Vikings announce five more coach signings

On Monday, the Minnesota Vikings opted not to take the day off for President’s Day. Instead, they spent the day signing coaches to pretty much complete Kevin O’Connell’s staff on the Vikings’ sidelines.

The Vikings officially announced the signings of five new coaches on Monday. We’ve touched on two of them already in new offensive coordinator Wes Phillips and special teams coordinator Matt Daniels. So, we’ll use this to take a look at the other three coaches that were hired today.

The most familiar name on the list is likely that of Mike Smith, who comes to the team as their new outside linebackers coach. Smith was most recently the outside linebackers coach for the Green Bay Packers, having been there from 2019 until this past season. Prior to that, he was an assistant coach with the Kansas City Chiefs.

The team also brought back Daronte Edwards to be the defensive backs coach. If his name sounds familiar, that’s because he was the team’s defensive backs coach in 2020. He departed from Minnesota this past season to coach the defensive backs at Louisiana State but will be back on the Vikings’ sidelines this coming season.

The other new coach hired is an assistant special teams coordinator, Ben Kotwica. Kotwica was the special teams coordinator for the Atlanta Falcons for the past two seasons, and prior to that spent five seasons as the special teams coordinator in Washington. Now he will serve as Daniels’ assistant with the Vikings.

That pretty much fills out the coaching staff for the purple. You can see the full list of transitions from Mike Zimmer’s staff to Kevin O’Connell’s on our coaching staff tracker, which we’ve been updating for the past couple of weeks.