Vikings helmet Jeffrey Becker-USA TODAY Sports

The Minnesota Vikings are in need of a new quarterback following the departure of Kirk Cousins, and it sounds like head coach Kevin O’Connell has a very clear idea of what he is looking for in his next signal-caller.

Kevin O’Connell recently gave a speech at St. Philip the Deacon Church in Plymouth where he also took some questions from fans. One fan asked a question about the team’s pursuit of a new quarterback, and O’Connell gave a very thorough response to his process for evaluating quarterbacks and why he is resistant to bringing in certain players.

“For a couple of years I’ve, you know, I’ve been kind of known as the ‘quarterback killer’ when it comes to the draft in Eagan, because the feeling that everybody that I feel from our fan base is when we get this next guy, he’s gonna be the guy. And I feel it. I know you guys all feel it. So I have had to in a lot of ways fight off some mistakes from being made, mainly because the evaluation process I go through, I think about the things that are fixable.

“I think about the things that are coachable and then you think about the things that you could coach another 15 years with the player, and you might not be able to fix and hope and faith are wonderful things. I do like them to not necessarily be strategies. So I do very much believe in certain principles of playing the quarterback position. I believe the footwork in the lower half of any quarterback can be fixed with the proper coaching and teaching. And I think that when you see the good things on tape, you see things that they can do better on tape. You’re looking for a lot of different things and to check a lot of boxes and ultimately when you feel like you find that guy then you got to hope that 31 other teams are complicit in making sure that they can become a Minnesota Viking, but we only need one team to be complicit and hopefully we find that team and that person’s on it.”

That’s an extremely thorough explanation from the Vikings coach. We’ll have to see who the team ultimately lands at the position.

[Matthew Coller]