Minnesota Vikings make surprising move regarding Kevin O’Connell, and it has a simple explanation

The Vikings had their end of the season press conference scheduled for Thursday and postponed it, possibly due to Ed Donatell.

Tyler Forness — NFL & College Football News Writer
Add as preferred source on Google
Dec 7, 2025; Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA; Minnesota Vikings head coach Kevin O'Connell during the first half at U.S. Bank Stadium.
Brad Rempel-Imagn Images

The Minnesota Vikings had their end of the season press conference scheduled for Thursday afternoon with head coach Kevin O’Connell and general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah. That ended up being postponed due to unannounced circumstances.

It’s rather odd that they chose to move the press conference back, possibly as much as a week. It also came suddenly. What could be the reason? For that, we can look back to 2022 for a likely scenario.

Kevin O’Connell is trying to avoid Ed Donatell conundrum

After the 2022 season, the Vikings had their season-ending press conference three days after they lost to the New York Giants 31-24 in the Wild Card round of the playoffs. It was a frustrating way to end the season, and the focus of the press conference was on the defense.

Led by defensive coordinator Ed Donatell, they finished 28th in points allowed and 31st in yards allowed. He came to Minnesota to run the Vic Fangio scheme after spending a decade-plus with him as an assistant. It didn’t work at all, and there was a serious discussion about his future.

The first question asked of O’Connell was if Donatell would return as defensive coordinator.

“I’m in the process of going through – as we did with our players on Monday – I don’t know the
total number between practice squad, IR and our roster guys, but Kwesi and I had a chance to sit
down and speak face-to-face with everyone, get their feelings on both the individual and collective
thoughts on where we’re at right now. And then over the next couple days, and it’s ongoing, I’ll be
doing the same thing with my entire coaching staff. I’m in evaluation mode of everything that we
did,” O’Connell explained.

“I think that’s really important – part of self-reflecting and part of us reflecting as a staff – is making sure we’re looking at every aspect of our football team and our coaching staff to make sure
we’re doing everything within my responsibility and my power to put our players and our organization in the best possible situation to have success. So that is an ongoing process that is continuing as
we speak, and we’ll continue throughout the rest of this week. I think it’s important to do, and I
think after the success we had this year and then coming up short of where we ultimately wanted to
get to, I think it’s the right thing to do – to make sure I go through that thorough process in doing so.”

In essence, O’Connell said that he hasn’t made a decision yet. Because he didn’t directly answer the question, reporters kept asking him different versions of the same question, and you got a sense that O’Connell was very annoyed when it was over. The next day, the Vikings fired Donatell, and O’Connell didn’t have to answer questions about why the decision to fire him was made.

What does that have to do with this press conference? There have been discussions among analysts for months about whether the Vikings should fire multiple coaches, including offensive coordinator Wes Phillips and special teams coordinator Matt Daniels.

The Vikings have taken time to make their decisions in the past, and pushing the season-ending press conference back signals to me O’Connell has learned from that PR mistake, and is waiting to have the end of season press conference until he makes the right personnel decisions. By waiting, O’Connell will answer questions of the moves he made rather than answer questions on moves that could be made.

It’s relatively eerie that the Vikings made this move, but if this is the case, it makes sense.

Related Articles