It’s the Monday of Week 3, and there are just five unbeaten teams left in the NFL. And you can be a believer in Kevin O’Connell’s program, and still be surprised that the Minnesota Vikings are somehow one of them.
This year was supposed to be their second season of a salary cap purge and roster reset.
The Vikings swapped out Kirk Cousins for Sam Darnold and J.J. McCarthy. They let Danielle Hunter go in favor of signing Jonathan Greenard. Thirteen of the 22 guys who started the first playoff game of the O’Connell era (after the 2022 regular season) are gone, too, with some of the young stars of that group—Justin Jefferson and Christian Darrisaw—now on big second contracts. More than a few respected vets—Eric Kendricks, Adam Thielen and Patrick Peterson—have departed.
What’s in place now is a little more sustainable, a little more flexible, and no less successful than what O’Connell and GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah inherited two years ago and won with right away. The locker room was good then. It’s good now. There was talent on hand then, as there is now. And the cool thing is, as the players see it, it’s not hard to see why the results of 2022 have carried over as the names and faces have changed.
It’s reflected, of course, on offense, with Darnold’s renaissance—we’ve covered that extensively the past couple of weeks. But, quietly, it may be even more pronounced on defense, where another change from 2022, and a bet O’Connell made two offseasons ago with the ’23 hire of Brian Flores, is paying off handsomely.
Sunday’s stifling of C.J. Stroud and the high-flying Houston Texans was just the latest example. And more than just an example of Flores’s defense dominating again, it was a testament to a program that’s pretty clearly firing on all cylinders.
The longest-tenured Viking, Harrison Smith, had a good word for it, as we caught up late Sunday afternoon: logical. Indeed, there’s a reason for everything.
For Smith, that starts on his side of the ball. But it extends everywhere.
“On a weekly basis, we just try to make it hard on whatever offense we’re playing,” he says. “Find what they like to do and try to limit that. It’s not always just about the quarterback. There’s more than that—just frustrating them early, not trying to let them get anything big on us, shutting the run game down.
“At that point, our offense is playing well. You get up two scores, and then you take a lot off their menu. It’s not just the defense playing well. It’s the field position. Those turnover ops tend to happen, obviously. You get up two, three scores, and you eat a little bit more.”
Everyone in Minnesota’s eating now. And as such, there are a lot of good stories to tell.
Darnold’s is one, and Flores’s is certainly another.
