O’Connell and Phillips were asked about the run with the Rams that preceded their hires in Minnesota.
“I remember we didn’t get the result we wanted in that last game [of the regular season], and we were able to, in many ways, do what we’re attempting to do this week from a standpoint of acknowledging how it happened, acknowledging how we need to improve,” O’Connell said. “The late-season improvement, sometimes, is just about consistency. It’s about doing some of the things that you think back over the season we did really well, we’ve got to make sure we find a way to do a lot of those things in a single elimination tournament to give yourself the best chance to win a game.
“Then it’s about momentum from there,” O’Connell continued. “In a game, in a quarter, starting the game the way you want to start, responding to adversity, a lot of the things that we’ve had to do all season long, you’re just going to need to extract all that and put it into one game and make sure that your team is ready to go. From there, there’s 1,000 little things that go on in the game. I’ve told you guys before, I can think back to seven to 10 plays throughout the course of that run, where if one of those goes differently, who knows.”