Kevin O’Connell To The Vikings Isn’t a Guarantee
If everything goes as planned, Kevin O’Connell will be the head coach of the Vikings in about a week.
There are sayings about the situation the team is in, though. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch, it ain’t over ’til it’s over, and so on. You get the point.
I’m not trying to suggest that K/O won’t be the next head coach. Instead, I’m merely pointing out that there’s a week between now and the day that Kevin O’Connell ought to be officially announced as the Vikings next head coach.
In the past, coaches have backed out of a job. Josh McDaniels comes to mind, though there are certainly several others. PFT‘s Mike Florio suggested that it ought to be the Vikings who back out of the deal:
There’s still time to fix it. O’Connell hasn’t been hired. The deal isn’t done until it’s done, as we learned four years ago. Even if the interview was an abject disaster, it’s not about who gives the best interview. It’s about who is the best option to lead a team that has never won a Super Bowl, and that supposedly wants to.
Do the Vikings really want to win a Super Bowl? Or is ownership concerned that things may not work smoothly in the building, given that they don’t live and work in Minnesota and thus aren’t there to monitor and/or mediate? If the Wilfs lived and worked in Minnesota, would they have hired Harbaugh? (Unfortunately, there’s a chance the answer to that question is “yes.”)
The chances of the team backing out are very small. Justin Jefferson – the team’s lone elite player – has expressed enthusiasm for what Kevin O’Connell will bring to the Vikings: “I’m just looking forward to it. It’s a new opportunity, new era, new energy, so we got to take advantage of it. . . . We got a new head man, we got a new G.M., so we just got to put the right people around us and we just got to go get it.” He also notes that Cooper Kupp was “open all the time” and that he’s looking forward to playing for a HC with an offensive background.
If the team did back out, it wouldn’t look good.
From what I can gather, it’s looking like a 99% chance (maybe even higher) that K/O formally accepts the offer to be the HC. He recently quipped that he does “own a very warm coat” during a press conference, a not-so-subtle suggestion that he’s planning on moving north.
Until he does, though, remember that it isn’t a sure thing.
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