Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell had a confession to make while giving a speech at St. Phillip the Deacon Lutheran Church in Plymouth, Minn., on Thursday.
Even at church, O’Connell can’t avoid questions about the Vikings’ quarterback plans. During a period of the service open for questions, a Vikings fan in the congregation asked O’Connell about the differences between North Carolina quarterback Drake Maye and Michigan quarterback J.J. McCarthy, two of the top quarterback prospects in this year’s draft that the Vikings reportedly have ties to.
That’s when O’Connell confessed he’s shot down a few quarterback ideas in the past.
“For a couple years, I’ve been kinda known as a quarterback killer, when it comes to the draft, in Eagan because the feeling that I feel from our fan base is when we get this next, he’s going to be the guy,” O’Connell said. “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.”
O’Connell then described his evaluation process. It’s thinking about what things are fixable, what things are coachable and what things aren’t fixable. He said “hope and faith are wonderful things” but doesn’t necessarily like them to be strategies.
“I do very much believe in certain principles of playing the quarterback position,” he said. “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 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.”
So, what happens when you find that quarterback that checks those boxes?
“Then you gotta hope that 31 other teams are complicit in making sure that they can become a Minnesota Viking,” O’Connell said. “But we only need one team to be complicit, and hopefully we can find that team.”
That prompted the church-goer to blurt out the New England Patriots, who recently said “they’re open for business” when it comes to trading the No. 3 overall selection in this year’s draft. The Vikings appear to be their most likely trading partner.
“I may or may not have sent a nice bouquet of flowers to Robert Kraft the other day,” O’Connell said.
