Advertisement

In first playoff run as a head coach, Vikings’ Kevin O’Connell relying on experience with Rams, advice from veteran coaches

chris tomasson, pioneer press
·8 min read

Sean McVay doesn’t have a playoff game to coach this season. So he can offer some pointers to Kevin O’Connell.

Last season, McVay coached the Los Angeles Rams to a 23-20 win over the Cincinnati Bengals in Super Bowl LVI with O’Connell as his offensive coordinator. Now, O’Connell is a rookie head coach for the Vikings who will make his playoff debut Sunday against the New York Giants at U.S. Bank Stadium.

It is not a long list of first-year NFL coaches who have taken teams deep into the playoffs. The only two to have won Super Bowls were Don McCafferty of the Baltimore Colts in the 1970 season and George Seifert of the San Francisco 49ers in the 1989 season. Three other rookie coaches have gone to the Super Bowl before losing: Red Miller of the Denver Broncos (1977), Bill Callahan of the Oakland Raiders (2002) and Jim Caldwell of the Indianapolis Colts (2009).

O’Connell, 37, steered the Vikings to a 13-4 record and is a strong candidate for NFL Coach of the Year. But he’ll take any extra help he can get in entering his first postseason.

“I have (communicated with) not only with Sean, but some other coaches that I’ve been around in my past,” O’Connell said. “A lot of it is, ‘Good luck.’ and, ‘Hey, proud of you,’ and things like that. But then there’s definitely some, if I’m leaning one way or the other with a decision about practice or scheduling or anything, there’s people I can reach out to. … (Those) former coaches and current coaches that I get to have dialogue with, those are resources and relationships that I value.”

Other than McVay, whose Rams slumped to 5-12 in 2022 and failed to make the playoffs, O’Connell declined to name any others he has dealt with this past week.

O’Connell will be matching wits Sunday with another first-year coach in the Giants’ Brian Daboll. And it really helps O’Connell that he is just a year removed from helping lead the Rams to the championship. McVay called the offensive plays, but O’Connell played an integral role in putting together game plans during the title run.

“It helps a lot just because of the role I was in there and getting to work kind of side-by-side with Sean every single day,” said O’Connell, who calls Minnesota’s offensive plays. “Just going through the dialogue of how we wanted to do some of the little things, getting really focused on what was important and then watching how everything mattered. Those (playoff) games, when you look back on it, if one or two plays go the other way, the result could be completely different.”

On their way to hoisting the Vince Lombardi Trophy, the Rams won four playoff games, the last three by three points apiece. They defeated Tampa Bay 30-27 and San Francisco 20-17 before the Super Bowl win over the Bengals.

Does that trend sound familiar? The Vikings are an astounding 11-0 in one-score games this season, setting an NFL record for most such victories.

“I think that’s a product of building confidence, of being precise in the tough situations and playing with composure, so I think a lot of that you’ve got to give credit to coaching,” said hall of fame coach Tony Dungy, a former University of Minnesota quarterback. “They’ve really established that belief of players buying into the system, and that’s definitely a big part of those one-score wins.”

Dungy, who coached Indianapolis to a Super Bowl victory in the 2006 season and is now an NBC analyst, was impressed what O’Connell accomplished in his first season as a head coach on any level.

“To win 13 games, that’s what it’s all about, and I think for a first year it was a wonderful job, and they’re going to have some fun in the playoffs,” Dungy said.

But just as Dungy praised O’Connell, the Vikings coach returned some compliments. O’Connell said not long after he took the job last February, he began to pick Dungy’s brain.

“He reached out when I first got the job,” O’Connell said. “He does that Uncommon Award in (the Twin Cities). I went to that (last April) and spent some time with him and his wife. He is as special a human being as I’ve really come across in the NFL.

“(There have been) text messages here and there. There were some phone calls and things. I just kind of reached out once I met him and felt like I was building a relationship.”

It certainly doesn’t hurt to get advice from Super Bowl-winning head coaches. When O’Connell was a Washington assistant from 2017-19, he attended a coaching clinic where he met Mike Shanahan, who won championships with the Broncos in the 1997 and 1998 seasons.

The two have seen each other a few times over the past several years, including last August at the TCO Performance Center. Shanahan came in to watch the two days of a joint practice between the Vikings and 49ers because his son Kyle Shanahan is the San Francisco head coach.

“I really have always liked (O’Connell) as a person, and you can tell he’s one heck of a coach,” Shanahan said. “It doesn’t really surprise me the success that he’s had (this season). … At the end of the day, you’ve got to find a way to win, and to have that type of record in one-score games means you’re doing a lot of the right things day in and day out.”

With O’Connell now in the playoffs, Shanahan joked that he won’t be dispensing any more advice since the 49ers could play host to the Vikings in the second round. However, Shanahan considers it wise that O’Connell, as a rookie coach, is reaching out to some veteran coaches for playoff pointers.

“There are so many different distractions that you’re dealing with (in the playoffs),” Shanahan said. “You’re dealing with wives, dealing with kids, dealing with tickets. You’re dealing with travel arrangements (if the Vikings end up playing on the road in the postseason). There’s so many different things that as a head coach you don’t even know about until you’re in (the playoffs).”

A Super Bowl-winning coach who has been watching O’Connell from afar is Dick Vermeil, who was inducted into the hall of fame last year. Vermeil was Philadelphia’s coach when the Eagles lost to Oakland in the Super Bowl after the 1980 season. But he returned 19 years later to the Super Bowl as coach of the St. Louis Rams, and they defeated the Tennessee Titans to win it all.

The Rams franchise didn’t win another championship until last season. Vermeil hasn’t met O’Connell but he followed the Rams’ latest Super Bowl run closely and he has watched many of the Vikings’ games this season.

“Whenever you win 13 games, it doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie, a veteran or a hall of famer, it’s exciting,” Vermeil said. “That’s hard to do, and doing it in your first year, it’s impressive. I’ve enjoyed watching him on the sideline, his poise. He always shows confidence on the sideline.”

Vermeil doesn’t deny that having playoff experience is important for a head coach, and he said it was a big help that the only rookie coaches to win Super Bowls inherited championship-ready teams. McCafferty took over in 1970 from legendary coach Don Shula, who two years earlier had led the Colts to a 13-1 record before they were upset 16-7 by the New York Jets in Super III. And Seifert replaced Bill Walsh a year after the 49ers won the Super Bowl.

But Vermeil does have some postseason advice for O’Connell.

“You’ve got to go into your first playoff game telling yourself you’ve been there 10 times before,” Vermeil said. “You’ve got to be careful about overreacting. It’s a football game and he’s coached them up 17 times already, and they’ve won 13.”

O’Connell is looking to take that approach. Veteran cornerback Patrick Peterson said that he “for the most part has been going about it just like another week.”

Still, when it comes to addressing the team, O’Connell said he has thrown in some references to what the Rams did last season.

“I reference how the little things matter, citing some plays that happened, things that could have gone either way, a turnover here, a turnover there, and just how important it is to just stay completely and totally in the moment and worry about the next snap,” O’Connell said. “It could be in the middle of the first quarter, and that next snap might be what determines ultimately, when you look back on it, the result of the football game.”

O’Connell also can reference plenty from what has happened this season. And one of the Vikings’ one-score wins came at U.S. Bank Stadium on Dec. 24, when they came from behind in the fourth quarter to defeat the Giants 27-24 on Greg Joseph’s 61-yard field goal on the final play.

“We rely not only on my experience from last year, but I think we rely on our experience as a team,” O’Connell said. “This year’s version of our team where we have won some close games and feel pretty comfortable in those moments, and I’m hoping that holds up even in the playoffs.”

Related Articles