Most Saturday evenings before a Vikings home game, the last illuminated office in the TCO Performance Center in Eagan is the one overlooking the practice fields from the third floor.
Then, after a Saturday walk-through meeting with Sam Darnold and the rest of the Vikings quarterbacks, O’Connell’s favorite thing to do is to flip a college football game on the TV in his office and go over his call sheet until meeting the team at the hotel. Right tackle Brian O’Neill, who lives near the Vikings’ Eagan headquarters, will drive by the team parking lot, see one car still there and text O’Connell, “Go home.”
“Or [Saturday] morning, he’ll check in and say, ‘What time was it yesterday?’” O’Connell said. “I’ll say, ‘It was only six o’clock,’ and he’s like, ‘Dude.’ I’m like, ‘I promise you, man, if I could [leave earlier], I would.’ I tell the players all the time, I’m gonna give them everything I possibly have. There’s time to turn it off in the offseason, but not right now.”
He condensed it all this week, before flying 1,500 miles for a return to the SoFi Stadium field he last left covered in confetti. There, he’ll use the methods he learned in Los Angeles to try and beat the head coach who taught him many of them.
The Vikings’ game against the Rams on Thursday night is a homecoming for O’Connell, a San Diego native whose two years as Sean McVay’s offensive coordinator set him up to become the Vikings head coach right after the Rams beat the Bengals in Super Bowl LVI. He is the third of McVay’s former offensive assistants (after Matt LaFleur and Zac Taylor) to become a NFL head coach, and through 40 regular-season games, O’Connell has the highest win percentage (.625) in Vikings history.
His hasty 2019 introduction to play-calling under interim Washington coach Bill Callahan was good for him, O’Connell said, “because there wasn’t too much time to think about it.” It was with McVay, though, that O’Connell learned many of the game-planning tenets he still uses.
He was McVay’s first offensive coordinator since LaFleur in 2017, and though McVay called the plays, O’Connell was his confidant from game-planning meetings with quarterbacks to the gameday sideline. McVay turned over play-calling duties to O’Connell in practice periods and preseason games, and left his door open for conversations to prepare O’Connell for his own shot as a head coach.
