Could Kevin O'Connell win AP Coach of the Year?
MINNEAPOLIS — After five straight wins without the team's best player — and two of them without the starting quarterback — Minnesota Vikings head coach Kevin O'Connell has forced his way into the coach of the year conversation.
O'Connell has the Vikings at 6-4 after winning just one of their first five games. He's won games with three different starting quarterbacks, multiple starting offensive line combinations and a young, injury-ridden defense. He's beaten division rivals (the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears) and Super Bowl contenders (San Francisco 49ers).
After leading the team to a 13-4 record, O'Connell was a contender for the Associated Press' Coach of the Year award last year, too. But he ended up losing to Brian Daboll, whose New York Giants beat O'Connell's Vikings in the playoffs. The award is announced the week before the Super Bowl and voted on even earlier, so Daboll's playoff win didn't necessarily impact the race.
Past Coach of the Year winners
To gauge O'Connell's odds this year, let's look back at the last 10 coaches of the year to see what commonalities we can find, as well as whether O'Connell fits the profile.
Here are the last 10 winners, with their teams and records:
- 2022: Daboll, New York Giants (9-7-1)
- 2021: Mike Vrabel, Tennessee Titans (12-5)
- 2020: Kevin Stefanski, Cleveland Browns (11-5)
- 2019: John Harbaugh, Baltimore Ravens (14-2)
- 2018: Matt Nagy, Chicago Bears (12-4)
- 2017: Sean McVay, Los Angeles Rams (11-5)
- 2016: Jason Garrett, Dallas Cowboys (13-3)
- 2015: Ron Rivera, Carolina Panthers (15-1)
- 2014: Bruce Arians, Arizona Cardinals (11-5)
- 2013: Rivera, Panthers (12-4)
Of those coaches, four of them were in their first year (Daboll, Stefanski, Nagy and McVay). Voters clearly put stock into overachieving freshman coaches.
Seven of the 10 coaches won their division and all of them made the playoffs. They averaged 11.1 wins, with Daboll's nine in 2022 being the fewest. No other winner had fewer than 11 victories.
Daboll is actually a useful outlier to analyze. His team was fairly middling — it ranked 15th in points scored and 17th in points allowed. The Giants had a winning percentage of .529 and finished third in the NFC East. Daboll's award was, seemingly, an acknowledgement that the team made the playoffs in his first year despite not being all that good (the same could've been said for O'Connell, but that's beside the point).
The closest analog to O'Connell among past winners is probably Arians, who coached the 2014 Cardinals to an 11-5 record in his second year despite starting three different quarterbacks (Drew Stanton, Carson Palmer and Ryan Lindley). If O'Connell can coach his team to 11 wins with Joshua Dobbs, he has a good shot at the award.
Dobbs is playing great football, due in large part to O'Connell's coaching, but the Vikings' remaining schedule is far from easy. They have two games against the division-leading Detroit Lions and a matchup with the Cincinnati Bengals yet to come. Eleven wins is not out of the question, but it will be a tough road for the Vikings. They'd need to win five of their remaining seven games. Only three of them are at home and only two are against teams who currently have losing records.
Other Coach of the Year contenders
It's also useful to compare O'Connell against some other contenders this year. The two other frontrunners, at this point, are likely the Detroit Lions' Dan Campbell and the Houston Texans' DeMeco Ryans.
Campbell has the Lions leading the division. If that holds, it would be their first division win since 1993. That alone would probably be enough to earn Campbell the win, but helping his case is that the Lions are playing really good football, and they're doing so with Jared Goff at quarterback. The Lions' offense is sixth in the league in points scored and second in yards gained. Their defense is much weaker (21st in point allowed), but when you're outscoring everyone, defensive mistakes can be forgiven.
Ryans has a Texans team that won just three games last year in contention for a division title. They've beaten three AFC contenders in the Pittsburgh Steelers, Jacksonville Jaguars and Cincinnati Bengals. His rookie quarterback, C.J. Stroud, is already playing like a top 10 passer.
Campbell is probably the stiffest competition, especially since his team is in the same division. The Lions have the lead in the NFC North, but it's far from locked up, particularly since Detroit and Minnesota have not played each other yet. If O'Connell steals the division away, Coach of the Year is all but locked up for him. If Campbell's Lions hold on to their lead, it's hard to see O'Connell's accomplishments eclipsing his.
There's still a lot of season left, and it could all come crashing down for O'Connell and the Vikings, but even if it does, his performance thus far is laudable. The narrative about the Vikings last year was one of fraudulence and untenable luck, despite their 13 wins. Early this season, it looked like the doubters would be proved right. But the course correction O'Connell's team has made is now the preeminent feel-good story in the NFL, and that will certainly count for something when Coach of the Year voting comes.