BRAINERD DISPATCH | SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2022
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Vikings have a new hand to play, but it’s no Royal Flush O’Connell ready to build offense around the skill set of Kirk Cousins
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ell, so much for reading the tea leaves. Kirk Cousins is here for at least another season, and new head coach Kevin O’Connell thinks he can make the haters reverse their course. He made Matthew Stafford a Super Bowlwinning quarterback, and O’Connell is committed, he said Thursday, to giving it a go with Cousins. “I see us being able to build an offense to JOHN SHIPLEY maximize what he does best, which happens St. Paul to be what a lot of Pioneer Press quarterbacks want to be able to do best,” said O’Connell, who until Monday morning was the offensive coordinator for the Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams. The plan, he added, is “a quarterback-friendly system where (a quarterback) can have an attacking mindset, aggressive mindset … on our terms.” One could see this coming as soon as O’Connell became the leading candidate to replace Mike Zimmer as the Vikings’ head coach between the NFC Championship Game and last Sunday’s Super Bowl. The quarterbacks coach for Cousins’ best season in Washington, O’Connell figured out how to make Stafford a great NFL quarterback — if not, unfortunately, a great human being. But we digress. After comparing Cousins favorably with Stafford, O’Connell said he anticipates building his offense around the quarterback who has polarized Vikings fans almost since the day he signed his first three-year, $84 million contract on March 15, 2018. “He plays with great rhythm and timing and precision,” O’Connell said, “and I think we can build an offensive system like we had in L.A. to take advantage of that skill set.” Asked if this could possibly be true, new Vikings general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, sitting next to the man he hired on a riser at
the Vikings’ practice field at TCO Performance Center, confirmed. The Cousins gambit appears to be part of what each man called their “shared vision” for the franchise’s success. “I’m excited that he’s excited to coach him and lead him, and we’re focused on building the team around him to set us up to succeed the best we can,” the GM said. There are at least a few possibilities in play here. One, Vikings ownership made clear before starting the hiring process that it believes the team can win next season. No doubt part of what made O’Connell appealing was a fervent belief — and convincing promise — that this is possible. Another, of course, is that the new guy thinks he has diagnosed what the old guy was doing wrong and is confident he’ll fix it. You’re forgiven if not likewise convinced but this is O’Connell’s job now, not to retool but to win with a roster already loaded with big contracts. Even if he’s circumspect, O’Connell must advance accordingly. Asked if he believes the Vikings as composed are far from achieving such lofty goals as a Super Bowl appearance — it would be their first since 1977 — O’Connell said, “I don’t. I really don’t. We’ve talked a lot about that. That’s one of the things you look for when you get these opportunities.” If you’re wondering if you’ve been watching the same team the past few seasons, well, you can be forgiven for that, too. But don’t forget, O’Connell just sold his services as a fixer, someone who satisfies the Vikings’ desire to win without starting over. Dropping Cousins through the bomb bay doors is a retooling move; one can argue whether that is what is genuinely required here, but it doesn’t seem to matter right now. Considering the presence of players such as Justin Jefferson and Dalvin Cook on the offensive roster, and Cousins’ prohibitive $45 million salary cap hit next season, playing out his contract seems reasonable. Being that this is the NFL, everything we heard on Thursday could be complete hogwash, but for now we take the new regime at their word. O’Connell and his staff might give the Vikings a new hand to play, but it appears it won’t be a Royal Flush.
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Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell is not Jim Harbaugh, which is kind of the point The 36-year-old O’Connell is a breath of fresh air that brings a new culture to the Vikings
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here’s a world in which Kevin O’Connell is not the head coach of the Vikings right now. If a few conversations had gone differently a couple of weeks ago, the job might belong to a 58-yearold goofball with a love for DANE MIZUTANI khakis, an impressive St. Paul Pioneer Press resume at the highest level and a personality that has a history of wearing people thin. Instead, the Vikings shrewdly went with the 36-year-old O’Connell. He separated himself from the pack of coaching finalists about a week and a half before the Super Bowl, and after hoisting the Lombardi Trophy with the Los Angeles Rams over the weekend, the Vikings introduced O’Connell as their next head coach on Thursday afternoon at TCO Performance Center in Eagan. Listen to O’Connell talk for 30 seconds and it’s easy to see why the Vikings hired him. He is not Jim Harbaugh. Which is kind of the point. Ever since the Vikings cleaned house on Jan. 10, firing longtime general manager Rick Spielman
and longtime head coach Mike Zimmer, ownership made its vision abundantly clear. Whoever was going to lead the Vikings into the future was going to do so with collaboration in mind. It’s become a buzzword over the past five weeks, starting the hiring process that landed the Vikings new general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah. Asked how he planned to select his head coach, Adofo-Mensah said he was looking for “a partner” most of all. He’s found exactly that in O’Connell. In his first appearance as head coach, O’Connell sat alongside AdofoMensah, rocking a designer suit, and fittingly, a purple dress shirt to match. The pair oozed charisma never seen with the previous regime. “There’s got to be collaboration,” O’Connell said. “That’s the No. 1 thing that I think we’ve talked about that we’re so excited about. Through the process of getting to know each other, we’ve known from Day 1 that we’re going to be able to collaborate.” He went on to use some iteration of the word “collaborate” a dozen times or so during his introductory press conference. It would have induced some eyerolls had O’Connell not sounded so authentic in his delivery. He made it sound as if he truly believes this stuff. Now take that mindset and compare it to Zimmer. It was his way
or the highway with the Vikings for much of the past decade, and because of that, his players seemed to stop listening to him in the end. It’s not a coincidence that middle linebacker Eric Kendricks spoke out against “a fear-based organization” when asked about the culture after Zimmer’s firing. It’s not a coincidence that right tackle Brian O’Neill yearned for “little personal things” like a simple “hello” in the hallways. As successful as Zimmer was over the years with the Vikings, his voice got old because he refused to collaborate. The same thing can be said about Harbaugh toward the end of his run with the San Francisco 49ers. That shouldn’t be an issue for O’Connell. “I think we’ll set a tone and create a culture here where players will want to be around us,” O’Connell said. “They’ll want to be around their coaches. They’ll want to be in the building.” It starts and stops with collaboration. “I know the word has been used a lot,” O’Connell said. “It’s been used a lot for a reason.” In that moment, O’Connell pointed toward his new partner in Adofo-Mensah. “We both believe in it,” the new coach said. “We have that shared vision, and I’ve been a part of something, and I know he has, too, where when it’s existed, a lot of really good things can happen.” He will soon have his Super Bowl ring to prove it.
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