Really, you could pick out any of Justin Jefferson’s 10 catches from Sunday. There was the 46-yarder on the Vikings’ third snap, followed by a 22-yard touchdown three plays after that on which he bodied up Bills corner Dane Jackson and boxed him out for the score. There was, of course, the impossible fourth-and-18 grab in the fourth quarter, a one-handed catch for the ages, pulled in despite a safety putting hands on the ball. Then, you have the third-and-10 catch in overtime that put Minnesota on the goal line.
But there was only one play Jefferson made at Highmark Stadium over those three hours that his coach, Kevin O’Connell, would raise repeatedly to me, as he stood in the biting, 25-degree air on the tarmac at the Buffalo airport, waiting to board the flight back to Minneapolis. And chances are, if you had 10 guesses, you probably wouldn’t guess where this one came from—with the Vikings down by 17 and less than 17 minutes left in regulation.
“We just kept looking at it like, if we can just start chipping away …” O’Connell says. “Then, we get that 81-yard touchdown run. On a day when we felt like we would have to run the football, we didn’t get off to a great start running it. We wanted to come back to the run and kind of try to sustain some drives that way. So for Dalvin [Cook], to make that run at that moment?
“And very few people will talk about it with some of the other plays that he made in that game, but Justin Jefferson blocking the safety on that play and springing that? That was a huge moment for Justin in the game. And then he followed that up by putting an exclamation point on it with some once-in-a-long-time catches and fourth-down plays and third-and-longs, and you just can’t say enough about him.”
O’Connell and GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, who arrived in tandem last winter, have told anyone who’d listen for months how much they the locker room they inherited, both for its talent and its intangibles. That’s why there was never a need for the standard new coach/GM teardown. Instead, the two kept doubling down on what Mike Zimmer and Rick Spielman left them, never wavering, tempting as it might’ve been to find their own guys.
The result is a team that’s now 8–1. And much as it’s 8–1 because of plays you’ll remember, like the ones Jefferson made during a 33–30 overtime win over Buffalo, it’s also because of the stuff you didn’t see. That is why O’Connell brought Jefferson’s block up to me on three different occasions.
“This one’s gonna take time for me to unpack,” O’Connell says. “There are a lot of little things that I can go back and look at. There’s a lot of ways that I’ll look inward first and try to improve as either a play-caller or the head coach of this team, but the one thing that I can rest easy knowing is that I got the right guys. I love this team.”
And in the game of the year, that team delivered for its coach in ways both big and small.
