Sam Darnold Excited to Begin Work with Vikings

O’Connell was asked about his evaluation of Darnold’s earlier career stops in which he started 38 games for the Jets, 17 for the Panthers and one for the Niners.

“I think there’s always things as coaches, that that’s our job to try to identify ways to help a player,” O’Connell said. “For every time you might sit there and say, ‘Oh, we need to work on this,’ or you know, ‘We can enhance this part of Sam’s game,’ there’s some other things where you look at and say, ‘There it is. That’s why.’

“He’s always shown those things, whether it was the end of [2022] with Carolina that he can go in and play winning football, you know, tough circumstances sometimes find all quarterbacks in this league,” O’Connell added. “I think that’s just the life of an NFL quarterback and you know, then he gets a chance to go to San Francisco with Kyle [Shanahan] and Brian [Griese], and I thought they did a great job with him because his tape from one year to the next, you see some things that translate. High level, you can tell he was really working on things, my conversations with him about his feet and eyes and reading with his feet and playing in rhythm and being able to make great decisions with a football all leads you to, and he’s making, you know, those comments are being made out of experience of not only things he’s done well, but we all sometimes have our greatest growth in moments of failure.

“The level of that failure at this position tends to be magnified because it’s for all to see. Wins or losses tend to get put on that player regardless of circumstance around them or the voice in the headset or all the things that goes into it,” O’Connell continued. “And I’d like to think, I’m confident in the combination of all those things for us here in Minnesota and where Sam’s at in his career, that this makes this a great opportunity for both the Vikings and Sam.”