreds of the little multi-colored bricks from dozens of separate sets.

The tub has no rules, nor order — the manuals for each set were thrown out long ago. The kids grab pieces — a couple of blocks from a disassembled “Cars” character, a few more from a “Star Wars” ship — and build whatever is in their imagination.

It drives O’Connell a little nuts. Building something real requires a plan, and part of him wants to know what all of the pieces do, or the different ways they might fasten to each other, before he starts to build. But the other part of him loves that his kids are having a blast creating like this, so he happily sits on the floor and fastens a racecar tire to a TIE Fighter.

He admits his two most dominant qualities — obsession with process and detail, and empathy — compete with one another, but in an NFL quarterback room one is needed just as much as the other, often at the same time. It’s why O’Connell’s teaching method has resonated with players.

With quarterbacks, he implements a layered approach that first explains why a play or broader concept will manifest in a certain way. This defense has a rule that says they’ll react to this formation with this type of coverage, so we will change our formation spacing to force them out of their rule and create our advantage instead of, we are lining up this way.

O’Connell installs a core alphabet for his system. Then he builds out the playbook and week-to-week game plans by tying a word players recognize in a concept or play to another word which brings them into a family of plays and eventually grows into an entire system. The player can easily jump between plays within a family and into the broader system because the words he recognizes escort him there. The point is to avoid rote memorization; everything links to something else. O’Connell calls it “dot-connecting.”

“Maybe it’s a concept that you take from an existing concept, and you say, ‘Here’s how we’re gonna change it, here’s how we’re gonna name it,” O’Connell explained. “It’s in a family of names that have sameness and likeness — big cats, sports cars — whatever it is, you name it, we’ve got a category for it. And if we don’t, we’ll have one soon enough.”

O’Connell asks his players for detailed feedback during the installation of his offense and subsequent practices. If a receiver feels more comfortable adjusting his route off a third inside step instead of a fourth, or if the quarterback wants to swap out one route for another while attacking the same space on the field, O’Connell changes his play.

“I’m not the one out there running the play,” O’Connell said. “If it doesn’t infringe upon the play-caller’s intent or the design of the play, ‘It’s yours, guys.’ I think that there is power in that, in this day and age … when they feel like they are a voice at the table, not just someone being talked to.”

“The way he connects, the way he talks with us, the way he understands us as players, I feel like it’s a really good characteristic as a coach,” said Vikings All-Pro receiver Justin Jefferson.

Plus, when players feel like they have a say in the details of the plays they run, O’Connell is comfortable asking them to trust him when he adjusts the plan in real-time. He does this often and for good reason. Defenses come up with bespoke plans — at times outside their typical system — to try to slow down Jefferson. There sometimes is no precedent for how a specific opponent will try to mitigate him until they show their strategy in a game’s first few series.

When that happens, O’Connell and his staff workshop their own offensive counters on the sidelines and in the locker room at halftime. They come up with a list of “what-if’s”: If a defense does X, how will the Vikings respond?

“I think the best coaches see it live. They can make those in-game adjustments, they don’t have to wait until after the fact to do that,” said McVay, who watches cut-ups of Minnesota’s game film every week. “I’ve seen Kevin do that in his tenure there.”

O’Connell’s adaptability beyond game-planning has been tested. While his 2022 team won 13 games — 11 by one score — they were ultimately undone by a defense that ranked near the bottom of the league and lost in the wild-card round. To fix it, O’Connell hired former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores, known for his complicated, aggressive, pressure-diverse scheme. A former quarterback hired a modern quarterback’s biggest fear.

On July 6, Vikings rookie cornerback Khyree Jackson was killed in a car accident in Maryland. “It has been a significant time in our organization, losing a player,” O’Connell said. “You are personally working through your process of dealing with something like that — while also knowing that my role is to be there… for anyone that might need support, and love, and guidance.”

Players were away from the facility during the brief break in the NFL’s calendar. O’Connell got on the phone with anybody who needed to talk, checking on players and coaches and grieving privately.

“He has a heart for people,” said McVay. “He really pays close attention to what people need, (and) he’s that for them.”

The Vikings contributed $20,000 to funeral expenses and paid out Jackson’s signing bonus to his estate. O’Connell spoke at the funeral in Jackson’s hometown, and the team also had a private memorial service with Jackson’s family in Minnesota. They keep Jackson’s locker open, and players wear decals of his initials on their helmets. O’Connell wears a pin above his heart that says “KJ.”

O’Connell told the team what he had learned through two years as a head coach and decades as an assistant and player before that: Life is a combination of success, adversity and chaos. They would all mourn as football’s unforgiving clock ticked on.

“With the proper amount of structure, coaching and clarity that you can give these players, you can make this very difficult or you can make the complex simple,” said O’Connell. “You’re constantly trying to find that balance, and the balance is in how you’re coaching it. I never want to be a Monday morning ‘clicker coach’ where I am holding the clicker … saying, ‘You should have done this, this and this.’ If I’m saying those things, I probably didn’t coach it very well.”

...

“The amount of work that goes into that position, on your quarterback journey, when everybody decides that you cannot play … ” O’Connell said after the game. “We always believed in him. Awesome to watch him go do that thing. I am really proud of Sam Darnold.”

O’Connell fought to control his voice, but it cracked with emotion as he thought about a young quarterback who got another chance and what he was building with him.