Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell has proven that he can get any given quarterback to perform at this ceiling. The challenge for now is to find a guy with the highest possible ceiling.
Speaking as part of the Faith & Life series, O’Connell fielded a question about the team’s quarterback situation. Here’s the clip, as posted by Matthew Coller of Purple Insider.
Basically, O’Connell explained that he’s been resisting certain quarterbacks because he wants the next one to be the long-term answer.
“For a couple of years I’ve, you know, I’ve been kind of known as the ‘quarterback killer’ when it comes to the draft in Eagan, because the feeling that everybody that I feel from our fan base is when we get this next guy, he’s gonna be the guy. And I feel it. I know you guys all feel it. So I have had to in a lot of ways fight off some mistakes from being made, mainly because the evaluation process I go through, I think about the things that are fixable.
“I think about the things that are coachable and then you think about the things that you could coach another 15 years with the player, and you might not be able to fix and hope and faith are wonderful things. I do like them to not necessarily be strategies. So I do very much believe in certain principles of playing the quarterback position. I believe the footwork in the lower half of any quarterback can be fixed with the proper coaching and teaching. And I think that when you see the good things on tape, you see things that they can do better on tape. You’re looking for a lot of different things and to check a lot of boxes and ultimately when you feel like you find that guy then you got to hope that 31 other teams are complicit in making sure that they can become a Minnesota Viking, but we only need one team to be complicit and hopefully we find that team and that person’s on it.”
O’Connell then was asked about his connections to his original NFL team, the Patriots, who hold the third overall pick in the 2024 draft.
“You know, I may or may not have sent a nice bouquet of flowers to Robert Kraft the other day,” O’Connell said.
It’s going to take more than flowers to go from No. 11 to No. 3. The Vikings seem to be willing to do it for the right guy.
But here’s the most important takeaway. O’Connell — the quarterback killer — won’t just settle for whoever. He knows who he wants. We’ll find out in five days whether he gets him.