During a Tuesday morning PFT Live interview with Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell, we asked when he first realized the Vikings might have a special team this year, especially when the preseason attention in the NFC North was focused on the Lions, Packers, and Bears.
O’Connell said it happened early in training camp.
“I think it might have been during the ramp-up period the first couple days,” he said. “I remember standing with Harrison Smith, you know it was about his hundredth training camp, so he’s standing off to the side and him and I are kind of watching maybe a special teams period going on and I remember saying to him, ‘I think we got a chance to be pretty good, what do you think?’ and he kind of looked at me and said, ‘You know I totally agree. I think we’ve got everything we need right here and let’s see how training camp goes.’
“My message from day one was for us to truly reach our potential regardless of — in this day and age it’s impossible to not hear, ‘Hey, win projections and expectations and this team and that team’ and he was really talking about us and probably rightly so with our division being what it is and ended up being this year with how well Detroit is playing and Green Bay has had a fantastic year as well.
“Didn’t expect a whole lot of people to kind of put us in that group, maybe at the beginning of the year, but I thought it might be possible if we just got better, things came together. We were very calculated and who we brought to this team, the type of player, the type of mentality they would have, we wanted to really bring guys here that were smart, tough, loved football, loved being great teammates because of what we built here.
“I do believe those players tend to thrive and we get enough of those guys in that locker room with the leadership and the players we already had in it. I thought it would be very much possible for us to have success and then if we built it the right way in that darkness when there was no light shining on this team at all I think those teams can be dangerous when they’re forged in kind of the background and you just keep on preparing, keep on growing and now we get an opportunity to play on the big stage, in the bright lights of Sunday Night Football to finish the season.”
That’s a great way to put it. The team was built in the darkness and forged in the background and now the Vikings have arrived.
Sunday night. NBC and Peacock. Winner gets the inside track to the Super Bowl. Loser gets a ticket to Tampa or L.A. or Atlanta and up to three road games to even get to the Super Bowl.
