When Fox Sports’ Jay Glazer reported that multiple NFL teams were interested in trading for Minnesota Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell, the legitimacy of the report and Glazer himself faced intense scrutiny.
It’s not that Glazer’s credibility was the issue here, even though some, like Vikings announcer Paul Allen, initially expressed skepticism about the legitimacy of his reporting.
But like any other NFL insider — Ian Rapoport, Tom Pelissero, Adam Schefter and Jonathan Jones, to name a few — he often holds onto some nuggets and waits to break certain pieces of intel as part of the NFL’s Sunday morning pregame show(s).
It gives people an incentive to tune in.
However, this report struck a nerve — not because of Glazer’s reputation but because it raised questions about its timing and origin.
As mentioned above, Allen didn’t hold back. He publicly called out the alleged leaker behind the O’Connell trade rumors, essentially accusing them of disrupting the team on the morning of their pivotal Week 18 matchup for the NFC’s top seed.
That was the most public criticism of the report.
But by Tuesday, the situation took another turn.
O’Connell inked a multi-year extension with Minnesota, firmly committing his future to the franchise and squashing any speculation about a potential trade. The deal ensured he wouldn’t enter the 2025 season as a lame-duck coach.
That saw Ari Meirov of The 33rd Team voice skepticism about Glazer’s initial reporting, saying he had “so many questions” about why the story dropped when it did. While Meirov believed the interest in O’Connell was real, he criticized the leak’s timing, arguing, like Allen, that it created unnecessary distractions for a team with so much at stake.
In response, Glazer stood his ground, clarifying that he was doing what he’s always done — his job.
“Welp, the timing was because that is when our show airs Fox NFL SUNDAY,” he wrote. “Not Wednesday or Thursday. SUNDAY. Every year for probably the last 15 years the same weekend I do my ANNUAL coaching carousel segment and usually drop nuggets that day that aren’t known. I don’t work for Twitter, I work for FOX so I wait til Sunday to drop news. I hold news very often to use on FOX only.”
He also wanted to clarify that the news he reported for Week 18 was, in fact, correct.
“I never reported he’s being traded [because] that’s up to Vikings,” he continued. “Just that he was on several team’s to try to trade for. They did the smart thing by moving quickly to ensure he would happily be the Vikings head coach for years.”
While terms for O’Connell’s contract extension were not immediately available, the Vikings effectively ended one of the weirder sagas of the current coaching carousel. While it was a product of their own creation and only furthered by Glazer’s reporting, it’s not like O’Connell wasn’t entering the final year of his current contract after signing on to be the head coach of the Vikings in 2022.
While Minnesota’s extending its head coach felt inevitable, the stakes without a new deal felt immeasurably high. O’Connell could’ve tested the market and potentially become the highest-paid head coach in NFL history. This came after a 2023 offseason where, according to ESPN, O’Connell was already frustrated with Vikings ownership for not extending him, saddling him with a less-than-ideal quarterback situation with his deal set to expire after 2025.
O’Connell went 14-3 with Sam Darnold, which included a 27-9 Wild Card round loss to the Los Angeles Rams, where he was sacked nine times. Not a great finish to a stellar season, but it ended with O’Connell being the head man of the Vikings for an extended period of time beyond 2025.
And yet, the timing of the report has still left lingering questions.
Glazer, for his part, has no regrets about how he does and did his job.
“Did my job reporting what was going on behind the scenes in some of these searches,” Glazer wrote. “This narrative that I reported it to screw the Vikings when they were going to play the Lions is the dumbest sh*t I’ve ever read… and I’ve read some realllly dumb sh*t over the years.
“Hope this helps.”
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.