Time had barely expired on the Minnesota Vikings’ crushing playoff loss to the Los Angeles Rams in January when plans were set in motion to prepare them for next season.
Kevin O’Connell’s team had a regular season for the ages in 2024, posting 14 wins that took them to a Week 18 showdown with the Detroit Lions for the NFC North title, a bye in the first round of the playoffs and homefield advantage throughout.
But within eight days the Vikings were beaten 31-9 by the Lions and then dumped out of the playoffs after suffering a bruising 27-9 defeat by the Rams. Another attempt at the franchise’s first-ever Super Bowl win had slipped away.
As the devastated players licked their wounds and regrouped, O’Connell’s staff got to work to get his team ready for the 2025 season – which begins on September 8 against the Chicago Bears.
Tyler Williams, the franchise’s Vice President of Player Health and Performance, has lifted the lid on that offseason regime to Daily Mail. He helped the Rams win the Super Bowl in 2022 and knows how important work done in the summer is to a team trying to win the Lombardi Trophy in February.
‘We usually start planning right after the season ends,’ he explains. ‘As much as that sounds kind of crazy, we do take a couple weeks to reflect, but I think it’s very prudent and a good process to go through an after-action plan.
The Minnesota Vikings have had a grueling summer getting ready for the new NFL season
Tyler Williams, the franchise’s Vice President of Player Health and Performance, has lifted the lid on that offseason regime to Daily Mail
The Vikings will be hoping to go deep into the playoffs after a crushing end to last season
‘Our war room from a health performance standpoint would be all of March. We get all disciplines together and start planning for what new programs we want to implement to provide our players with the best opportunities to be the best version of themselves.
‘The offseason is when you can add some additions to players and have time to actually focus on things from a physical standpoint. Do we want to increase a player’s weight? Do we want to work on their running technique? Do we want to do some corrective movements to help a player move more efficiently?
‘We always start with an assessment when players come in in April. They spend time with our health and performance departments and dietician, who do a fantastic job of putting together some programs to onboard our athletes to get back into football training.
‘That nine-week offseason program is just a progression into building up some strength, speed and power and developing them over a couple of weeks and then integrating back into football and knocking the rust off before they focus on concepts and systems that our coaches want to eventually implement.’
While some teams, like the Kansas City Chiefs and Dallas Cowboys, opt to take their training camps on the road, the Vikings have stayed put in Minnesota. Why wouldn’t they?
The team operates out of their state-of-the-art $90m TCO Performance Center. It has got everything a modern NFL franchise could possibly need: indoor and outdoor fields, hydrotherapy rooms, a huge gym, its own TV studios and even a 7,500-seater stadium.
But while those things help players get physically ready for Week 1 in Chicago, Williams says it’s the people inside the building that help O’Connell’s team develop into winners.
‘The Wilfs (the Vikings’ owners) do a phenomenal job of providing us with the best resources for our players and that really gives us an advantage. But the other side of that coin that they really put first and foremost is the people.
Williams helped the Rams win the Super Bowl in 2022 and wants to do the same in Minnesota
The Vikings operate out of their state-of-the-art $90m TCO Performance Center in Eagan
‘Even though we have this amazing facility, it’s the people that make it. It’s the people who are our competitive advantage to be honest. We really believe in people first and how those people relate and communicate strategies to our players and build those relationships, that’s what’s important. We really believe in character over credentials.’
Preparations for the new season really ramped up for Vikings players on July 20 when rookies and quarterbacks returned for training camp. The rest of the roster arrived for duty on July 22.
It is the most grueling time of the year for NFL players as the building blocks are slowly put in place for the 17-game season that begins in early September and runs until January.
Most will have images of players endlessly running or lifting weights, but Williams says the toughest part of training camp is the work on the field.
He explains: ‘The hardest work in training camp is really what the coaches put them through on the field. If you think about it in a game the offense is on the field against the opponent’s defense and then our defense is on the field against their offense. There are times where our players are working and there are times where they’re resting in practice.
‘But sometimes we practice at a harder rate than we play in games, even though we’re not tackling fully to the ground in practice. Some of the hardest drills we put them through is where there is minimal rest with a lot of repeated decelerations. And by deceleration I mean hard stops, changing directions, reactive training.
‘Those are the hardest things to put an athlete through, as opposed to just running sprints. If you run sprints across the field you know where you’re going but if you must react and continually go with minimal rest, that can be very taxing on the body.
‘I think you have players struggling every single year, and that’s a constant uphill battle. We try to find ways to be as effective and efficient within the concepts and strategies that we implement from the health and performance team to make sure that we’re accurately assessing players in training camp.
Star Vikings receiver Justin Jefferson has been dealing with hamstring issues in training camp
The hardest work in training camp is what Vikings coaches put players through on the field
‘We’re trying to understand how they’re responding from the training, and I can remember multiple times every single year where a guy’s like, “Man, my lower body feels heavy. I’m wrecked, I’m sore. It’s going to be hard to get out there and then go perform again.”
‘Then there are times where we might pull back some of their field work training. There are times where we must push through the soreness to get them prepared for the week in and week out nature of in-season football.
‘But, yeah, there are a lot of different times where you’re finding every strategy possible, whether it’s nutrition, recovery, medical, in the weight room to make sure that that we’re mitigating them feeling that way before it happens.
‘There is only so much the body can take before it crosses over and then there’s an injury, right? So, we’re trying to mitigate the risk as much as we can, and it’s an everyday constant puzzle to try to solve.’
A big talking point around the Vikings going into the new season is quarterback JJ McCarthy. The No. 10 overall in last year’s draft was sidelined for the whole of last season after tearing his right meniscus.
He’s healthy again now but the pressure has really ramped up in Minnesota because last year’s replacement, Sam Darnold, was impressive when leading the Vikings to a 14-3 season in 2024.
Darnold has since joined the Seattle Seahawks and the Vikings have made it clear that McCarthy is their man. He is yet to play a snap in the NFL but Williams has been impressed with how the 22-year-old battled back from injury.
‘JJ was a full participant in the offseason program and we look forward to seeing him attack the training camp,’ he said.
J.J. McCarthy has battled back from knee surgery and will be the Vikings starter this season
The Vikings have been gearing their preparations towards the Week 1 game against the Bears
‘He went through the full rehab process and attacked it every single day with as much energy and passion as you can imagine. It was impressive to watch him just grind through that.
‘No matter who it is or what injury it is, it’s really fascinating to watch professional athlete go through the rigors of that because what they’re used to doing at a high level and what they love has been taken away.
‘During the rehab process an athlete gets stripped down, their weight drops because they’re not working out as hard and then they have to build themselves back up. That is really one of the joys of what we do: watching them get back to doing what they love most.’
As well as the brutal work in practice, Vikings training camp this year also included three pre-season games against the Houston Texans, New England Patriots and Tennessee Titans.
The Titans game was two weeks before Minnesota’s opening game against the Bears, which takes place under the bright lights of Soldier Field and in front of ESPN’s cameras for the first Monday Night Football of the new season.
With the bulk of training camp done by the time they played in Nashville, what is happening in these final few weeks as anticipation builds for the new season?
‘It’s different since you used to have four preseason games, and it was kind of that last week and then you started week one. It was a natural flow,’ Williams explains.
‘Now it’s a unique opportunity to let some of the players recover from the stresses of training camp to get ready for that week one game but also making sure that we’re really practicing and preparing them.
The Vikings played three preseason games this summer, winning just one against the Texans
‘The roster gets cut down to see who’s on the 2025 Vikings, you go from 90 players down to 53 and all of a sudden that’s a change of how you manage that practice with that roster size.
‘So it gives us a good transition week to know who are we going into the season with, and how are we going to manage their workloads and push them to be ready for this season?’
The pain of last season, which promised so much but ended so cruelly, will have lingered in the Vikings locker room all summer.
Now the majority of their preparation for the new season is done and, thanks to Williams and his staff, the Vikings are ready to chase that elusive Lombardi Trophy once again.
