Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell is a maestro, and Sam Darnold is his ideal backup instrument

Minnesota Vikings head coach and offensive play-designer Kevin O’Connell is no stranger to building his emergency quarterback system on the fly out of spit and baling wire. In 2023, O’Connell had Kirk Cousins in the first half of the season, and all was well. Then Cousins suffered a torn Achilles in Week 8 against the Green Bay Packers, and his season was over.

O’Connell then had to piece it together with Joshua Dobbs, Nick Mullens, and Jaren Hall. The Vikings lost six of their last seven games, and through the Vikings were confident in selecting Michigan quarterback J.J. McCarthy with the 10th overall pick in the 2024 draft – even trading up to do so – they also wanted a better answer at backup quarterback if anything happened to McCarthy.

When McCarthy suffered a torn meniscus in the preseason, the decision to sign Sam Darnold to a one-year, $10 million contract with $8.75 million this offseason came into clear focus.

Darnold is not playing for his future as the Vikings’ starting quarterback; he’s playing for his NFL future overall. Darnold, the third overall pick in the 2018 draft out of USC, fell out of favor with the New York Jets, the team that drafted him, and then wandered the earth with the Carolina Panthers in 2021 and 2022, and as Brock Purdy’s backup with the San Francisco 49ers in 2023.

Against the New York Giants last Sunday, Darnold had one of the best games of his NFL career as a pure passer. The stats were decent – 19 completions in 24 attempts for 208 yards, two touchdowns, one interception, a passer rating of 113.2, and a Passing EPA of +2.4 – but the real story here was how seamlessly Darnold fit into O’Connell’s concepts, and how Darnold had clearly engendered belief from his coaches and teammates.

In particular, there were three explosive plays from Darnold that O’Connell wanted to discuss post-game.

“I thought there were a couple,” O’Connell said when asked which Darnold throws impressed him the most. “I thought the seam ball to Josh Oliver from under center, trying to take advantage of a look, trying to see if [he] could manufacture an easy throw but an explosive throw with that play, and he just absolutely drilled it.”

That throw came with 5:26 left in the first quarter. The Vikings were in 21 personnel with a full backfield on first-and-10 from the Giants’ 27-yard line. Justin Jefferson was in the left slot, and he was obviously the focus for Bug Blue’s Cover-2 defense.

At the snap, the Vikings went four verts with Jordan Addison, Jefferson, Oliver, and fullback C.J. Ham all displacing New York’s coverage with downfield routes. The Miami Dolphins and San Francisco 49ers love to test defenses by throwing multiple vertical concepts out of heavy looks, and O’Connell’s version was pretty sweet as well. Darnold exploited the deep focus on Jefferson to Oliver’s other side, and the gap in intermediate coverage when rookie linebacker Darius Muasau stayed underneath to cover halfback Aaron Jones’ release route.

ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky broke this play down very well.

The Vikings found themselves pinned at their own 1-yard line with 13:39 left in the first half when safety Dane Belton downed Jamie Gillan’s 39-yard punt there. If O’Connell didn’t have confidence in his quarterback, the idea here would have been to throw short of the sticks in a safe fashion, and run the ball down the Giants’ collective throat. Instead, with second-and-12 from his own 10-yard line with 11:41 left in the first half, O’Connell called a deep backside corner route for Jefferson, and Darnold nailed the throw.

“I thought on the 99-yard drive, which I know it’s been a while since we did that, I just thought that throw to Justin was remarkable,” O’Connell said. “To be able to lean on the quarterback in that moment to activate your best player and for his trust and just a lot of time on task with those two opening up. That’s a really big-time play in that moment to really set the stage for us to go down the field and come away with seven when the team gets you backed up 99 yards like that, so I just thought there were examples of that throughout the game.”

O’Connell later got into the details of just what made that throw so special.

“It’s just the feel. It’s just the understanding of Justin is unique, how he can do things at full speed and change direction and have total body control with the quarterback a lot of times. It can also throw the quarterback off as far as, ‘Hey, where’s he taking this? What kind of angle is he coming out of?’ We are near the shadow of our own end zone at that moment. Got great protection and threw an absolute strike. It’s something that I saw Justin’s face after that drive when we finished it. I think he felt pretty darn good about who’s throwing him the football.”

As he should have. Jefferson said post-game that this play hadn’t quite come together in practice through the week, but it was all good in the moment.

“We’ve been working on that. We literally just worked on that play a few days ago and we didn’t connect on that play, so just communicating with each other and trying to make sure that we are on the same page that I’m in the right spot and that he is throwing it to the right spot. Everything that we’ve talked about happened exactly out there on that play and it was a beautifully thrown ball. It was a wonderful start of our drive getting that energy up on that 99-yard drive.”

That play came out of no-huddle as well, so it’s not as if there was extra time to think about it. And if you want to know how much confidence O’Connell had in his quarterback, consider the fourth-down throw to Jefferson for the touchdown. The Vikings were up 7-3 at this point, and it wasn’t as if the Giants were going to match points with anybody with Daniel Jones as their quarterback. O’Connell clearly wanted his quarterback to feel the exhilaration of putting a sharp point on the end of that drive. This time, O’Connell had his other receivers flowing away from Jefferson as the backside iso receiver, and it was pitch-and-catch as cornerback Deonte Banks tried to keep pace.

O’Connell also brought up the 21-yard touchdown pass to receiver Jalen Nailor as representative of Darnold’s ability to take the heart of an ever-expanding and adjusting playbook to the field. The Giants were trying to bracket Jefferson and Addison earlier in the game to try and mitigate the damage, and this was O’Connell’s response.

O’Connell complicated the idea of bracketing by throwing a frontside Levels concept against the Giants’ Cover-1. The result was not only a wide-open Nailor, but also a wide-open tight end on the backside in the person of Johnny Mundt.

“You worry sometimes about sending different motions and things and the noise and silent cadence and getting it snapped,” O’Connell said. “But then, that goes right along with kind of just the performance Sam had that would be really something we can build off of.”

First regular-season game with his new team, all kinds of force-fed concepts from one of the NFL’s best offensive minds, and the former draft bust looked as if he’d been in this offense his entire career.

O’Connell had some great things to say not only about Darnold, but how quarterback progress can be unpredictable in general.

“Some of the folks I get to speak to quite often they know I’ve talked a lot about the quarterback journey. Quarterbacks in our league don’t get to control a lot of that journey and they’re expected to perform in some cases immediately. I’ve just always really liked the way Sam carries himself. He’s a talented player and he can make big-time throws, every throw we’re going to ask him to make he’s more than capable of doing that. And then he’s a great example of what this last month and a half have really been like, preparing in a way that will show up on a Sunday.

“There’s a lot of things that Sam will probably come in here and say he can do better, but I can tell you starting 12 for 12 [Darnold completed his first 12 passes] and having the presence to help overcome that early adversity comes directly from the quarterback position. And that’s probably why his teammates viewed him as a captain and almost unanimously voted him one. I just can’t say enough about what he was able to do and how excited I am to build on his performance today and moving forward.”

As for Darnold, he’s just getting started in his new environment.

“I think for me it was just coming out here and like I keep saying, I think just playing my game,” he said after the win. “Playing one play at a time but again, just playing with confidence. I think that’s the biggest thing, because we’ve got a great offense. We’ve got a great system. If I just play on time and do all the things I need to do to execute, we’ll be alright.”

So far, so good. The Vikings next face the 49ers, Darnold’s team last season, so we’ll see what he has in his quiver to beat that stout defense. In a larger sense, we may be seeing one of those quarterback rehabilitation stories in which the player’s physical gifts are perfectly matched with the guy calling the game.