It has been four years since Kevin O’Connell has been holding the head coaching throne in the Minnesota Vikings camp. The head coach has seen a good share of successes and failures as part of the staff on various NFL teams. But to Pat McAfee, he still remembers him as the quarterback who dropped by the New York Jets. O’Connell really could do less of that reminder.

“Former quarterback in the NFL. We’ve seen the tape of him getting cut. Man is the head coach of the undefeated Minnesota Vikings. Ladies and gentlemen, Kevin O’Connell,” McAfee said while introducing O’Connell on the Pat McAfee Show. 

“How many times are we going to talk about me getting cut, man?” O’Connell replied, with a smile on his face.

Immediately, McAfee tried to portray how that incident shaped what O’Connell is today, no matter how tough it was at that time. 

“Well, it’s just a nice reminder that everybody goes through something,” added McAfee. “You know, we’re all from somewhere. We just want to tell people that you’ve been in that seat before. When you return, you weren’t good enough after getting to the highest level. So we just want to, you know, let people know who we’re talking to here.”

The incident that McAfee referred to dates back to 2010, when o’Connell was playing for the Jets. They waived him to make way for Kellen Clemens, who became the No. 3 quarterback. Hard Knocks captured the moment he was informed of the decision by then-New York Jets general manager Mike Tannenbaum

“Hey Kevin, come on in. So we’re going to let you go,” shared the NFL executive back then, before O’Connell even had the chance to sit down. “And it just came down to the fact that we felt that Kellen beat you out. And we’re going to keep three quarterbacks this year. And we really had hope when we had traded for you [from the Detroit Lions] and giving up a pick that you were going to turn into our long-term number two.

“And unfortunately that hasn’t happened. And that was really at the end of the day. The difference was, you know, I think there’s a more of a trust with Kellen that if he had to go play, he has a better chance of operating our offense today than you do.”

Former head coach Rex Ryan had previously expressed that Clemens had outperformed O’Connell, despite Hard Knocks showing an “X” next to Clemens’ name on a depth chart in the previous week’s episode.

O’Connell would eventually find his way back to the Jets, but he was released by the team in 2011. However, by that time, the former quarterback had already taken to coaching a little bit. Cowboys head coach Brian Schottenheimer, who was the Jets’ OC at the time, used to refer to the former QB as “Coach O’Connell,” per the New York Times.

O’Connell was picked up by the San Diego Chargers in 2012, only to be released by them in August that year. It was only in 2015 that O’Connell officially became an NFL coach, beginning as the quarterbacks coach for the Cleveland Browns. The head coach of the team at the time was Mike Pettine, who noted Kevin O’Connell’s coaching skills when they were at New York.

“Kevin wasn’t a great quarterback,” Pettine told ESPN in 2022, who was O’Connell’s assistant head coach at Minnesota. “I remember joking with him and saying, ‘You’re not worth a s— as a player, but you’re going to make a hell of a coach. I wasn’t the only person who told him that.”

Five years into Kevin O’Connell’s tenure with the Vikings, this franchise looks set to achieve new heights. O’Connell is now 47-25 as a head coach, which shows how successful he’s truly been.

“I’ve used this joke before, but my career as a player provided a great platform for me as a coach because I did spend a lot of time watching games from the sideline,” O’Connell said back on Feb. 17, the day he was introduced as Minnesota’s head coach. “I will say that with that becomes the ability to see the game in a way that I feel very prepared to call the game.”

With a 4-0 record so far in 2026, the Minnesota Vikings are thriving under Kevin O’Connell.