Vikings HC Kevin O’Connell explains the differences with joint practices and preseason ‘A whole different world’
There is a lot of value with joint practices, but Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell doesn’t see as much value in them as the preseason.
The Minnesota Vikings have completed their first joint practice with the Baltimore Ravens, and we learned quite a bit about both teams.
For the Vikings, the biggest winners were on the defensive side of the football. Brian Flores had Lamar Jackson and Tyler Huntley in the gulag all afternoon, finding ways to confuse them and create chaos on all three levels of the field.
Kevin O’Connell highlights differences between joint practices and preseason games
These two days are going to be the last work for the majority of the Vikings and Ravens’ top-line players have for the week. They will have Saturday’s preseason game off due to the joint practices, but is that the right approach?
Head coach Kevin O’Connell was asked about how different the two are from a coaching perspective, and he gave a fascinating answer.
“Preseason games, I know that teams are in their uniforms and they’re out there playing and it’s tackling and all those things, but from a standpoint of the level of football schematically that goes into a preseason game, you might get one or two standardized coverages versus each phase of the game, having a whole different world that you get into coverage-wise, pressure-wise, what we do defensively based upon what we’re showing in the preseason versus what we can do when we’re really thinking about game planning and preparing for an opponent for four quarters.”
O’Connell makes a really good point. Everything is pretty vanilla during preseason games, which makes the evaluation a little bit harder. That’s not the case during a practice.
“I would just always say that you’re going to get more X’s and O’s here than you would in a preseason game. There’s still a lot to evaluate in preseason games, but normally it is guys’ ability, technique, fundamentals, throwing, catching, cover and tackling, not so much how they have to handle the football 501 that can go into a regular season NFL game. We can get into that world out here a little bit, there’s not a ton of game planning that goes on for these,” said O’Connell.
We are going into day two of joint practice on Thursday, and it will likely give the Vikings a lot of information.
