When the Minnesota Vikings fired Mike Zimmer and Rick Spielman after the 2021 season, they couldn’t have imagined what a new regime would bring. The Vikings wanted to be “super competitive” and establish a “championship standard” lost in the final years of the Zimmer-Spielman era. They wanted someone to rebuild the culture — and have plenty of success while doing it.
Three years later, Kevin O’Connell has checked all of the boxes. The 39-year-old speaks like a seasoned vet during press conferences. His positivity is off the charts. He spends most of his time on camera building his players up like a high school coach in a Disney movie. He boasts a winning percentage (.667) higher than Bud Grant’s.
A track record like that should have the Wilfs running to the TCO Performance Center with a blank check for a new deal. But that hasn’t happened as O’Connell enters the final year of his contract. Reports of other teams looking to trade for O’Connell and rumors of tension between him and ownership have already surfaced as the Vikings head into the offseason, and fans are looking for the smallest details that something has gone wrong.
There’s no way that O’Connell could be unhappy with his situation in Minnesota. Then again, O’Connell might have a legitimate gripe that the Vikings must solve before he puts his name on the dotted line.
It goes back to the beginning of O’Connell’s tenure. The Vikings were a mess, and Zimmer’s final weeks as head coach were the cherry on top of a bad sundae. Minnesota was no longer in playoff contention, starting Sean Mannion against the Green Bay Packers, and had a meaningless game against the Chicago Bears. With Justin Jefferson approaching the single-season record for receiving yards, Zimmer took a knee at the end of a 31-17 victory and defiantly spoke to reporters after the game.
“I don’t care about records,” Zimmer snarled. “I only care about wins.”
Zimmer later admitted he didn’t discuss the record with Jefferson, shedding an ugly light on the culture in the building. The Vikings were not a galvanized group. We later found out that Zimmer didn’t talk to Spielman during the final year of their partnership.
It led to the Wilfs, who were heavily involved in purchasing the Orlando Pride of Major League Soccer at the time, coming home to the kind of mess that a group of toddlers, some crayons, and a two-liter of Mountain Dew can create. Shortly thereafter, they dismissed Zimmer and Spielman.
A few months later, Adofo-Mensah and O’Connell arrived. Collaboration was a common buzzword, and Adofo-Mensah surrounded himself with many voices to make decisions. O’Connell was a key contributor, but so was Ryan Grigson, who he hired as the senior vice president of player personnel.
A disastrous 2022 draft followed. Still, O’Connell worked with the pieces that Zimmer and Spielman had left behind, leading them to a 13-4 record. The team wasn’t perfect – as evidenced by a Wild Card loss to the New York Giants – but O’Connell maximized the talent the way the Wilfs wanted.
The Vikings got off to a much different start in 2023, losing four of their first five games. It was a true test of O’Connell’s culture. Still, Minnesota rattled off five-straight wins to get back into playoff contention. However, they lost Kirk Cousins to a torn Achilles in the process, finishing the season with a 7-10 record.
Although the final record was disappointing, it should have shown everything the Wilfs needed to see. In 2022, O’Connell made a team that wasn’t his into a playoff contender, and in 2023, he showed the value of his culture. He also anointed J.J. McCarthy as his hand-picked quarterback of the future and appeared ready to commit to the long haul.
Mike McDaniel’s three-year extension with the Miami Dolphins set the table for O’Connell to receive a similar agreement. But nothing materialized, in part because of the Wilfs’ past.
Since the Wilfs bought the Vikings in 2006, they’ve reached a pair of extensions with their head coach. In 2009, Brad Childress signed a multi-year extension, only to be fired the following November. The Wilfs reached an initial contract extension with Zimmer that proved to be a good investment in 2018. However, a second extension before the 2020 season preceded his dismissal in 2021.
In both cases, the Wilfs spent years paying Childress and Zimmer not to coach their team. While the current ownership group has not spared any expense during their time in Minnesota, they also had to be kicking themselves that those deals didn’t work out.
There’s also the public perception that fans had of the Wilfs at the time of Zimmer’s dismissal. With the desire for playoff games and division titles, many believed the Wilfs were more enamored with being “in the hunt” than chasing a championship, keeping fans just interested enough to fill U.S. Bank Stadium every Sunday.
O’Connell gave the Vikings everything they wanted, but the Wilfs may have considered the optics of giving a coach who had just gone 7-10 the previous season a multi-year contract extension. That lined up with Mark Wilf’s comments before training camp, in which he stressed that he was focused on the season ahead and had not discussed an extension publicly or internally for O’Connell or Adofo-Mensah.
That leads us to where we are now. While O’Connel wasn’t in an official contract year, coaches rarely go into the final year of their contract without a new deal in place. It led Fox Sports’ Jay Glazer to report that teams had discussed looking into O’Connell’s availability for their head coaching vacancies. Meanwhile, Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio suggested there was “tension” between O’Connell and the Wilfs, with O’Connell wanting more control moving forward.
Many laughed off these reports, believing they were reserved for TikTok content. Still, they had some merit. Many teams have a brainstorming session when deciding upon a head coach, and we never know which names are on the board. Some of those inquiries never reach the public, like O’Connell’s did in Glazer’s report.
People also dismissed Florio’s report, especially after last offseason’s Justin Jefferson drama led to him re-signing with the Vikings. Still, it also made sense that O’Connell would want more say in day-to-day operations. It could also be O’Connell’s way of starting high in negotiations and working to a middle ground that both sides can agree on.
Perhaps this is all about human nature with O’Connell. However, it may not be enough to prevent an extension this offseason, considering Mark Wilf’s comments during training camp.
“One thing that we saw for sure is this: Discontinuity almost ensures failure,” Mark Wilf said via The Athletic’s Alec Lewis. “So, you keep switching your leadership and it’s counterintuitive. It’s not that you keep the same people you’re necessarily going to be successful. But it’s absolutely the case that if you switch people continuously, you absolutely will fail. At some point, you have to put your foot in the ground and say, ‘I’m going to stick with somebody and stop tinkering, tinkering, tinkering.’”
Zygi Wilf also echoed these comments to the Minnesota Star Tribune’s Ben Goessling, who reported that the contract talks between O’Connell and Adofo-Mensah will begin this offseason.
“We realize how important it is from a football sense to get the right people involved,” Zygi Wilf said. “You go through trials and errors, and hope eventually, you come out with the right people. Certainly in our organization and our coaching staff, we do believe we have the best people involved. So we’re just very proud of that.”
It sounds like a situation that both sides can get past on the way to a deal that should get done in the coming months. But both also have their arguments, which has led to the uncertain stage we have reached at the end of the season.