Second interviews for Vikings head coach candidates coming this week

The names aren’t surprising

With a General Manager finally in place, the search for the tenth head coach in Minnesota Vikings history should soon be reaching its final stages. The team is reportedly going to be doing second interviews with their favored candidates next week, and the names that are on the list aren’t that surprising.

According to Tom Pelissero of the NFL Network, the Vikings will be giving second interviews to Los Angeles Rams offensive coordinator Kevin O’Connell and San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator DeMeco Ryans. Their units will be going head-to-head in this afternoon’s NFC Championship Game from Los Angeles, so it’s entirely possible that we’ll be seeing the next Vikings’ head coach at work this afternoon.

Pelissero also notes that it “wouldn’t be a surprise” if Jim Harbaugh was in the mix as well. We talked about that in a couple of different posts yesterday.

O’Connell has also emerged as someone that the Jacksonville Jaguars want to interview for their head coaching vacancy. However, as Pelissero notes in another tweet, because they did not make contact with O’Connell during Divisional Playoffs week, they can not make contact with him until after the Super Bowl if the Rams advance today. The Vikings, on the other hand, did make contact with O’Connell during that week, so they can interview him during the down week between the Conference Championship Games and the Super Bowl. That probably explains why the Vikings were conducting interviews with potential coaching candidates before they had a GM in place. . .they wanted to give themselves that option.

We’ll see how things play out with the Vikings’ coaching search, but you’ve got to think that the whole process is going to reach a conclusion here before too much longer.