Sure, Kevin O’Connell won the NFL Coach of the Year award, and his team won 14 games, but today we must question everything the Vikings do, because the new NFL champs set fire to KO’s nice-guy playbook.
Souhan: Super Bowl champion Eagles were built with brilliance
Howie Roseman, the architect of the NFL’s best roster, should take a bow following Sunday’s rout of Kansas City.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
February 10, 2025 at 4:04AM
O’Connell handles himself with poise and class.
The coach who won the Super Bowl on Sunday, Philadelphia’s Nick Sirianni, just this season screamed at his own team’s fans behind the bench during a game and required a special meeting with his quarterback to head off mutiny.
The Vikings’ best player, Justin Jefferson, occasionally shows frustration during games but has never confronted a coach or quarterback.
A.J. Brown, the best receiver on the champion Eagles, made such a spectacle of himself while complaining during games that he required a prop to calm himself down. He reads the book “Inner Excellence” while sitting on the bench.
The Vikings chose a conventional-looking and playing quarterback, J.J. McCarthy, to be their future.
The Eagles, who defeated the Chiefs 40-22 on Sunday in New Orleans in Super Bowl LIX, chose in the second round of the NFL draft a running quarterback who left Alabama after losing the starting job, then helped Jalen Hurts develop so quickly that he almost won two Super Bowls in three years.
If there was a lesson to be learned from the Eagles this season, it’s that winning cures all ills, and that winning is as simple, and difficult, as handing a mega-talented roster to an excellent coaching staff.
Sirianni hardly ever wins a news conference. Sometimes he seems incapable of forming complete thoughts, or sentences.
But he is 54-23 as an NFL head coach, with two Super Bowl appearances and one championship in three seasons.
Sirianni deserves credit. Hurts deserves credit. Defensive coordinator Vic Fangio and offensive coordinator Kellen Moore deserve credit.
One person deserves more credit than all of them.
Eagles General Manager Howie Roseman.
Roseman won a Super Bowl in Minneapolis in 2018 with a backup quarterback buoyed by a remarkably deep and talented roster. He came within a play or two of winning another two seasons ago. Sunday, the best team he has ever built destroyed the two-time defending champs in the Super Bowl.
Roseman has the ability to be both bold and surgical.
He sensed Carson Wentz, the quarterback he drafted to lead his team for a decade, was not up to the task. So he drafted Hurts, considered by most at the time to be a long shot, run-first athlete more than a fully developed quarterback. Turns out, he was right.
He saw a chance to trade for A.J. Brown, a dynamic receiver. Brown gave the Eagles the true No. 1 receiver they had lacked. He gave up just the 18th and 101st picks in the draft.
He saw running back Saquon Barkley hit the free-agent market and signed him, and he turned the Eagles offense, which had been reliant on Hurts’ running and passing, into a physical, run-first team.
Because of his team’s success, Roseman has been forced to draft at the middle or bottom of rounds. He has nevertheless built the NFL’s best defense, offensive line and running game.
This year, the Eagles’ relative weakness was their passing game. But there is no doubting the talent available in the passing game — Hurts throwing to Brown, former first-round pick DeVonta Smith and tight end Dallas Goedert.
Roseman hasn’t only won two Super Bowls, he’s won two Super Bowls against quarterbacks considered the best of all time — Tom Brady, who has won more Super Bowls than any other quarterback, and Patrick Mahomes, whose quest to catch Brady took a hit on Sunday.
After two years of Mahomes’ heroics, Roseman’s team provided another reminder that blocking and tackling make all of those highlights possible.
His offensive line helped Barkley produce one of the best running back seasons of all time.
His defensive line rarely blitzed on Sunday, yet Mahomes never had time to work his usual magic.
The Chiefs’ superpower this season was winning close games, sometimes inexplicably.
Thanks to Roseman’s work, the Eagles never had to worry about losing close and late on Sunday.
“Inner excellence” is an apt description of what happens between Roseman’s ears.
The Vikings have completed a contract extension for head coach Kevin O’Connell and are working toward one with General Manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah. With NFL awards and the Super Bowl in the books, here are the important dates ahead for the team.
