Most Saturday nights before a Vikings home game, the last lit office in the TCO Performance Center in Eagan is the one overlooking the practice fields from the third floor.

The final hours before kick-off are a lonely place for Kevin O’Connell to put the finishing touches on the call sheet he will hold in his hands for three hours on Sunday. He’ll start building it on Friday afternoon after his press conference and production meeting broadcast, during which he sits down with assistant quarterbacks coach Grant Udinski and asks for input from his offensive staff on the game plan. Friday nights are for dinner with his wife, Leah, and their four children, and playing in the basement with his children “until I can’t move anymore,” he said.

Then, after a Saturday meeting with Sam Darnold and the rest of the Vikings’ quarterbacks, O’Connell’s favorite thing to do is catch a college football game on the TV in his office and go over his call sheet until he meets the team. at the hotel. Brian O’Neill, who lives near the Vikings’ Eagan headquarters, drives past the team parking lot, sees another car there and texts O’Connell, “Go home.”

“Or (Saturday) morning he checks in and asks, ‘What time was it yesterday?’” O’Connell said. “I’ll say, ‘It was only six o’clock,’ and he’ll say, ‘Dude.’ I’m like, ‘I promise you, man, if I could (leave early), I would.’ I tell the players all the time, I’m going to give them everything I’ve got. There’s time to figure it out in the offseason, but not now.”

He recapped it all this week before flying 1,500 miles for a return to the SoFi Stadium field he last left covered in confetti. There he will use the methods he learned in Los Angeles to try to beat the head coach who taught him a lot.

The Vikings’ game against the Rams on Thursday night is a homecoming for O’Connell, a San Diego native whose two years as Sean McVay’s offensive coordinator led him to become the Vikings’ head coach right after the Rams lost the Bengals defeated in Super Bowl LVI. . He is the third of McVay’s former offensive assistants (after Matt LaFleur and Zac Taylor) to become an NFL head coach, and through 40 regular-season games, O’Connell has the highest winning percentage (.625) in Vikings history.

His hasty introduction to play-calling in 2019 under interim Washington coach Bill Callahan was good for him, O’Connell said, “because there wasn’t a lot of time to think about it.” However, it was with McVay that O’Connell learned many of the game-planning principles he still uses today.

He was McVay’s first offensive coordinator since LaFleur in 2017, and while McVay called the plays, O’Connell was his confidante from the game-planning meetings with quarterbacks to the sidelines on game day. McVay turned over play-calling duties to O’Connell in practice and preseason games, leaving his door open for talks to prepare O’Connell for his own opportunity as a head coach.