Kevin O’Connell has no opponent to prepare for this week, but that doesn’t mean the Vikings’ first-year coach will be free from watching film or grinding through X’s and O’s. Only, in this case, O’Connell’s focus will be solely on his 5-1 team that has won its past four games by a closer-than-he-would-like average of 5.5 points.
The bye week presents an opportunity for a self-scout in which O’Connell and his coaching staff will dissect everything that has gone right and wrong in the first six weeks. Despite the Vikings’ record, there is plenty to fix and it will be O’Connell’s job to identify and fix as many of those issues as possible.
Ultimately, it might end up being the most important week of the regular season for O’Connell. The Vikings are one of three teams with a 5-1 mark, joining the Bills and Giants, and only trail the Eagles (6-0) for the best record in the NFL.
What’s interesting is the Vikings have been successful — their only defeat came in Week 2 in Philadelphia — while not being dominant and often playing an uneven game on at least one side of the ball. This isn’t uncommon in a league filled with flawed teams but the best teams find ways to fix their biggest issues.
O’Connell has been careful to remain measured in his responses, including following a 24-16 victory Sunday in Miami. Minnesota only held a six-point lead in the fourth quarter before Dalvin Cook’s 53-yard touchdown run. The Dolphins then got a late touchdown.
“I told the team (on Saturday), by this time tomorrow, we’ll have six examples of who we are as a football team,” O’Connell said, “and will we come out of this stadium 5-1 and be able to say we’re a little bit more of a third of the way through our season with different identities? Sometimes it may feel like to Vikings fans, depending on what Sunday it is, but what I would say is we’ve got a tough resilient group that maybe doesn’t always play the most consistent. But they are willing and able to have each other’s backs in all three phases.”
Consistency is the key word. The Vikings’ preparation is not a concern and O’Connell’s leadership has proven to be exactly what the locker room needed. But what remains uncertain is just how close this team, and especially its offense, matches up to what O’Connell envisioned when he left the Rams to take this job.
Sunday’s win was underwhelming from an offensive standpoint with the Dolphins outgaining the Vikings by 224 yards and Kirk Cousins throwing for only 175 yards. A defense that had struggled to get a pass rush, benefitted from some of the Dolphins’ injury issues and recorded six sacks. The Vikings are a respectable 11th in the league in points against, but are 26th in yards surrendered.
While O’Connell’s main focus is on offense, he and defensive coordinator Ed Donatell are likely to pick apart film of the first six games and try to find ways to improve a 3-4 scheme that is 29th in the NFL in passing yards allowed. The pressure the Vikings applied in Miami — Za’Darius Smith and Patrick Jones each had two sacks — was a positive step.
The Vikings will have 11 games remaining coming out of the bye, including six at U.S. Bank Stadium. Considering how weak the NFC appears to be, the Vikings are not only well-positioned to win the North but also contend for a high seed in the playoffs. Minnesota is two games clear of Green Bay, which lost at home to the Jets on Sunday, and actually have a three-game lead because of a Week 1 victory over the Packers.
The Vikings have helped create their own breaks thus far — just as their late-half and late-game meltdowns hurt them last season — but improvement is almost mandatory or regression might be inevitable.
“Obviously it’s right where we want to be,” veteran wide receiver Adam Thielen said of his team’s start. “I think if you asked anybody in this organization or the fanbase if we could be 5-1 at this point before the
season started, I think everyone would be like ‘heck yeah, I’ll do whatever it takes to get to that point,’ right?
“But we know we’ve got to get a lot better. I’ve been on teams that have started fast and not made the playoffs. So we have a lot of guys on this team that have had that experience and know that we have to stay on top of it, we’ve got to keep getting better. The teams that find ways to get better throughout the season are the teams that do things in the end of the season, and that allows them to make the playoffs. We’ve got to take advantage of this bye week and then go back to work.”
It will be a bye week for Thielen and his teammates. For O’Connell, it will be a week in which he has time to correct things that could cost the Vikings later.
