The Vikings Offense Was The Definition of Insanity On Sunday Night
Credit: Lon Horwedel-Imagn Images
Picture this: You’re Kevin O’Connell, head coach and offensive play-caller for the Minnesota Vikings. Your team is playing the Detroit Lions in arguably the most important regular season game in NFL history. The winner of this game earns the No. 1 seed, a first-round bye, and takes the NFC North title. The loser must travel to SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and face your mentor Sean McVay and his high-octane Rams, a team that nobody wants to play in the Wild Card Round. The stakes in this game are higher than ever before.
It quickly becomes apparent that your guy Sam Darnold is struggling with his accuracy. Throughout the evening, he keeps overthrowing his receivers, holding onto the ball too long, excessively scrambling outside of the pocket, and loses his confidence in himself with every play. To make matters worse, your offensive line is struggling mightily in pass protection. By halftime, they’ve already allowed four quarterback hits and a sack, with Darnold only completing 9 of his 19 passes for 76 yards, going a brutal 1-for-8 in the red zone.
Fortunately, it’s still a one-score game, and your Vikings are only trailing 10-6 at the half. This is the perfect time to make some offensive adjustments that’ll help get your quarterback back in rhythm. Right?
Right?
Oh, well.
The sensible thing to do would have been to simplify the offense for Darnold, moving the ball with some quick passes while establishing the run game with Aaron Jones. Jones was banged-up, but still efficient in the first half, averaging 4.5 yards per carry on seven rushing attempts. Cam Akers would break off a 58-yard run on the fourth play of the second half… only to take one more carry for the rest of the game. Nope, gotta make space for more deep throws for Darnold.
If insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, then KOC’s play-calling was insane, and not in a good way.
O’Connell is widely regarded as one of the best play-callers in the league, and he’s usually pretty good at finding ways to exploit defenses. He has a reliable system in place that can maximize the strengths of his quarterbacks and has elevated Darnold to an MVP-caliber player. So it’s no surprise that he has a lot of confidence in his scheme, given its success. However, when the offense has struggled, he has a tendency to double down on the same pass-heavy scheme, regardless of how well the quarterback is (or isn’t) throwing the ball.
His time with Jaren Hall and Josh Dobbs starting in the 2023 season are good examples. Hall couldn’t get anything going in the first half against the Green Bay Packers in 2023, and rather than adapting the scheme for Hall, O’Connell simply benched him at halftime for Nick Mullens. Dobbs had a Lin-sanity run that lasted a couple of games before defenses figured out his run-first gimmick. But once that happened, O’Connell did very little to change the offense to suit Dobbs’ strengths as a runner. Instead, Dobbs was quickly benched and was demoted to being a healthy scratch on game days.
O’Connell’s scheme works a vast majority of the time, but he’s not the quickest to adapt when his players can’t execute it. In theory, you can understand why he repeatedly called aggressive passing plays. He saw that the Lions were hurt, and insisted that the Vikings should exploit their weakened secondary. That mindset intensified when Terrion Arnold got hurt in the third quarter, and when his team’s deficit grew larger in the fourth quarter. But it wasn’t working, and KOC had no answer but to try pushing through.
As a Vikings fan, the most frustrating part about this game is that the Lions played a very sloppy game offensively, seemingly trying to hand a win over at times. But the Vikings couldn’t capitalize on those opportunities because they were in their own heads. Or maybe, it was the Lions who got in their heads. One could argue that Detroit used KOC’s ego and stubbornness to their advantage. Coming into this game, the Lions had the 29th-ranked scoring defense over the last three weeks, so Aaron Glenn dialed up a ton of blitzes and man coverage, daring O’Connell to change his game plan.
Richard Sherman almost had a stroke “run the damn ball” pic.twitter.com/m0hbrBYWFR
— Gifdsports (@gifdsports) October 7, 2022
Every time Minnesota’s offense got in the red zone, KOC kept calling pass plays from two yards from the goal. Minnesota collectively screamed at the TV, calling for Jones to run the ball. Or heck, use Darnold’s mobility in a QB sneak! Something! Anything different! But KOC stood defiant in the face of logic.
It’s great that KOC has so much confidence in Darnold, and Darnold has responded many times to having a coach who doesn’t stop giving him opportunities to bounce back. But while that works in the regular season, the playoffs (The schedule said Week 18, but the stakes made it much more) are when you need to make offensive adjustments against great teams. It had to be clear by halftime, if not well before, that Darnold wasn’t gonna get himself back on track with the status quo. Unfortunately, Kevin O’Connell’s insane play-calling prevailed, and it’s a big reason why the Vikings lost the division and the No. 1 seed.
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