Whatever the Minnesota Vikings are paying Carlsbad’s Kevin O’Connell, it’s a great value.
The Vikings are breaking in a new quarterback this year under O’Connell, their third-year head coach and a former La Costa Canyon High School and San Diego State quarterback.
Injuries have hit hard, such as Sunday, when Aaron Jones — a very good running back — suffered a game-ending injury in the first quarter.
O’Connell’s club nevertheless stands 5-0 after defeating the New York Jets in London, 23-17.
Coaching matters more in football than any other team sport. The volume of influence and detail is extraordinary. Each NFL staff prepares and manages close to 50 players in a game, and makes about 140 play calls.
The first quarter tends to reveal, among other things, several clues about how well the respective coaches have prepared.
O’Connell’s Vikings are dominating the first quarter.
They outscored opponents by an NFL-best 35 points entering Sunday before outpointing the Jets 10-0 in the first 15 minutes.
The Jets (2-3) rallied, but never pulled even.
So the Vikings will enter their bye week as the NFC’s only unbeaten team before facing the rival Detroit Lions in Week 7.
Even the Minnesotans who sleep in Vikings pajamas wouldn’t have bet lunch money on their team starting 5-0.
Surely, they reasoned, it would take time for the offense directed by Sam Darnold, a veteran QB who joined the team in March, to get up to speed.
Plus, the Vikings were coming off a 7-10 season and got only 7.5 victories on over-under betting lines for this season.
So what’s going on here?
O’Connell’s decision to play for San Diego State played a role in his landing with the New England Patriots as a third-round selection in the 2008 draft.
His year-and-a-half stint with the Patriots exposed O’Connell to not only football savants Bill Belichick and Tom Brady but an assistant coach named Brian Flores.
Flash forward to two offseasons ago. O’Connell was coming off a promising first season as an NFL head coach.
The ’22 Vikings had won an NFL-record 11 consecutive games decided by seven points or fewer, bringing them the North title.
But their vanilla defense, owing in part to subpar personnel, was a problem.
The solution: O’Connell reunited with the creative, Belichick-trained Flores. The former Miami Dolphins coach was named Minnesota’s defensive coordinator.
This was a great move, one that may land Flores a much-deserved second head coaching job.
The Vikings improved from 28th to 15th in points last season, blunting the challenges of losing QB Kirk Cousins to a midseason injury and seeing three other QBs start for them.
Flores’ second Vikings D has fueled the first-quarter dominance by allowing only three points in the five games.
Prospering via a bewildering array of disguises to coverages and blitzes, the Vikings entered Sunday fourth in fewest points alllowed. They confused and bullied the Aaron Rodgers-led Jets most of the game.
What other experiences are informing O’Connell’s management of the Vikings?
Belichick, arguably the best defensive mind in NFL history, wasn’t the only defensive expert/head coach under whom he played. Another was Rex Ryan, who led a pair of Jets teams QB’d by Mark Sanchez to an AFC title game.
On the offensive side, O’Connell backed up Brady and Philip Rivers. He coached alongside Kyle Shanahan and was the coordinator under Sean McVay on the Super Bowl-winning L.A. Rams team.
Still, it’s not true that O’Connell has “fixed” Darnold.
Though Darnold has outperformed Cousins’ three successors last year, the team’s overall successes have mitigated a few bad decisions by Darnold in several games.
O’Connell said the offense erred too often Sunday.
“I’ve got to make sure that I find a way to continue chasing improvement, because there were some things offensively that just can’t happen in the big scheme of 17 games over a season,” he said.
A second reunion, that of Flores and former Dolphins linebacker Andrew Van Ginkel, has further lifted the Vikings.
A versatile linebacker, Van Ginkel has returned two difficult interceptions for touchdowns this season. Sunday, he dropped from blitz mode into coverage. Rodgers didn’t see him, and Van Ginkel gathered an 8-yard dart over the middle and ran it for 63 yards.
Thirty-nine games into O’Connell’s tenure, which has yielded a 25-14 (.641) record, this is clear:
O’Connell, 39, is a good head coach, in part because he identified Flores as a star and hired him.
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