It’s the Monday of Week 3, and there are just five unbeaten teams left in the NFL. And you can be a believer in Kevin O’Connell’s program, and still be surprised that the Minnesota Vikings are somehow one of them.
This year was supposed to be their second season of the cap purge and roster reset.
The Vikings swapped out Kirk Cousins for Sam Darnold and J.J. McCarthy. They let Danielle Hunter go in favor of signing Jonathan Greenard. Thirteen of the 22 guys who started the first playoff game of the O’Connell era (after the 2022 regular season) are gone, too, with some of the young stars of that group—Justin Jefferson and Christian Darrisaw—now on big second contracts. More than a few respected vets—Eric Kendricks, Adam Thielen and Patrick Peterson—have departed.
What’s in place now is a little more sustainable, a little more flexible, and no less successful than what O’Connell and GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah inherited two years ago and won with right away. The locker room was good then. It’s good now. There was talent on hand then, as there is now. And the cool thing is, as the players see it, it’s not hard to see why the results of 2022 have carried over as the names and faces have changed.
It’s reflected, of course, on offense, with Darnold’s renaissance—we’ve covered that extensively the past couple of weeks. But, quietly, it may be even more pronounced on defense, where another change from 2022, and a bet O’Connell made two offseasons ago with the ’23 hire of Brian Flores, is paying off handsomely.
Sunday’s stifling of C.J. Stroud and the high-flying Houston Texans was just the latest example. And more than just an example of Flores’s defense dominating again, it was a testament to a program that’s pretty clearly firing on all cylinders.
The longest-tenured Viking, Harrison Smith, had a good word for it, as we caught up late Sunday afternoon: logical. Indeed, there’s a reason for everything.
For Smith, that starts on his side of the ball. But it extends everywhere.
“On a weekly basis, we just try to make it hard on whatever offense we’re playing,” he says. “Find what they like to do and try to limit that. It’s not always just about the quarterback. There’s more than that—just frustrating them early, not trying to let them get anything big on us, shutting the run game down.
“At that point, our offense is playing well. You get up two scores, and then you take a lot off their menu. It’s not just the defense playing well. It’s the field position. Those turnover ops tend to happen, obviously. You get up two, three scores, and you eat a little bit more.”
Everyone in Minnesota’s eating now. And as such, there are a lot of good stories to tell.
Darnold’s is one, and Flores’s is certainly another.
Welcome to the Week 3—we’re back to recap a fun Sunday slate, and even peek back a little to Thursday. So over in the takeaways on this Monday morning, you’ll find …
• How the Philadelphia Eagles are still figuring it out with two new coordinators, and gutted out an impressive win over the New Orleans Saints in the meantime.
• Why the 3–0 Pittsburgh Steelers need to stick with Justin Fields as their starting quarterback.
• Where the resilient Daniel Jones and his New York Giants have a chance to pull their season from the early September wreckage.
• My stab at confronting the Deshaun Watson question in Cleveland.
And a whole lot more. But we’re starting the NFL’s retooled, reloaded, surprise unbeaten.
Over the summer, O’Connell and I were talking about, of course, the quarterbacks, and he threw a line in there about developing Darnold and McCarthy that was pretty telling on how he felt about his second-year defensive coordinator.
“Sam and J.J. are further along than I thought they would be at this point,” he said, “just thinking about it from a 30,000-foot view of what would transpire, playing against Flo’s defense every day.”
Playing against Flo’s defense every day.
While Darnold and McCarthy got to feel the challenge of Flores’s defense over the summer, Stroud got a full-on definition of what O’Connell meant by that Sunday afternoon.
Coming into Minnesota, the Texans’ star hadn’t thrown an interception since before Thanksgiving of last year, and had only one multi-pick game on his career résumé—his streak came to an end on his first official throw of the day (his first pass was negated by a penalty), and his second pick came with the Vikings leading 24–7 in the fourth quarter.
But as Smith said, there was more to it than just trying to get to Stroud.
During the week, the coaches challenged the players to wage mental and physical warfare against the high-flying Houston offense. That meant giving them no tells presnap, and forcing Stroud, Texans OC Bobby Slowik, and everyone else in navy and red to have to measure every call they’d make, both from the sideline and on the field.
From there, it was about making the Texans work for everything. After the pick, the Texans’ next possession took 13 plays to go 39 yards, and ended in a missed field goal. In the second quarter, Houston moved the sticks some, but kept hitting dead ends, with a disciplined, complex Vikings defense finding a way to get the Texans off-schedule in generating penalties or negative plays, and then winning in long yardage.
And it was tough for the Texans to prepare for because, well, the Vikings were, by design, different from what they were in Week 1 against the Giants or in Week 2 against the San Francisco 49ers.
“Just Flo’s philosophy coupled with the mix of guys that we have allows us to be pretty multiple,” Smith says. “As different as we need to be week to week, we have things we like to run, like most defenses. We can morph week to week a little more than most defenses and just make things where you’re really not sure what we’re doing. You have to have smart players. You have to have athletic players that can play different roles at any given point.
“We have all those things. Flo knows that and gives us a little flexibility to do some things here and there. We just try to match what the offense we’re playing does best instead of saying, This is who we are. Who we are is whatever we need to be.”
Of course, that’s easier said than done.
Some of this is rooted in the philosophical crossover O’Connell and Flores have in their mutual starting points working for the legendary Bill Belichick. The two were actually together with the New England Patriots in 2008, and the young assistant coach (Flores) did get to know the rookie quarterback (O’Connell) a little back then. More recently, they’d see each other at the scouting combine, or games. But it was in the interview that O’Connell found a kindred spirit.
Both wanted units that morphed week to week to force the opponent to play left-handed, and would be stocked with smart, dependable, tough players. And with a base of vets such as Smith and Harrison Phillips, O’Connell could give Flores, then an assistant in Pittsburgh, a nice baseline to start carrying out that vision.
That vision was everywhere in how the Vikings played defense Sunday.
“The constants are setting edges, tackling well, not giving up deep plays, the basics of football,” Smith explains. “If you can do that and tweak your scheme, you’re not going crazy but you’re doing some things that might cause some issues, and we have enough guys on this team with experience and football knowledge, football IQ. The hardest thing, in my opinion, if you try to play like we do, is the presnap communication. I think just because we’ve committed to it, not that it’s gotten easy, but it’s gotten less difficult to do that.”
Which brought Smith to the key to the whole thing—Flores’s trust in the guys on the field.
“I think it’s hard [for a coach] to commit to being like that,” he says. “It’s kind of scary to have flexibility out there—Y’all figure it out. Since Flo got here last year, there are times where it’s like, All right, tighten up. Within reason, he knows we know ball and can get ourselves into some reasonable stuff if we need to. It’s a very logical and enjoyable work environment. It’s fun. You learn a lot about ball, a lot of stuff that you can do on a field with 11 guys. You got to stay sharp with it for sure.”
And that spills over into just about everything.
I asked Smith for an example of where the Vikings’ ability not just to fashion a different game plan every week, but tweak that plan in-game, came into play Sunday. He struggled to pick one out—because, at this point, it’s baked into everything the Vikings do on defense.
The discussions from Wednesday and Thursday flow right into Sunday afternoon. So if you think it’d be hard on an opponent not knowing what’s coming going into the game, imagine how much more difficult it’d be if the Vikings themselves weren’t sure where the scheme would take them as the game went on.
“It happens every week,” he says. “We’re talking on the sideline. I’ll normally ask [Flores], What do we want to do against this look? Should we switch it up? Sometimes he’ll be like, I want to go to this. I want to go to that. Sometimes he’ll be like, What do you like? Sometimes I don’t know what I like, so I’ll ask Byron [Murphy] or Cash [Blake Cashman] or [Josh] Metellus, and they might like something. If it’s reasonable, we’ll go with that.
“It might not be a big play, but now it’s another wrinkle we threw in. [The other team is] like, What are they doing now? It’s just constant, trying to stay ahead of people figuring us out and getting stale with stuff.”
Which is easier said than done.
But we saw in New England for a lot of years what it looks like when you have the coaches and players to pull it off. Through three weeks, it looks like the Vikings do.
Doing all this, of course, requires trust, and Flores has built that with his guys—something that was pretty visible at a tough personal moment for the Vikings’ DC this summer.
When Tua Tagovailoa went on Dan LeBatard’s show and called Flores a “terrible person”, it was tough for anyone within the Vikings to know quite how to respond. So a crew of players came with him to his press conference the next day, as a sign of solidarity. It looked a little weird in the moment, but it was a weird time, and the gesture was genuine and very real.
Now, read back what Smith, a 14-year vet, says about playing for Flores, and the “very logical,” “enjoyable” and “fun work environment.” You’ll see that while the core of who Flores is hasn’t changed, maybe lessons have been learned, with a lot of the things New England’s decorated defensive players used to say about the coach coming back again. He’s tough and demanding, but there’s reason for it, and the results have followed.
“I know him as a successful guy from the Patriots,” Smith says. “Whatever happened in Miami, I can’t speak on that. Everything I’ve ever experienced with Flo was enjoyable, purpose-driven, it’s a good work environment. A lot of stuff is logical. He expects a lot out of us, but we expect a lot out of ourselves. At this point in my career, being an old guy, I couldn’t ask for a better setup.
“The work week is very productive. I can only speak on my experiences—it’s a pretty damn good experience. I would say that all our defensive guys would echo that sentiment.”
Sunday showed it, for sure.
So, yes, Darnold’s among the NFL’s best stories this September. But there are plenty of good ones coming out of Minnesota right now. That’s a testament to what’s been built in Minnesota over the past two-plus years. And the once-embattled Flores is no small part of it.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Brian Flores Is No Small Part of Surprising Vikings’ Start.
