During the Vikings' summer 2023 training camp, I was sitting in Kevin O’Connell's office, preparing to interview him for a season preview feature, when a voice chirped in on his walkie-talkie. O’Connell gave one of his knowing smirks, picked up the walkie-talkie and responded, "Yes?"
It was Grant Udinski, the assistant quarterbacks coach O’Connell had hired a year earlier as a 26-year-old chief of staff to help manage some of the administrative functions of his job. The Vikings quickly realized Udinski was a fount of football ideas who could do everything from preparing advance scouting reports and critiquing game plans to coaching players. His football knowledge and love of the game was so unique, O’Connell said, he could go as far in the coaching world as he wanted. They'd promoted him to assistant QB coach before the 2023 season, which worked out, because his skill set, perhaps, wasn't quite as well-suited to an administrative role. O’Connell recalled the time Udinski went out of phone contact while on a five-day hike in Colorado, and left O’Connell's messages about training camp unanswered for so long the coach worried something serious had happened to him.
As we talked, I said, "Now you've got my reporter brain going." O’Connell's eyes widened and said, "You should absolutely do a story on him!"
It wasn’t until last weekend that I finally did. We published my profile of Udinski, whom J.J. McCarthy called “the most interesting man in the world,” in last Sunday’s paper, finally finishing the story almost a year after I first sat down with the Vikings’ young assistant. It’s a story that went through numerous fits and starts, to the point where O'Connell would occasionally ask, with mock incredulity, what was taking so long. But the delay was fortuitous: McCarthy, the quarterback to whom much of Udinski’s work is now tied, was still playing at Michigan when I started reporting the story.
For today’s newsletter, I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about how the story came together, share a few thoughts and anecdotes that didn’t make it into the article and spend a minute looking at the process that helps us bring you stories like Udinski’s that you might not have otherwise learned.
Perhaps the chief reason the story took so long to see the light of day was because the Vikings’ quarterback situation changed so much in the time since O’Connell first told me about Udinski. When Kirk Cousins tore his right Achilles tendon on Oct. 29 at Lambeau Field last year, the Vikings went into overdrive trying to get two quarterbacks (rookie Jaren Hall and trade deadline addition Joshua Dobbs) ready for the following Sunday’s game against the Falcons. I first sat down with Udinski last November to talk about two things: his hiking expeditions (O’Connell had made him sound a bit like Tom Cruise at the beginning of "Mission: Impossible 2," which Udinski insisted was an embellishment), and the round-the-clock work he’d done with Hall and Dobbs to get them ready.
Udinski typically stays on the practice field on Fridays, for extra work with the backup quarterbacks who didn’t get many practice reps that week. Before the Falcons game, he was on the field with Hall and Dobbs for nearly six hours. They’d go through almost the entire game plan, with Udinski playing roles that ranged from receiver to pass rusher and safety.
“I mean, at some point, I do start feeling bad because they're standing on turf that long, and I'm like, ‘Are your legs going to be alright?’” Udinski said. “Josh and Jaren were both like, ‘No, I’m good.’”
Even when Udinski offered a pause for dinner or a bathroom break, “They just powered through and kept practicing,” he said. “I mean, it's awesome. It's so invigorating to have guys like that, when they're like, ‘Well, he's good. He's still working. Let's go.’”
The 2023 season, of course, changed quickly after that; both Dobbs and Hall had lost their starting jobs by the end of the year, and the plot twists in the season meant the Udinski story got put on the back burner. But when the Vikings started scouting rookie quarterbacks to replace Cousins this spring, Udinski was right there on the road with O’Connell and quarterbacks coach Josh McCown. That's where Udinski first met McCarthy.
The two clicked quickly, with Udinski giving McCarthy gentle reminders during his pro day to soak up the moment and enjoy his last day with his Michigan teammates. When the Vikings drafted McCarthy, Udinski became his late-night resource for questions about the Vikings’ offense when the quarterback was processing his notes from the day.
“It’s always enjoyable when it's like, he's catching a mistake on something before you do, or he's catching like a little nugget or a little detail on something,” Udinski said. “Or he’s asking those questions, where you know there's something that came up earlier in the day and it was a minute detail on something that was kind of briefly touched upon, and you can tell he's going back through his notes [at night], or just thinking about things and studying things. That did happen quite a bit during training camp. It was probably a nightly occurrence.
“I had to change the settings on my phone at one point to make sure that his calls were coming through [when the phone was] on Do Not Disturb late at night, which is a good problem. I have a problem where I probably go into Do Not Disturb too much on my phone — which I guess is really the impetus of this whole thing.”
Udinski is a good sport about the teasing he receives from other coaches about his worldwide hiking adventures, which went from Colorado in 2022 to the Austrian Alps in 2023 (pictured above) and Scandinavia in 2024. O’Connell said other coaches call Udinski “Chief,” short for “chief of staff,” and that joke has continued even after two promotions. “They kind of mess with him, which is why I’ve tried to change his title as much as possible,” O’Connell said with a laugh. “And when I give him a hard time a lot, it's just about his lifestyle: he's gonna get his workouts and he's gonna get his nature time. I may or may not be able to find him or get a hold of him. But I've learned to cope with that a little bit.”
O’Connell concedes it might not be long before Udinski is no longer “a shout away” in the Vikings’ building, given how quickly his career could take off. The Vikings have already had some interest from other teams in Udinski, and O’Connell thinks he could be a QB coach, offensive coordinator or even head coach before too long. O’Connell got the Vikings job at age 36 and followed coaches from Sean McVay’s staff who became offensive play-callers or head coaches before their 40th birthdays; O'Connell thought Udinski, now 28, could equal that timeline.
“The starting point with Grant is, he's a good person,” O’Connell said. “He cares about people. He's very, very intelligent, and has an unbelievable love of the game of football and really every aspect of the game. That really equals a toolbox that means the sky's the limit. I joke with him all the time: ‘When you become a head coach one day and you have to deal with all the things that you have to deal with, I just want to be a senior offensive assistant, so I can just sit there and laugh as you just lose your mind not being able to do football all the time.’
“He already handles a lot of responsibilities on our staff. He already is more than equipped to become a quarterback coach and beyond. You always have to be planning for the days where you don't have these guys, because they're too valuable to ask to stay in their role. You’ve got to find ways of making it meaningful for coaches like that moving forward, and we've tried to do that, while also still giving Grant the runway to continue to keep on growing into what's gonna be a really, really special football coach.”
The current Vikings team is filled with players and coaches who have great stories, and there’s an openness in the Kwesi Adofo-Mensah-Kevin O’Connell era that means the people who cover the team every day get the time to tell those stories. The Minnesota Star Tribune has more reporters covering the team than anyone else — we’ll be up to four beat writers next week when Emily Leiker joins our crew — and the unique stories we get to tell, I hope, are a rewarding aspect of our Vikings coverage for our readers.
Whether you follow our Vikings coverage in the daily paper or our website, or you subscribe to this newsletter each week, thank you for your support, and for giving us the resources to tell stories like this one. It’s our pleasure to bring them to you.
