The Minnesota Vikings have been one of the NFL’s most consistent franchises in terms of winning percentage, but the one thing that has eluded them is a Super Bowl win. The Vikings have gotten close in the 66-year history of the franchise, but they haven’t gotten the chance to compete for the Lombardi Trophy since 1976.
For some, that creates a sense of urgency. But for Vikings ownership, it requires some patience, as Minnesota president and co-owner Mark Wilf emphasized when speaking to the media earlier this week.
“Ultimately, it’s not just about playoff wins but about championships. And that is the ultimate measure. We know that. We try to be patient as an ownership, and that we know leads to ultimate success.
Of course, patience isn’t infinite. But I feel really good about the direction of this football club, and we’re going to get those benchmarks checked off here.”
Wilf’s comments about patience not being infinite could come across as a warning shot to Kevin O’Connell and his staff if they fall short of expectations this season. But after an offseason of catering to his needs, the Vikings will never win the Super Bowl unless they hold their team to a higher standard.
Minnesota Vikings put future in Kevin O’Connell’s hands this offseason
If you ask the Wilfs, they’ve shown everything they need to build a championship-level franchise. They laid the groundwork for U.S. Bank Stadium, which opened in 2016. Two years later, they opened TCO Performance Center, which is one of the best team facilities in the NFL.
Last offseason, they spent more money than any team in free agency, and this past January, they fired general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah after a disappointing 9-8 season.
For fans who are sick of the mediocrity around the franchise, Adofo-Mensah’s firing was celebrated. But it doesn’t feel like the same standards have been applied to O’Connell.
The Vikings have insisted that firing Adofo-Mensah was a collaborative decision. But it was made while Adofo-Mensah was at the Senior Bowl. A few weeks later, Adofo-Mensah’s paternity leave in 2023 was made public in a report by The Athletic’s Dianna Russini and Alec Lewis.
But a few weeks prior, O’Connell was texting Russini as she was being pulled over for a traffic stop in a video that was released by TMZ.
Maybe it wasn’t O’Connell who ordered Adofo-Mensah to be fired. But that didn’t make the rest of the offseason even weirder.
O’Connell partnered with interim General Manager Rob Brzezinski to run the entire offseason and draft process. After producing a class with his fingerprints all over it, the Vikings had O’Connell sit in on interviews to help find Adofo-Mensah’s replacement.
While all of this was going on, O’Connell screamed from the mountain tops that J.J. McCarthy and Kyler Murray would have a competition for the starting job.
But it’s hard to believe when Vikings legend Cris Carter suggested McCarthy was Adofo-Mensah’s “guy” as opposed to O’Connell’s – something O’Connell did not deny in an interview this week.
O’Connell is now in another two-man power structure with Nolan Teasley and it’s not a surprise that Wilf noted that the two are in alignment in the first two months of that partnership. But after failing to make the playoffs a year ago, it’s time for patience to be replaced with urgency.
Minnesota Vikings must hold Kevin O’Connell to a higher standard if they want to win a Super Bowl
O’Connell deserves credit as a coach that has gone 43-25 and won a division title during his time in Minnesota. He also built a culture so clean you could have your appendix removed in it after it became toxic in the final years of Mike Zimmer’s tenure.
But O’Connell has also failed to win a playoff game in his first four seasons. In 2022, he lost as a favorite to Daniel Jones and the New York Giants at home while Kirk Cousins short-circuited on a 4th-and-8. In 2024, the Vikings got dogwalked by a Los Angeles Rams team that was re-routed to Arizona in the wake of wildfires in Southern California.
Cousins’s torn Achilles and poor quarterback play kept the Vikings out of the playoffs the other two seasons, but other franchises would have at least put some heat on O’Connell entering Year 5. Instead, it feels like the Wilfs gave him an even comfier seat going into next season.
Playing in the NFC North, the Vikings will face stiff competition if they want to go back to the playoffs. And even if they finish with a 9-8 record as USA Today recently projected, it still feels like the Wilfs will praise O’Connell and maybe even give him more autonomy if one of those wins came against the Green Bay Packers.
This isn’t to say O’Connell should be fired tomorrow. But with a new GM that he helped choose, O’Connell’s roots feel deeper than ever.
If the Vikings fall short of expectations again, the Wilfs must have another reality check and ask where things are headed and that requires holding O’Connell to a higher standard to capture that elusive Super Bowl.
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