When someone calls themselves a “quarterback killer” within the confines of a church, you’d think it would be from behind a confessional. But a week before the draft, Kevin O’Connell gave himself that moniker at the altar of St. Philip the Deacon Lutheran Church in Plymouth while giving a talk called “Faith & Leadership: Coaching in the NFL.”
At the end of the session, he took questions from the crowd, and one attendee asked about Drake Maye and J.J. McCarthy. O’Connell responded to the person’s question without blinking.
For a couple years, I’ve been kind of known as the quarterback killer, when it comes to the draft, in Eagan. Because the feeling that I feel from our fanbase 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 fight off some mistakes from being made. Mainly because [of] 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 know, you could coach another 15 years with a player, and you might not be able to fix.
“Hope and faith are wonderful things,” he concluded. “I do like them to not necessarily be strategies. I do very much believe in certain principles of playing the quarterback position.”
O’Connell doesn’t often preach from the altar, but his voice naturally carries in the TCO Performance Center hallways. He’s the Minnesota Vikings head coach and a former quarterback. The New England Patriots took him in the third round of the 2008 draft, and the Vikings must trade with New England to get the third pick if they want Maye. Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and O’Connell are in the third year of their four-year contracts, and ownership will likely tie their job security to whether they take the right quarterback on Thursday and develop him correctly.
“Luckily, we’ve got a lot of really smart people in this building,” O’Connell said earlier this month. “Between Kwesi’s staff and our coaching staff, the process has been really good. The quarterback position is one where you may have 10 really smart coaches or personnel folks watch the same cut-up, and you might come away with 10 different opinions on a player.”
O’Connell was a dynamic dual-threat quarterback at San Diego State, ranking first among quarterbacks in career rushing yards and second in rushing touchdowns. He also finished in the top 10 in school history in passing yardage, attempts, and completions. However, the Patriots cut him after one season, and he bounced around the league after that.
The New York Jets cut him twice, once on national television. After releasing him a second time, Rex Ryan left him a voicemail saying he didn’t think much of O’Connell as a quarterback, but he thought he’d make one hell of a coach. O’Connell still has Ryan’s voicemail saved on his phone. Instead of coaching for Ryan, he tried to catch on with the San Diego Chargers in 2012 but didn’t make the team.
O’Connell started his coaching career three years later.
Ryan was right about O’Connell as a coach. O’Connell started his career as a quarterbacks coach for the Cleveland Browns in 2015. Then he spent a year with the San Francisco 49ers, where O’Connell first crossed paths with Adofo-Mensah, who worked for the Niners from 2013 to 2019. O’Connell was in Washington from 2017 to 2019, where he met Sean McVay, and they won a Super Bowl together with the Los Angeles Rams in 2021.
Adofo-Mensah hired O’Connell as his head coach a year later, and he said he will rely heavily on O’Connell as they choose Minnesota’s next franchise quarterback.
A lot of it came from Kevin. I think a lot of people who were involved in that process would tell you this was something new to all of them, and I would add myself in that regard. Since we got here, Kevin’s really been adamant about, when you select a quarterback, it’s about — it’s a marriage. It’s that serious, and that level of commitment and work that should go into it.
Kevin’s been really a big driver of this process.
O’Connell believes some of a quarterback’s success is his natural ability, but some of it is also nurture. O’Connell and his staff have pored over the film, trying to decide which of the quarterbacks available to them is the most naturally talented. However, Adofo-Mensah and Minnesota’s front office have also created the best environment for a quarterback in recent history.
“You can spend all year looking at the historical aspect of when guys were picked, what worked, what didn’t,” said O’Connell. “First and foremost, I think you have to have confidence in what the opportunity is on your team…. Every quarterback goes to different environments, different systems, different organizations, and that path is not the same for every player.”
He also believes there are certain traits that a quarterback must have to be successful in his system.
“The accuracy component is important,” he said. “I think there’s a level of mental and physical toughness playing quarterback in the NFL, the very popular processing word and all of that. What that really means is can they go out and function, distribute the football, you know, snap in and snap out, take plays when they’re there, occasionally create plays that aren’t there, and they maybe can change a football game with either their arm talent or their athletic ability.”
O’Connell won’t make the decision alone. Although he may have played the position and had strong coaching influences, he will rely on his staff and front office. O’Connell coached with Vikings offensive coordinator Wes Phillips in Washington and Los Angeles. Quarterbacks coach Josh McCown played 16 years in the league and coached Maye in high school. His assistant, Grant Udinski, navigated Minnesota’s quarterback carousel last year.
“It definitely helps to know a background of coaching different guys, different skillsets, as a quarterback coach, as a coordinator, and then obviously now as a head coach and play caller,” O’Connell said. “But I think it’s still got to be a process because I’m learning things from Kwesi and his staff, from Josh McCown, Grant Udinski, Wes Phillips.”
O’Connell has a lot of knowledge at his disposal. He played quarterback at a high enough level that Bill Belichick drafted him, and Rex Ryan thought highly enough of O’Connell as a coach that he tried to hire him in 2011. He also knows the McVay system intimately because they worked together in Washington.
Every team will lean on their head coach when deciding who to draft as a franchise quarterback. But O’Connell is uniquely positioned as a former player who learned from Belichick and worked with McVay. Still, Adofo-Mensah has people in the front office who can offer insight, and Phillips, McCown, and Udinski may understand certain aspects of quarterbacking better than O’Connell.
It requires film study to find Minnesota’s next franchise quarterback. But it also takes a little faith.
