How Kevin O'Connell won Coach of the Year
KOC's journey to the top of the coaching profession in 2024 began way before the first kickoff and will resonate far beyond the end of the year
By Matthew Coller
Over the last five years, the Coach of the Year award has most often gone to the coach whose team outperformed expectations by the widest margin.
In 2023, Cleveland Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski guided a team to the playoffs despite picking up his starting quarterback Joe Flacco midway through the year. In 2022, Brian Daboll took a previously floundering New York Giants franchise to the playoffs. The year before that, Mike Vrabel led a group that was supposed to be slipping to the best record in the AFC.
So it should come as no surprise that Minnesota Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell took home the highest honor for coaches this year at the NFL Honors ceremony on Thursday night. After losing their veteran quarterback to free agency, the over-under for the Vikings heading into 2024 was 6.5 wins. They beat that by Week 10 and walked into Ford Field in Week 18 with a chance to take the No. 1 seed in the NFC. In terms of outperforming preseason expectations, it’s one of the great coaching performances since Vegas started setting lines.
While that particular accomplishment may not be matched any time soon, boiling down O’Connell’s Coach of the Year 2024 candidacy to his win-loss record versus the gambling community does not begin to capture everything that led to the 14-win season.
O’Connell’s journey to the Coach of the Year award began the moment that ESPN’s Adam Schefter hit “send” on a tweet announcing that Kirk Cousins would be joining the Atlanta Falcons. Certainly Vikings fans were ready for something fresh at that point following six years of middling finishes, but for O’Connell, replacing a Pro Bowl quarterback who won 17 of 25 games over the previous two years was a daunting task.
The process of replacing Cousins began with a fundamental belief that O’Connell carries: Teams fail quarterbacks more than quarterbacks fail teams. The Vikings knew they were going to draft a quarterback because the draft class was considered one of the best collections of prospects in league history but O’Connell felt that rushing a young quarterback onto the field was risky. He wanted to have a veteran quarterback in place to give him time to develop his future QB1.
The options for a bridge quarterback weren’t particularly thrilling. Players who were past their prime like Russell Wilson, Joe Flacco and Ryan Tannehill topped the list and proven backups like Gardner Minshew, Jacoby Brissett and Mason Rudolph made sense as well. Sam Darnold didn’t exactly fall into either category. After starting his career by winning just 13 of 38 games as a New York Jet, he had shown flashes of development with the Carolina Panthers in 2022 and the 49ers as a backup in 2023.
Darnold existed in a space where there was still reason to hold out hope for his upside because his previous teams had struggled mightily with ineptitude (outside of the 49ers) but his history was so poor statistically that the floor was nothing short of catastrophic. From 2018 to 2023, there were 39 quarterbacks who threw at least 1,000 passes. Darnold ranked 39th in passer rating, 39th in success rate, 37th in interception percentage 39th in completion percentage, 35th in sack percentage and 37th (tied) in yards per attempt.
O’Connell bet on Darnold’s rocket launcher arm and character. The Vikings signed him to a one-year, $10 million contract with hopes that spending a year as San Francisco’s backup would give him new perspective and open his eyes to playing the quarterback position like a point guard rather than a half-court chucker.
When the draft came around, O’Connell led a traveling quarterback search party across the globe looking for the next young franchise player. When draft night arrived, the Vikings moved up one spot to assure themselves JJ McCarthy. What the head coach saw in the Michigan product was a lot of raw talent and a willingness to put everything into maximizing it.
But KOC kept telling anyone who could listen that Darnold was going to be good. When OTAs and minicamp came around, Darnold took all the first-team reps as McCarthy showed the flashes and frustrations of learning a system that demands a lot of its quarterback. During that time, KOC and his staff laid the foundation that McCarthy would ultimately use during the time between minicamp and training camp to make massive gains.
During the spring workouts, O’Connell developed a message for his team that would carry on throughout the rest of the 14-win season. He didn’t shy away from outside prognostications, rather leaning into skeptical projections to insist to his group that they were going to be much, much better than what the outside world believed. During the year, players referred to that belief as a driving force through the ups and downs.
Messages from a leader are important but actions say more than words. Weeks before training camp began, Vikings draft pick Khyree Jackson was killed in a car accident. O’Connell traveled to Jackson’s hometown and spoke at his funeral. The organization made sure that his family was invited to Minnesota to have a private celebration of his life with his teammates. Guiding the team through grief won’t show up on the bullet points of O’Connell’s Coach of the Year resume but it was far more difficult than any other hurdle and he handled it with empathy and grace.
When training camp arrived, O’Connell toed the line between preparing Darnold to be the 2024 starting quarterback and developing McCarthy for the future. Both quarterbacks thrived in the environment. In the weeks leading up to the preseason, McCarthy became more and more consistent and was beginning to push O’Connell to give him first-team reps. But Darnold was locking in with star receiver Justin Jefferson to the point that it was beginning to look possible that they could have a good offense with the journeyman QB.
O’Connell’s Coach of the Year trophy is shared with Brian Flores and the front office. During joint practices with the Cleveland Browns, it became apparent that the Vikings defense had something good brewing. They demolished Cleveland’s offense on both days as new players Andrew Van Ginkel, Jonathan Greenard and Blake Cashman began to gel. The defense appeared to be one player away at cornerback after having lost Mekhi Blackmon for the year to an ACL injury. So they signed veteran corner Stephon Gilmore to solidify the secondary.
Flores’s defense was the best the Vikings have put together since 2019, ranking fifth in points allowed and leading the NFL in takeaways. The DC created an environment where the players led the way with Cashman, Harrison Phillips and All-Pro Harrison Smith making the real-time adjustments that gave quarterbacks fits. They wouldn’t have been able to gather as much talent if they hadn’t moved on from expensive veterans following the 2022 season and set up a healthy cap situation for the future.
The joint practices were also where O’Connell announced that McCarthy suffered a season-ending injury during his first preseason game. That meant Darnold would be taking them the rest of the way. Somehow O’Connell was able to declare McCarthy the future of the franchise and give his full backing to Darnold without contradicting himself.
O’Connell’s fingerprints were all over Darnold’s 5-0 start to the season. On the second drive of the year, Darnold led them into field goal position and KOC dialed up a pass on fourth down. He threw a touchdown to Jefferson, which hit like a jolt of lightning through the team. The following week, KOC called in a deep shot from his own end zone, resulting in a 97-yard touchdown pass to Jefferson.
The theme of the season became about O’Connell’s belief in Darnold. Sometimes that went too far, like when he threw an interception against the Packers that opened the door for a near comeback. Or when he did the same exact thing the following week against the Jets. But KOC was willing to take the mistakes with the big plays from Darnold’s howitzer.
That loyalty was tested against the Jaguars. The previously mistake-prone QB threw three interceptions inside Jacksonville’s 30-yard line, nearly costing the Vikings a win against one of the NFL’s worst clubs. Rather than dial it back, O’Connell and Darnold went to work together breaking down where things had gotten off track. After that pivot point, Darnold went 7-1 with a 105.2 QB rating, 18 touchdowns and two interceptions and led three game-winning drives.
Along the way, there were all sorts of memorable moments. Whether it was Cam Bynum and Josh Metellus’s celebrations going viral or Darnold’s expression of emotion on the sideline in the midst of a five-touchdown game against the Falcons or O’Connell’s moving postgame speeches, or the team raising Darnold on their shoulders after beating the Packers, the 2024 Vikings played with the enthusiastic energy of their head coach.
How often can we say that a team took on the personality of its coach en route to a season like this? Pete Carroll’s Seahawks might argue that was the case in 2014. Maybe Jim Harbaugh’s 49ers before that. Most recently Dan Campbell’s intensity and aggressiveness has permeated his entire locker room. Bill Belichick had “The Patriot Way” for many years. There aren’t that many examples.
Of course, a lot of those teams were memorable because they reached the NFC Championship or made the Super Bowl. O’Connell’s Coach of the Year award would have seen more celebration had the team beaten Detroit in Week 18 or advanced to play the Eagles in the playoffs. That’s the unforgiving part of the sport: No matter what you accomplished, if it was anything short of raising Lombardi’s trophy, then it was a disappointment.
Falling so flat in the final two weeks only hit Vikings fans so hard because O’Connell raised the bar that high. You have to wonder if the Vikings had won 10 games and still blown expectations out of the water, that their 2024 season would have been more celebrated (see: Broncos, Chargers) as major progress rather than severe disappointment.
No excuses, though. The Vikings ranked as a top 10 team on offense and defense and failed when the lights were the brightest. The brutal trip to the playoffs will make KOC’s celebration meal for COTY a little bitter.
That’s the next step. Having the best regular season of any coach certainly says a lot about the caliber of leader the Vikings locked themselves into when he signed a multi-year extension. However, if the postseason wins don’t follow, then the fun regular seasons and the awards will be forgotten quickly. Again, it’s unforgiving league.
Let’s not lose the forest through the trees though. We learned this season that the Vikings have one of those coaches. The McVays or Shanahans or LaFleurs that stick with their franchise for a long time because every year they are going to give the team a shot to be a serious contender. When you look around the NFL at floundering teams that are changing coaches every two years, you can truly see the value in having that. Heck, look who made the playoffs this year: Two Harbaughs, Payton, McDermott, Reid, LaFleur, Quinn, Sirianni… all the guys who are usually there. KOC is in that club and that’s a good place to be.
The Coach of the Year ceremony wasn’t over for more than a few minutes before O’Connell was asked about what’s next at the quarterback position. He will go into this offseason tasked with either repeating his results with Darnold or putting together Starting QB Boot Camp 2025 for McCarthy. Thursday night’s award signifies the trust that has been earned that O’Connell and the Vikings front office will make the right call and that 2024 will be the start of something rather than the peak.
KOC is great with the Xs and Os (despite the running game woes), but his coaching super power in my opinion is still his emotional intelligence and sincerity. So many phony coaches out there trying to project an image to the team and the media that the players can see right through. KOC somehow manages to come off as entirely sincere at all times, even if he is throwing around corporate business jargon like “standpoint perspective” that would get an immediate eye roll coming from anybody else. Getting Kirk and Darnold to shed several layers of psychological hang ups to perform the way they did is so impressive. We can bitch about a lot of little things, but he’s an amazing coach and is fun as hell to root for.