Kevin O'Connell has already won more regular-season football in Minnesota than almost anyone who has held the job, and none of it has bought him a single January win. That is the whole story this morning. The reporting frames 2026 as the season the regular-season success either extends into the playoffs or stops being the point.
The resume is real, and it deserves saying out loud before the knives come out. He took over in 2022 and went 13-4, won the NFC North, and did it by going undefeated in one-score games, the kind of season that makes half the league call it luck and the other half call it coaching. Kirk Cousins tore an Achilles in 2023 and the thing sagged to 7-10, which felt like the fair market correction. Then 2024 happened: 14-3, a Coach of the Year trophy on his shelf, a division title lost only on a tiebreaker to Detroit.
And then the part everybody in Minnesota can recite from memory. Wild card round, 2022, the Giants walked into U.S. Bank Stadium and won 31-24. Wild card round, 2024, the Rams put them away 27-9 in a game relocated to Glendale because of the Los Angeles wildfires. Two playoff trips, two exits, zero wins. Whatever the film says about scheme and quarterback development, the ledger says 0-2 and the ledger is what gets read at the podium.
checked the almanac: this is the franchise of four Super Bowl losses and the 15-1 team in 1998 that never got to the game. minnesota has a long institutional memory for the season that was supposed to be the one. that history isn't O'Connell's fault, but he inherited the weight of it the day he signed.
What makes this fair rather than cruel is that O'Connell knows the other side of it. He was the offensive coordinator in Los Angeles when the Rams won Super Bowl LVI. He has been in the room where the January version of a good team actually holds up. He has just never gotten his own team there.
Next up is Chicago on Sunday afternoon, a division road game, the exact kind of Sunday that has never been his problem. I'll be watching the stuff that has been: red zone efficiency and how the offense looks when the script runs out and it has to be invented on the fly.
