With Kevin O’Connell still laser-focused on Super Bowl LVI, the Minnesota Vikings can turn to collecting the staff he presumably asked for. While they can’t officially announce anything until after the game, they can still shake some hands and broker deals. The first of those dominoes fell on Monday with the expected hire of Denver Broncos running backs coach Curtis Modkins.
Modkins is an experienced coach, something the relatively green duo of O’Connell and Kwesi Adolfo-Mensah can use. He has 14 years of coaching experience as a running backs coordinator or higher. Time will tell how well his Minnesota tenure stands up to his stints with the Broncos or Detroit Lions. What we can glean is some insight into the style of team the Vikings intend to build.
Of course, there is some guesswork involved. We can only look at what the teams that employed these coaches did, assuming that these coaches will do the same. If there is some secret desire that O’Connell harbors that he could never use in an offense before, we’d have no way of knowing.
Still, the structure of the Vikings’ run game is coming into some focus. Modkins worked under Mike Munchak in Denver, and they ran something similar to O’Connell’s vision as he’s mentioned it. O’Connell worked under Jon Gruden and Sean McVay, two famous wide-zone coaches, but he seems to have a slightly different vision.
O’Connell’s Vision
You may think that O’Connell will simply take the famous McVay offense and install it in Minnesota. After all, that’d be an excellent fit for Kirk Cousins, who O’Connell reportedly wants to keep around. Plus, that offense is in the Super Bowl, so it must be a pretty good idea, right?
There are several ways to construct an offense, though. The easiest way to understand it is to identify the team’s rushing style and work outward from there. That makes it convenient that the Vikings hired their run-game coordinator first. O’Connell’s vision of a ground game is a bit more “multiple,” as he puts it, which is to say not relying entirely on zone schemes.
Zone running is the wave in the NFL. McVay’s coaching tree is exploding, of course. As is Kyle Shanahan’s, and there are still Gary Kubiak disciples roaming around. That is the zone-running cabal of the NFL, and it has fully seized control. Outside-zone running, at its core, is defined by offensive linemen starting a run play on a horizontal track.
There are other variants of zone that follow similar logic. Move defenders horizontally, then punish that movement. Someone like Kubiak would want to focus on that exclusively. If you can become so good at zone running that even a team that has studied it can’t stop you, you won’t need any other tools.
On the other end of the spectrum lands O’Connell. After becoming Washington’s offensive coordinator in 2019, he talked about the importance of being multiple in the run game. O’Connell wants a team that can execute more than just zone runs in an ideal world. Other teams utilize power running, gap running, and all sorts of off-the-wall variants like traps, options, and so on.
If you face a defense that is particularly well-suited to defend the zone run, and you can’t transition to anything else, you may find yourself trapped. O’Connell wants to be able to identify a run defense’s biggest weakness and be prepared to attack it. This is further evidenced by the recent evolution in the Los Angeles Rams’ offense since O’Connell wrested more control over it.
The Rams now run more duo and power to attack the zone-countering fronts their opponents threw at them. It’s not a coincidence that LA varied their run schemes as soon as O’Connell, a vocal proponent of the idea, arrived.
And now, the very first staffer the Vikings hired, Curtis Modkins, is from a similarly varied scheme. Modkins ran mostly zone in Denver but peppered in a healthy amount of other schemes.
From all this, it’s safe to assume that the Vikings won’t be as much of a pure zone team as they were under Kubiak. Instead, they’ll make the run game multiple, which is more like what Kubiak the younger tried in 2021. Of course, it didn’t work. But you’d expect the new staff to think they can outdo Klint Kubiak.
What that means for the Vikings
So, who cares? It’s just a run game. And while it’s true that O’Connell made his paper on the passing game, the run game still gives us important clues. First and foremost, it might tell us some about the future of the Vikings’ roster. Some players with uncertain futures, such as Garrett Bradbury and Alexander Mattison, would be significantly affected by this change.
Mattison has been in pure zone schemes since he started at Boise State. Next season would be his eighth year running in a zone scheme if the Vikings were to go that direction. Trying to go more multiple might take some getting used to for Mattison as he enters a contract year.
Bradbury is also in a contract year and is an awkward fit. His lighter, nimbler build makes him a pure zone center. If the Vikings are going to mix in run plays that require more pure power, Bradbury’s future in Minnesota will become even murkier than it already is.
Beyond that, however, it defines the passing game. A team’s play-action passing game isn’t necessarily defined by how often they run. There are plenty of ratios that teams employ to varying degrees of success. But how they run determines how they play-action pass. After all, a run fake should look like a real run play.
So if the Vikings stuck with outside zone, they’d also stick with the outside zone bootlegs that Kirk Cousins has seen so much success with. If they want to run more duo, perhaps some seven-step-dropback shot plays would be in order. If they wanted to install some option runs, it would be easy to transition those into more run-pass options or sprint-out plays for easy, rhythmic completions.
The last of those options seems most likely. O’Connell isn’t a huge fan of play-action. In fact, his insistence on using pass plays to set up more pass plays, instead of using the run to set up play-action, cost him an offensive coordinator gig in Washington — after which he re-joined Sean McVay in LA.
Like the run game changes, O’Connell moved the Rams away from their vaunted play-action attack in the last two years.
That all leads to a clear vision: A drop-back, quick-passing, rhythmic attack. The Vikings might look to spread things out and attack defenses spatially with quick-read concepts. This would make it easier to protect the quarterback (Cousins or otherwise) and make more use of weapons like Justin Jefferson and Adam Thielen.
Because the Vikings won’t have a particularly repetitive rushing attack, it’ll be much harder to set up quality play-action. That might be okay if Minnesota chooses other ways to manipulate defenders and create conflict in their assignments. Doing so is a much more difficult ask, but it is a key part of both the Cincinnati Bengals’ and Rams’ offenses. What are they up to this weekend?
