At Thursday’s pre-draft press conference, Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell and General Manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah discussed the future of the quarterback position and how it would be ideal to have the team’s next quarterback on hand for a year before they took over the offense.
It’s unclear if the Vikings will have a developmental quarterback at this point, but they do know that they will have Kirk Cousins as their starter for at least one more season and his prospects for 2023 were also a topic of conversation. For the first time since joining the Vikings in 2018, Cousins will have the same offensive voices in his ear for two straight seasons and that prospect has O’Connell excited to see the impact that continuity has on the quarterback.
“I’m very excited about Kirk in Year Two in this system,” O’Connell said, via the team’s website. “It’s been a while since Kirk’s been able to say that he gets to come back in the same system he ran previously with the same play-caller. I’ve had a lot of great dialogue with him in ways we’re going to look to fine-tune what we did and grow and improve. That will be a big part of 2023 for me, not only as the head coach but as play-caller in our offensive staff.”
Plenty of people will be thinking about succession plans if the Vikings do draft a quarterback this month, but plans for the future could change if familiarity winds up paying off on the offensive side of the ball.