INDIANAPOLIS — The lifeblood of the NFL Combine is conversation. So much information gets exchanged during the annual trip to Indianapolis, whether it be near the Starbucks inside the JW Marriott, on the 15-minue walk to the Indiana Convention Center, or at any of the various steakhouses around downtown.

The major talking point for the Vikings was the future of Kirk Cousins. Will he re-sign? Will he test the market? It feels like the NFL as a whole is waiting for that domino to fall before anything else happens.

It wasn’t the only thing the Vikings talked about, however, with many other topics being brought up throughout the process. Here are some leftover Vikings notes from the NFL Combine in Indianapolis:

Was it a surprise that Brian Flores did not get a look?

The fact that defensive coordinator Brian Flores will be back on the coaching staff is something head coach Kevin O’Connell doesn’t take lightly.

That said, O’Connell admitted he was surprised Flores did not get any interview requests last month with so many head coaching vacancies across the league.

“I thought maybe there would be some slips turned in,” O’Connell said. “Never came to fruition.”

Not that Flores was necessarily looking to leave.

“I know he loves being in Minnesota,” O’Connell said. “It was not something he was actively pursuing.”

Maybe the biggest thing O’Connell is looking forward to is that Flores will get to help make decisions regarding personnel on defense.

“Just continuing to have his imprint on the defense is critical,” O’Connell said. “I would be shocked if next year he’s not a significant target for a lot of teams.”

How did the Josh McCown deal come together?

The addition of new quarterbacks coach Josh McCown this week seemingly came out of nowhere. In reality, O’Connell has been keeping tabs on McCown, hoping he’d get a chance to work with him at some point.

“He’s really somebody that I’ve always thought really highly of,” O’Connell said. “There was a process that took place and conversations making sure it was the right fit.”

As a longtime NFL journeyman himself, McCown will bring a wealth of knowledge to the position group. He can speak authoritatively about his experience in the NFL as a way to connect with whoever is under center for the Vikings moving forward. That is invaluable.

“He’s phenomenal,” O’Connell said. “I see him having a wildly bright future in the league.”

As for former quarterback coach Chris O’Hara, he will remain with the Vikings as a pass game specialist.

“We wanted to make sure that his role could be clearly defined where he’s really assisting in the game plan side of things,” O’Connell said. “I really wanted to use this opportunity to really continue growing Chris in the phase that I think he’s going to be best at moving forward.”

McCown will lead the position group along with assistant quarterbacks coach Grant Udinski. Asked about the tandem, O’Connell heaped praise on Udinski, noting that he might get a title change to give a more accurate portrayal of what he does on a weekly basis.

What went wrong with the previous head trainer?

The abrupt departure of former head trainer Uriah Myrie last month raised some questions. What exactly happened?

“There were some things that I felt fell below the line of the standards that we try to set,” O’Connell said. “Sometimes we have to make some decision that on the surface seem difficult because we want to provide people with a chance to improve and do some things to meet those standards. At the same time, that room, that area of our team, it is so vital to provide what we need to provide for our players. I felt like it was the right thing to do.”

More responsibility will fall on executive director of player health and performance Tyler Williams as a result of the decision to part ways with Myrie. Not surprisingly, O’Connell used it as chance to speak highly of Williams, noting that he fully understands everything the Vikings need in the trainer’s room.

“He was brought here for a purpose and a reason,” O’Connell said. “He’s got superpowers.”

Are more joint practices in the works?

Though nothing has been finalized, it sounds like the Vikings will travel for joint practices with the Cleveland Browns this summer.

It would mark the first time since O’Connell has taken over that the Vikings will travel for joint practices. They hosted the Tennessee Titans and Arizona Cardinals last summer.

As much as O’Connell enjoys putting on a show for local fans at TCO Performance Center in Eagan — he hinted that the Vikings might host some joint practices of their own — he sees value in traveling as a team to break up the monotony of training camp.

The most important thing about joint practices, according to O’Connell, is making sure both teams are on the same page. He said he feels extremely comfortable working with Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski, who was a member of the Vikings’ coaching staff in several roles from 2006 to 2019. .

“The dialogue we had about how we would put it together was really exciting,” O’Connell said. “I’m looking forward to that and hopefully it does become final and we get the green light.”

Will the increase in salary cap impact free agency?

A funny exchange happened this week when O’Connell talked about the increase in the salary cap. He joked that he started to celebrate when he learned the salary cap was going up by $30 million.

Unfortunately for O’Connell, general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and executive vice president of football operations Rob Brzezinski quickly burst his bubble. They didn’t just raise the salary cap for the Vikings. They raised it for everybody.

“I go down running down hall, ‘It’s $255 million!’” O’Connell said with a laugh. “They’re like, ‘Yeah everybody’s got that.’ I’m like, ‘Dammit.’”

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As a father of two, Gerard Gousman enjoyed his career as a tour manager, working for artists including DMX, Salt-N-Pepa and Cat Power.

But the job required him to travel about six months out of the year. So when his wife, Quaneisha Gousman, became pregnant in 2018, he crunched some numbers. Gousman, now 45, quit his job to stay home to care for the children while his wife, who has a doctorate in industrial and systems engineering, continued working in user experience research in Seattle, where the family lives. Becoming a stay-at-home father, he said, “was an easy decision once we realized it was viable.”

Gousman, who has since joined the board of the National At-Home Dad Network, said the move has allowed him to take an active role in his children’s education and “build the community that I want for my family.”

The percentage of stay-at-home parents who are fathers has risen dramatically over the past three decades. Pew Research Center, using the Census Bureau’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement, published a report over the summer showing that almost 1 in 5 American parents who do not work for pay are fathers. From 1989 to 2021 (the latest Pew data), that represented a 63.6% increase — the result of both rapid growth in the share of fathers who do not work for pay and a slight decrease in the share of mothers who do not work for pay. (The share of women working is currently at an all-time high, driven by mothers of children under 5, who have generally been likeliest to stay home.)

The continued rise may be partly attributable to the pandemic and its associated recession, when some men lost their jobs and liked being at home; or to the recession of 2008; the high cost of child care; and higher rates of women working in jobs that require graduate degrees than men, creating more job stability for the former.

Gerard Gousman with his sons in Seattle, on Friday, Jan. 5, 2024. Gousman said becoming a stay-at-home dad allowed him to take an active role in his children’s education and “build the community that I want for my family.” (Jovelle Tamayo/The New York Times)

For many families, a stay-at-home parent is not an option — they need two incomes to make ends meet. Others decide it’s economically beneficial for one parent to stay home — employers pay disproportionately more to workers who can be on-call at work, meaning another parent has to be on-call at home, and child care can cost more than a parent’s take-home pay.

Stephanie Coontz, a historian and author of the forthcoming “For Better and Worse: The Problematic Past and Uncertain Future of Marriage,” said shared labor is not necessarily a new development. Before the 20th century, couples were partners in work like “setting up a farm or small business,” she said. In colonial households, women were often referred to as “deputy husbands,” she said, because if the husband had to leave (to fight, for instance), it was up to the wife to keep the business running.

But in the 20th century and early aughts, being a stay-at-home father came with stigma. In fact, the notion of a father as primary caretaker was considered so absurd that it produced comedies like “Mr. Mom” (1983), “Daddy Day Care” (2003) and “Cheaper By the Dozen” (2003), to name a few.

Today, the stigma is lessening for some — as one bellwether, dad humor is all over social media — as more men become stay-at-home dads by choice.

The pendulum has seemingly swung so much that there is now comedy about working mothers’ resentment. In her 2022 special “Don Wong,” comedian and actress Ali Wong pokes fun at the people who asked whether her then-husband, Justin Hakuta, was uncomfortable with her raunchy jokes.

“My husband is at home. In the house that I bought. Telling time, on the Rolex I got him for Father’s Day,” she said, adding that he doesn’t care “what I say onstage, because he’s too busy living the life I wanted for myself.”

The couple split in 2022, but she thanked him in her acceptance speech at the 2024 Golden Globes: “It’s because of you that I’m able to be a working mother.”

‘I Felt Very Much Like a Misfit’

Hector Jaeger, who ran a small business and worked in carpentry, became a full-time stay-at-home father in 1990, when his second of three daughters was born. Education factored into the decision: Jaeger has a high school diploma, while his wife, Nancy Jaeger, who runs a psychotherapy practice, has a master’s degree.

Jaeger, who lives in Bath, Maine, said the stigma of being a stay-at-home father in the 1990s was isolating: When people asked him what he did for work, he said his answer was usually a conversation ender. “People didn’t know what to do with that.”

“I felt very much like a misfit,” he added.

“It was very lonely for him,” Nancy Jaeger said. “That would be a regret I had for him,” adding that still the roles made sense because her husband is “a natural nurturer.”

Gerard Gousman with his youngest son, Nathaniel, at his home in Seattle, on Friday, Jan. 5, 2024. With more men choosing to stay at home with their kids, the stigma – and the notion that they’re just filling in for mom – could finally be fading. (Jovelle Tamayo/The New York Times)

Some fathers were able to find community with other stay-at-home dads. Larry Lewis, who played professional baseball and worked for a metal-stamping company before becoming a stay-at-home father in 2003, would often take his daughter, Marianna, to meet up with a group of three other stay-at-home dads — whose wives worked at the same insurance company as his — and their children at a park near their home in East Dundee, Illinois.

Nedra Glover Tawwab, a social worker and author of “Set Boundaries, Find Peace,” said that at her practice in Charlotte, North Carolina, women with husbands who stay home often face stigma too. Referring to domestic work, she said that women often receive critiques along the lines of: “Even though you’re working, you should be doing all of these other things, because you’re a woman, you’re a mother.”

She said that her clients often find that talking about their arrangement with people outside the house “is not very safe” because so many people are “making judgments about your situation.”

Some stay-at-home parents have, of course, made a lucrative business of it. Bryan Lambillotte, 38, of San Diego, California, always wanted to be a stay-at-home father. In March 2022, he and his husband, Christopher, who is the chief operating officer and co-owner of a medical device company, welcomed twins — a son and a daughter.

In 2021, the couple decided that Lambillotte, who had lost his job as a sales manager at the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego during the pandemic, would be the primary caregiver. That year Lambillotte began chronicling the couple’s path to parenthood on Instagram. (The couple also has a TikTok account with over 1 million followers.)

The couple’s following grew, and Lambillotte turned it into an LLC and hired an agent and manager who help facilitate brand collaborations. The couple hired a nanny for three days a week, so Lambillotte could focus on his business part-time.

As a result, he has tweaked his title: “stay-at-home working dad.”

‘Just the Joy’

While Jaeger said he never regretted his decision to stay home with his daughters in the ’90s and ’00s, he sometimes worried he wasn’t enough for them. “I’d wonder, did they think I was not quite measuring up to these money and power-type males?”

But Jaeger, who is now 73, said that his wife’s work set a positive example. “The fact that she was the primary breadwinner undoubtedly has had a huge impact on our children,” he said.

The couple’s youngest daughter, Anna Jaeger, 30, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said, “I didn’t know any different and I didn’t wish anything was different.” She praised how involved he was at her school. “The playground is actually called Hectorville” because he built it.

Today Jaeger, who faced so much isolation 30 years ago, is feeling much more relaxed in his current role: stay-at-home grandfather. Three days a week, he takes care of his 2-year-old granddaughter, Pip — the child of his oldest daughter, Gretchen Jaeger, who lives near him in Maine and runs the small business Jaeger ran before becoming a father.

He acknowledged that being a male caretaker for a baby today might feel much easier: “I almost feel like I’m cheating, because it’s so, so much fun.” But, he acknowledged, “I do everything during the day. It’s just the joy,” he said, “without the work.”

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Hall of Fame second baseman Ryne Sandberg announced Monday that he’s battling prostate cancer.

In a post on his Instagram page, the former Chicago Cubs great shared that he learned last week of his metastatic prostate cancer diagnosis, adding that he already has begun treatment.

“We will continue to be positive, strong and fight to beat this,” Sandberg wrote in his post. “Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers during this difficult time for me and my family.”

A bronze statue of Sandberg, 64, will be unveiled in Gallagher Way outside Wrigley Field on June 23, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of his legendary “Sandberg Game” against the St. Louis Cardinals.

The Wrigleyville company Obvious Shirts is planning to create a T-shirt in honor of Sandberg’s cancer fight with 100% of sales donated to a charity of Sandberg’s choice, which is still being finalized.

A winner of nine Gold Glove and seven Silver Slugger awards as well as the 1984 National League MVP award, Sandberg was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005 and had his No. 23 retired by the Cubs the same year.

He spent four seasons (2007-10) managing in the Cubs farm system before departing the organization and joining the Philadelphia Phillies, who drafted him in the 20th round in 1978, to manage their Triple-A affiliate in 2011. After a promotion to the big-league coaching staff in 2012, Sandberg took over as the Phillies interim manager in August 2013 and one month later had the interim title removed.

MIDDLETON, Wis. — New Richmond’s hopes of a second consecutive state hockey title evaporated in two minutes.

Fond du Lac St. Mary’s Springs scored three goals in the decisive span midway through the second period en route to a 6-2 victory over top-ranked New Richmond in the Division 2 title game of the Wisconsin boys state hockey tournament Saturday morning.

“Give St. Mary’s Springs a lot of credit, they played well today,” said New Richmond coach John Larson. “Obviously some momentum changes in the second period … wasn’t one of our days. It just wasn’t clicking. Didn’t get a lot of bounces and just kind of battling back.

Springs snapped a 1-1 tie when the Tigers turned it over on a power play in their own end. Austin Westergaard converted the shorthanded opportunity, punching it in lower left past goalie Ryan McGillis at 8:17.

The Ledgers jumped on another turnover to make it 3-1 when Quinn McLaughlin brought it up the left side on a 2-on-none break and found Gabe Braun wide open out front at 9:53.

Isaac Sabel capped the blitz 31 seconds later with an unassisted goal from the top of the left circle that went in top right.

New Richmond’s hopes of a third-period comeback were dashed when Armani Fisher’s power-play goal put the Ledgers up 5-1 just over three minutes into the period.

“Hockey is momentum swings and we scored so fast, and it’s also tough to come back,” Springs coach Kevin Collien said. “When you get that extra goal, it’s not secured, but you know it’s going to be tough for them to come back.”

Brody Jackson scored for the Tigers with just under three minutes remaining, but Westergaard countered immediately for Springs with an empty-net goal.

Top-seeded New Richmond, ranked No.1 in Division 2 in the state coaches poll, was making its sixth state tournament appearance. The Tigers (17-10-2) won their only title last season with a 5-1 win over Oregon in the final.

The second-seeded Ledgers (20-9) won their third title in five years; they also won in 2020 and 2021 and were runners-up in 2022.

New Richmond outshot Springs 43-26, but Brendan Gaertig turned in 41 saves for the Ledgers. McGillis had 20 saves for New Richmond.

The Ledgers capitalized on an early penalty for a power-play goal in the fourth minute of the opening period. The Tigers failed to clear their own end, setting up Will Stellmacher’s shot from the top of the slot.

The Tigers came away empty midway through the period when Gaertig turned away Catcher Langeness with a spectacular save on a shorthanded breakaway.

New Richmond, which outshot Springs 16-11 in the first period, tied it on a goal by Bjorn Bahneman at 12:12. The Tigers won the faceoff in the left circle, passed to Steven Chapman behind the net, and he found Bahneman wide open in front of the crease.

“Three years ago, we were 10-15, just to scrap and fight in the playoffs,” Larson said. “I think the bar has been raised. Our numbers have been continuing to grow in our program, obviously a lot of excitement and things about New Richmond hockey.

“I think you look at the last two years at what we’ve built and the hard work from the kids and the entire community, it’s certainly special.”

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