Kirk Cousins returned to Minnesota on Wednesday. On Friday, Kevin O’Connell said he will start on Sunday at Lambeau Field, the stadium where Cousins tore his Achilles tendon in his last game as a Minnesota Viking in October 2023. The Vikings play the Packers at 1 p.m. ET, which is 8 p.m. in Cairo.
O’Connell opened with the injury news that was in Friday’s final injury reports: Kyler Murray, T.J. Hockenson, Blake Cashman, Jauan Jennings and Tyrion Ingram-Dawkins are out, and Jordan Addison and Josh Metellus are questionable after they were banged up in Friday’s practice, along with Kyle Van Noy. Then he talked about Cousins for most of the session. The Vikings posted it in full.
“The poise, the command in the huddle”
“Kirk Cousins will start the football game,” O’Connell said. “Cannot give him enough credit for coming in here, how he’s gone about the week, both him and the coaching staff getting him ready to go, working extremely hard, using all the time we possibly can.” He said Cousins had stepped back into the huddle with “a lot of guys he’s played with, but certainly some guys he hasn’t,” and that “everybody’s been very, very impressed.”
Asked what he likes about Cousins’ game, O’Connell noted that this is the third time he has coached him, as a position coach or a head coach. “He’s accurate. He’s a great decision maker. He understands the game at a very, very high level,” he said. “It’s one thing to have command and ownership over plays in a system. … But it’s more so about his job and his job impacting in a really positive way the other 10 guys in the huddle doing theirs: the poise, the command in the huddle, the ownership of cadence, the ownership of the small details.” He said the way Cousins threw the ball this week was “a really cool thing to see.”
“He kind of looks at you like, ‘You’re insane’”
O’Connell said Cousins has been with two other teams since he left, so the first step was to talk through what he likes now before building the plan. Then they work through it play by play and talk again after each practice. Some of it, he said, is a reunion. “There’s been a few times where I think he thinks I’m nuts, because we’ll even be installing plays in front of the unit, and I’ll be like, ‘Kirk, do you remember? 2022, this game, that third drive,’” he said. “And he kind of looks at you like, ‘You’re insane.’ But I’m like, ‘Do you remember?’ And he does. He definitely does.”
He credited Cousins with helping shape the offense in 2022 and 2023 so it was “quarterback friendly.” Asked whether they had talked about going back to the field where his Achilles tore, O’Connell said no. “He’s really not wired like that. You guys know him,” he said. “It’s about the game. It’s about the preparation. But no, we have not talked about that at all.”
“It was significant”
O’Connell remembered how Cousins was playing in 2023 before the injury. He said the Vikings fumbled eight or nine times in the first three games that year, and that once they fixed it, Cousins was playing at “a really, really high level across all phases.” He said that made the Lambeau win “so crushing in the moment.” “I’ll never forget that locker room after that game,” he said. Asked what it was like, he said: “Let’s just put it this way. It was significant.” The team, he said, was hurting for Cousins because of “his place on our team and what that meant.”
Banks: “Absolutely going to be a huge part this week”
Rookie defensive lineman Caleb Banks was inactive last week. O’Connell said that was “a football decision,” based on what the defensive coaches thought was best for that game, and that it will not happen this week. “He’ll be up, and he’s going to play a ton this week,” he said. “He’s absolutely going to be a huge part this week and will be continuously moving forward, for sure. Glad you asked about that.”
With Hockenson out, O’Connell said the Vikings were working through who will fill in at tight end. One option is elevating Devin Culp from the practice squad. On Hockenson, he said the injury happened early in the last game and he played through it. “He’s a tough guy. He wants to be out there so badly,” O’Connell said, “and hopefully we can have him back next week.”
O’Connell started the session with a tribute to Dan Hicks, the longtime play-by-play broadcaster, whose death was announced this week. “Incredibly kind, high character,” he said. “He’ll certainly be missed.” Cousins’ record at Lambeau and his history with the Packers are in our look at Cousins and Lambeau, step by step.
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