Vikings’ Kevin O’Connell returns to L.A., ready to show Sean McVay what kind of play-caller he is now

Most Saturday evenings before a Vikings home game, the last illuminated office in the TCO Performance Center in Eagan is the one overlooking the practice fields from the third floor.

The final hours before kickoff are a solitary sweet spot for Kevin O’Connell to put the finishing touches on the call sheet that will remain in his hands for three hours on Sunday. He starts building it on Friday afternoons following his news conference and broadcast production meetings, sitting down with assistant quarterbacks coach Grant Udinski and soliciting input from his offensive staff about the game plan. Friday nights are for dinner with his wife, Leah, and their four children, and playing in the basement with his kids “until I can’t move any more,” he said.

Then, after a Saturday walk-through meeting with Sam Darnold and the rest of the Vikings quarterbacks, O’Connell’s favorite thing to do is to flip a college football game on the TV in his office and go over his call sheet until meeting the team at the hotel. Right tackle Brian O’Neill, who lives near the Vikings’ Eagan headquarters, will drive by the team parking lot, see one car still there and text O’Connell, “Go home.”

“Or [Saturday] morning, he’ll check in and say, ‘What time was it yesterday?’” O’Connell said. “I’ll say, ‘It was only six o’clock,’ and he’s like, ‘Dude.’ I’m like, ‘I promise you, man, if I could [leave earlier], I would.’ I tell the players all the time, I’m gonna give them everything I possibly have. There’s time to turn it off in the offseason, but not right now.”

He condensed it all this week, before flying 1,500 miles for a return to the SoFi Stadium field he last left covered in confetti. There, he’ll use the methods he learned in Los Angeles to try and beat the head coach who taught him many of them.

The Vikings’ game against the Rams on Thursday night is a homecoming for O’Connell, a San Diego native whose two years as Sean McVay’s offensive coordinator set him up to become the Vikings head coach right after the Rams beat the Bengals in Super Bowl LVI. He is the third of McVay’s former offensive assistants (after Matt LaFleur and Zac Taylor) to become an NFL head coach, and through 40 regular-season games, O’Connell has the highest win percentage (.625) in Vikings history.

His hasty 2019 introduction to play-calling under interim Washington coach Bill Callahan was good for him, O’Connell said, “because there wasn’t too much time to think about it.” It was with McVay, though, that O’Connell learned many of the game-planning tenets he still uses.

He was McVay’s first offensive coordinator since LaFleur in 2017, and though McVay called the plays, O’Connell was his confidant from game-planning meetings with quarterbacks to the gameday sideline. McVay turned over play-calling duties to O’Connell in practice periods and preseason games, and left his door open for conversations to prepare O’Connell for his own shot as a head coach.

“All the time I spent with him, framing how you want the week to go to provide ultimate clarity, for not only the quarterback but the whole team, was something I took directly from him,” O’Connell said. “The fact I was able to be right there every step of the way only made me feel that much more committed to that process.”

They’ll share a field Thursday night for the first time in 984 days since that Super Bowl victory, and though they remain connected — O’Connell called McVay “one of my closest friends in the league” in his Monday news conference — their interactions this time of year are limited to text messages every so often.

Their first matchup as head coaches comes with O’Connell in charge of a 5-1 team, facing the 2-4 Rams.

“He’s done a great job over the first two years, with a variety of different situations,” McVay said in his Monday news conference. “He’s got a great coaching staff. They’ve done a great job of adding players that fit the identity they want to play with. Kevin’s a guy that made a tremendous impact as a coach here. I’m not surprised and I’m happy for those guys. We’ll give them our best shot on Thursday.”

When new Washington coach Ron Rivera changed staffs in 2020, O’Connell became available as McVay searched for an offensive coordinator after the Rams missed the playoffs in 2019.

Wes Phillips, who’d worked with both men in Washington, recommended O’Connell as a kindred spirit who thought about offense the way McVay did: learning an opponent’s defensive rules and building plays that would turn those rules into constraints.

Both LaFleur and Taylor had become head coaches by the time O’Connell arrived in Los Angeles, and his time as McVay’s offensive coordinator became an apprenticeship of sorts. O’Connell, a voracious note-taker since his days as a rookie quarterback under Bill Belichick, absorbed everything he could.

“One of the things that probably made me feel so prepared for this job was his willingness to allow me to be a part of things that, maybe at other places, offensive coordinators aren’t a part of,” O’Connell said in his Monday news conference. “I got to see a lot, learn a lot, ask a lot of questions.”

O’Connell still approaches a game plan with many of the traits he honed with the Rams. He treats some plays as fact-finding missions and builds his approach around cornerstone plays that will exploit what he often calls a “premier look” that will leave defenses vulnerable to what the Vikings intend to do.

His time as a head coach, though, has made O’Connell appreciate the nuance behind calling a game.

Asked how he’s changed most as a play-caller with the Vikings, O’Connell said he’s learned not to chase plays he’s become enamored of throughout the week. That’s true “specifically in the pass game,” he said.

“Sometimes you’ve got to commit to a certain play style: running plays, maybe it’s different types of pass plays,” O’Connell said. “A lot of the ideas you come up with, you can’t help but think, ‘That’s gonna work.’ But there’s a time and a place. How’s the team playing? What’s the game situation? Do we have a lead? Maybe it’s a great time with a lead to call that. Or maybe it’s a time where you want to make sure you’re eating a little clock, moving the football and trying to extend a one-score game into a two-score game. We’ve had some of those this year. That’s probably the biggest evolution.”

Then, he said, it’s understanding that winning trumps a gaudy stat sheet. The Vikings are 13th in the NFL in yards this year, their worst ranking under O’Connell. Their passing offense, which ranked sixth in yards two years ago and fourth last year, is 14th this season.

They are sixth in points, after ranking eighth in 2022 and 22nd last year.

“I mean, [the Lions] are a perfect example,” he said last Friday, before Detroit beat the Vikings 31-29 on Sunday. “We’ve thrown for a lot of yards, but they’ve gotten us three times in a row. They’ve done more than we have, regardless of the stat sheet, to win games. And that’s where we’ve got to make sure we’re constantly evolving as coaches, and me as the play-caller and head coach, to put our team in the best possible position — not just the offense, not just the stat sheet.”

Phillips, now the one calling practice periods and preseason plays as O’Connell‘s offensive coordinator, has seen the coach learn to work by feel.

”Sometimes the separator is these guys that, they’re seeing it more in real time,” Phillips said. “They’re understanding what plays we could get to without having to look down at the sheet. Kevin’s always been able to do that, and the more experience he gets, the better he is. Sometimes, I’m even surprised. It’s, ‘You know, we need that play because of this situation.’ I go, ’That’s interesting; I wouldn’t have thought of that.’”

O’Connell might sound the most like McVay when he talks about “player ownership” of the scheme: how it can’t truly live apart from a call sheet unless players are comfortable with carrying out his designs.

He’s seen, in particular, how frequently defenses ditch their typical coverages in the presence of Justin Jefferson, designing unique approaches to counteract the receiver’s dynamism. “Every single time we’re just walking together in the hallway, we’re talking about a new play he’s drawing up or how they’re going to play me,” Jefferson said. “The communication and the chemistry is definitely high.”

At times this year, O’Connell has pushed the gas pedal as an endorsement of his players. It happened in Green Bay, when he chose to keep calling pass plays rather than playing conservatively with the Vikings up six in the fourth quarter.

“It’s confirming to them I believe in them,” he said after the Packers game. “We’re going to stay aggressive while being smart. There’s always a line there, but I’m really proud of our guys.”

He’ll take it all west on Thursday night, after a short week to prepare for the coach with whom he hasn’t shared a stadium since the greatest moment of their careers.

It’s a chance to reconnect with McVay, and to show what O’Connell’s done on his own.

”The player ownership behind that bar being raised during my time there, to eventually win in the Super Bowl, [is something] I always look back on,” he said Monday. “That’s a huge part of my experience that led me to this opportunity. I felt incredibly prepared for it, with much of it having to do with my two years there.”

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