Why O'Connell's '1-0' mantra has resonated with Vikings players

The head coach formed his message early in the year and players have latched on

Photo courtesy Minnesota Vikings

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By Matthew Coller

EAGAN — On Day 1 of journalism school, they teach you that cliches are the root of all evil. The goal when interviewing players and coaches is to get them to talk outside of cliche boxes and give specifics, anecdotes and details. So when the Minnesota Vikings adopted a common cliche phrase from head coach Kevin O’Connell this season, “let’s go 1-0 this week,” it was mostly met with eyes glazing over during press conferences. But as the Vikings sit at 13-2 and the team has remained focused through all sorts of potential pot holes that could have derailed them a long way, it was worth wondering: Is there something to the 1-0 mantra?

O’Connell decided to preach his footballed-up version of “one day at a time” in the offseason as a way of dealing with the fact that most of the outside world thought his team was going to be bad.

“It all stems back to early on in the season or even leading into training camp, if you just looked on predictions of the season as a whole, you wouldn't have found many predicted 1-0s on that schedule,” O’Connell said.

Now that the Vikings are two wins away from winning the entire conference, it’s easy to forget how horrendous the prognosticators thought the 2024 Vikings were going to be. Their Vegas line was 6.5, which would have made them right around the ballpark of the results from the New Orleans Saints or Dallas Cowboys this year. ESPN’s preseason power rankings had the Vikings 25th, just ahead of the Saints and Titans. USA Today had them 28th. NFL.com placed the Vikings 19th, right behind the Bears. NBC Sports picked them as the 25th strongest team heading into 2024. (Purple Insider did project a winning season, just saying).

Chris Berman voice: That’s why they play the games!

Anyway, in today’s social media universe, there’s no ignoring what is being said outside the building. Every player on the team would have been aware of the skepticism surrounding a Sam Darnold-led team that appeared to the experts to be one year away from contention.

O’Connell had much higher expectations for his team. He recalled on Friday sitting with the free agent class of Darnold, Blake Cashman, Jonathan Greenard, Andrew Van Ginkel and Aaron Jones and thinking they made the right decision when it came to the players they were bringing into the building. But no matter how confident KOC was that they were going to prove the prognosticators wrong, he knew that they couldn’t show them up just by starting the season strong — it had to be a complete effort throughout the year. He wanted to make sure that they understood that preparing each day like a winning team would drive them to an unexpected playoff berth, not getting ahead of themselves.

“We just have to worry about what's right in front of us right now,” O’Connell said. “From the very first day, that has really been built upon getting that first win under our belt, then coming back home and opening up U.S. Bank Stadium to totally different challenge, totally different team, but wanting to play well at home this year. Okay, well, we won our first game at home. Can we come right back the next week and do that, and then can we travel across the Atlantic Ocean? There’s just new challenges every week in this league, and that's what makes our league so special. At the same time, it's what makes it very difficult.”

Having done some media in the past, O’Connell understands the nature of the NFL media beast. When he rolled out his “1-0 this week” tag line, he probably couldn’t have figured that his team would be staring at a 2-0 finish to the season to win the conference or that a massive debate over how the Vikings should handle Darnold’s future would break out but he may have had an intuitive sense that overachieving would put them in the spotlight, especially with a unique situation at QB.

“1-0 might be not as exciting as talking about these grand massive, big stories and season-long things and decade-long projections,” O’Connell said. “I'm happy I don't have to do that because I just get to talk to our team about the challenges that we're facing in the moment and trying to coach them through that and equip them with what they need to win the game that week, whatever it takes.”

While the wins have continued to come week after week, the narrative surrounding the Vikings nationally has shifted around several times. When they started 5-0, there was discussion about whether Darnold was the frontrunner for MVP. When they lost two games in a row and then Darnold struggled against the Jaguars, they were tagged as pretenders and Darnold was, “turning into the old Sam.” One rambunctious analyst with two million Twitter/X followers went as far as suggesting the Vikings dump Darnold to sign Ryan Tannehill after a three-INT afternoon in Jacksonville.

Then the Vikings disappeared from the conversation as Super Bowl contenders as they reeled off wins against the Titans, Bears and Cardinals. It wasn’t until they smashed their former QB Kirk Cousins’s Falcons and it became a reality that they could compete for the NFC crown that they rejoined the debate-show party.

But mostly the debates weren’t about whether they were better than the Lions and Eagles. It was mostly about whether the Vikings needed to give a contract extension to Darnold for next season. The day after the Falcons win, ESPN’s main page included a video of NFL legend Shannon Sharpe arguing vehemently against the Vikings paying their thriving quarterback.

There isn’t a single player on the 53-man roster that needs the “1-0 this week” message more than Darnold. Yes, it’s impossible for him to never think about what might coming in the future for him — and O’Connell joked that he can’t keep reminding Darnold not to think about it or that’s all he’ll think about — but the veteran quarterback knows his focus can’t waver if the Vikings are going to go deep into the playoffs.

“When you think about just going 1-0, it's not only just going 1-0 on Sunday, it's going 1-0 every single day and just you know having a great Thursday practice, being locked in on third downs and certain calls that we're making,” Darnold said.

He added that the idea of being 1-0 every day is about consistency — making each week mostly the same in terms of the approach. Even worrying about the results of a particular game and what that will mean to the season can’t creep in.

“Being locked into what's going on [today] and not necessarily thinking about what's gonna happen on Sunday,” Darnold said. “What do we have to do today? That's kind of what that means and I feel like a lot of the guys in the locker room resonate with it because we all share a similar mindset and we truly just want what's best for the team.”

Players will tell you that unless you have been under the stress of an NFL season, it’s impossible to explain. For receiver Justin Jefferson, keeping his focus on the day-to-day is vital because games are often won well before either team steps out on the field. If he gets overly concerned with upcoming opponents or scenarios, it makes the preparation process more difficult.

“We have all of these motions, having all of these different plays that we do in our offense, they don't come easily,” Jefferson said. “We don't just say, ‘all right, here, let's just run these, and we're just going to score touchdowns.’ We actually have to come out here, walk through those plays two, three times a play. So it's just the preparation that we have and going into the game during the week is very top tier.”

Now heading into their matchup with the Packers, the discussion is (finally) centered playoff scenarios. If they win the next two games, they earn homefield advantage throughout the playoffs and a first-round bye. If they do not, there is a strong chance that they’ll end up playing on the road to open the postseason.

Asked after their win against the Seahawks if O’Connell was thinking about the possibility of winning the conference, he said, “we can't go 2-0 without going 1-0.”

The comment drew laughs and ESPN played it on TV that night but star TE TJ Hockenson appreciated that answer.

“In this league there's so many what-ifs,” Hockenson said. “What if this happens? What if that happens? What you know is there's too much of that, so to be able to play where your feet are and to have a head coach that is implementing that and really talking about that every day, that resonates with us because that's what our jobs are, is what today looks like and what can we do to help the team today. So we haven't really looked at the big picture.”

As we try to pick apart all the reasons that the Vikings are 13-2 heading into the final two weeks and the reasons we have seen Darnold lead the team to eight wins in a row, the overall mental toughness of the team has to rank highly on the list. How much is that due to O’Connell banging the one-day-at-a-time drum? That’s hard to say but they have bought into it across the roster and that tells a story in itself.

“It is very critical and I think this team understands how we got to this point,” O’Connell said. “It's a mature team that can be dangerous, I do believe, if we continue to just understand what got us to this moment from the first day we got to training camp.”

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