A common refrain from head coach Kevin O’Connell as he gave the autopsy of this season on Monday was highlighting how small moments make a big difference. He seemed to be driving himself crazy while reflecting on some of the inflection points.

“It’s easy to say when we get into December and we’re playing for a chance to get into the playoffs,” O’Connell said. “We’ve got to understand it might be this play in September, October or November that ultimately determines our ability to have the best path to get in.”

There were a few games on the schedule that the Vikings simply have to live with because they weren’t competitive. The blowout losses to the Los Angeles Chargers, Green Bay Packers, and Seattle Seahawks come to mind. But the Vikings also let a number of opportunities slip through their fingertips, losing a handful of games they could easily have won.

Now, they will be forced to sit at home while their peers get to chase a Super Bowl.

“It’s going to sting,” O’Connell said. “We’ve got to find a way to punch a ticket into the tournament.”

Here’s a ranking of the plays that cost the Vikings a shot at the playoffs:

Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts (1) scrambles out he pocket as Minnesota Vikings linebacker Dallas Turner (15) pursues in the fourth quarter of a NFL game at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis on Sunday, Oct. 19, 2025. The Philadelphia Eagles beat the Minnesota Vikings, 28-22. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

No. 5: The Jalen Hurts escape act (Oct. 19)

After the Vikings kicked a field goal to cut the deficit to 21-19 in a matchup with the Philadelphia Eagles, they immediately put themselves in position to force a punt. If the Vikings got the ball back, they might have been able to take the lead.

Instead, star quarterback Jalen Hurts made a play on third down to move the chains, and the Eagles took complete control.

As the pocket collapsed around him, Hurts escaped pressure, rolled to his right, and fired a dart to star receiver A.J. Brown to move the chains. That scramble kept the drive alive, and Hurts followed it by throwing a 26-yard touchdown pass to Brown that proved to be the difference.

Pittsburgh Steelers defensive tackle Derrick Harmon (99) hits Minnesota Vikings quarterback Carson Wentz (11) during an NFL football game at Croke Park in Dublin, Sunday, Sept. 28, 2025. (Dave Shopland/AP Content Services for the NFL)

No. 4: The Carson Wentz penalty (Sept.  28)

It looked like the Vikings were about to force overtime despite trailing the Pittsburgh Steelers for most of the game. They had cut the deficit to 24-21 and had the ball back in the final minute when quarterback Carson Wentz got whistled for intentional grounding.

The pressure came from edge rusher Nick Herbig, who beat left guard Blake Brandel with a stunt on the interior of the offensive line. After initially managing to escape the sack, Wentz tried to throw the ball away while being brought to the ground.  He was called for intentional grounding and the Vikings turned the ball over on downs a few plays later.

No. 3: The Myles Price fumble (Nov. 9)

After rendering superstar quarterback Lamar Jackson largely ineffective to that point, the Vikings surrendered the lead when the Baltimore Ravens kicked a field goal to make it 12-10 shortly after halftime.

On the next play, rookie receiver Myles Price fumbled on the kickoff return, a turnover from which the Vikings never fully recovered. Though they had struggled to move the ball, the Ravens took advantage of the gift, scoring a touchdown to go up 19-10 in a game they ended up winning rather comfortably.

J.J. McCarthy #9 of the Minnesota Vikings fumbles the ball while being sacked by Zach Harrison #96 of the Atlanta Falcons during the fourth quarter in the game at U.S. Bank Stadium on Sept. 14, 2025 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by David Berding/Getty Images)

 No. 2: The J.J. McCarthy strip sack (Sept. 14)

Never mind that the Vikings looked like a shell of themselves offensively against the Atlanta Falcons. They still trailed only12-6 at the start of the final frame — and had the ball near midfield.

That’s when quarterback J.J. McCarthy got strip sacked by defensive end Zach Harrison. The turnover set up a field goal that put the Falcons up 15-6, and the Vikings never scored another point.

This play finished high on the list because it was the first time McCarthy really showed that he was going to be a work in progress. He completed 11 of 21 passes for 158 yards, no touchdowns and a pair of interceptions.

Chicago Bears wide receiver Devin Duvernay (12) leaves the field after an NFL football game against the Minnesota Vikings, Sunday, Nov. 16, 2025, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)

No. 1: The Devin Duvernay kickoff return (Nov. 16)

A clutch touchdown pass from McCarthy to receiver Jordan Addison put the Vikings up 17-16 on the Chicago Bears in the final minute at U.S. Bank Stadium.

On the next play, receiver Devin Duvernay fielded a kickoff on the left side of the field, immediately sprinted toward to his right, and found a seam for what went down as a 56-yard gain. A few plays later, kicker Cairo Santos knocked in a field goal as time expired, lifting the Bears to a stunning 19-17 win.

This is undoubtedly the play everybody is going to point to when lamenting this season, and rightfully so. As tough as the Vikings made it on themselves at times, they might be in the playoffs had they simply been able to cover this particular kickoff return.

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By AAMER MADHANI

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump hasn’t minced words about the larger message he’s trying to send the world with the U.S. military raid to capture Nicolás Maduro and spirit the deposed Venezuelan leader and his wife to the United States to face federal drug trafficking charges.

“American dominance in the Western Hemisphere,” Trump declared following Maduro’s capture, “will never be questioned again.”

In the days since the audacious raid, Trump and his team have doubled down on the notion that the new focus on American preeminence in the hemisphere is here to stay. He also held up Maduro’s capture to make the case to neighbors to get in line or potentially face consequences.

Trump’s rhetoric harkens back to the muscular talk of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when American presidents deployed the military for territorial and resource conquests, including to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

“There’s been periods, Vietnam and Iraq, which have evoked questions about a return to American imperialism, but the U.S. leaders’ messages in those periods were cloaked in talk of democracy. The way Trump is talking about it is something we haven’t seen in a very long time.” said Edward Frantz, a historian at the University of Indianapolis.

In the aftermath of the operation, Trump’s tough talk has been been directed at titular allies in Greenland — where he renewed calls for the U.S. to take over the Danish territory for national security reasons — and Mexico. Trump says America’s southern neighbor needs to “get their act together” fighting drug cartels.

Trump has also warned that longtime adversary Cuba is “going down” now that Maduro, who has provided deeply discounted oil to the economically isolated government in Havana, has been deposed. And the president has heightened anxiety with Venezuela’s neighbor, telling reporters that a military operation in Colombia — the epicenter of global cocaine production — “sounds good to me.”

The Republican president has also said his administration will “run” Venezuela policy and threatened the country’s new leader, interim President Delcy Rodríguez, with an outcome worse than Maduro’s if she does not “do what’s right.” He’s made plain that he expects Caracas to open its vast oil reserves to U.S. energy companies, further igniting speculation about American overreach.

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure — the oil infrastructure — and start making money for the country,” Trump said over the weekend.

The Venezuela incursion has split Latin America, with Trump‑aligned leaders mostly from the right applauding the ouster, and non‑aligned leaders condemning it on sovereignty grounds. It’s sharpened concerns that Trump might actually be serious about his desire to annex Greenland as well.

Leaning on Monroe Doctrine, Trump puts neighbors on edge

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned Monday that Trump would mark the undoing of the transatlantic military alliance, NATO, if he attempts to follow through on his assertion that the U.S. “absolutely” needs to take over Greenland for national security reasons. The alliance, which includes the U.S. and Denmark, has been a linchpin of post-World War II security.

“If the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops,” Frederiksen told Danish broadcaster TV2.

In the early part of the 20th century, American leaders repeatedly turned to the Monroe Doctrine, a foundational U.S. foreign policy document authored by the nation’s fifth president, which had been aimed at opposing European meddling in the Western Hemisphere.

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Now, Trump too is leaning on the doctrine to justify U.S. intervention in Venezuela and threaten action around the hemisphere in the name of protecting the safety and welfare of Americans.

“Trump’s rhetoric conjures up images of Teddy Roosevelt and gunboat diplomacy. The rhetoric is a return to a pre-Great War era,” Frantz said, referring to the 26th president’s intercessions in unstable Caribbean and Central American economies as well as his backing of Panama’s secession from Colombia in the name of the U.S. national interest.

Just weeks before the ouster of Maduro, Trump rolled out a long-awaited National Security Strategy that had some disparate elements that seemed to be at odds with each other.

On one hand, Trump, who has long eschewed America’s role in foreign wars, asserted that the administration would have a “predisposition to non-interventionism.” But the strategy document also made clear that the administration would push “to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.”

With the ouster of Maduro, the administration has clearly doubled down on the latter.

“This is the Western Hemisphere,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “This is where we live — and we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors and rivals of the United States.”

Anger at U.N. Security Council

The capture of Maduro and Trump’s rhetoric could certainly be a level-setting moment for global leaders as they consider what may lay ahead in the final three years of Trump’s second term.

At an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting Monday, Colombian Ambassador Leonor Zalabata Torres said the raid in Venezuela was reminiscent of “the worst interference in our area in the past.”

“Democracy cannot be defended or promoted through violence and coercion, and it cannot be superseded, either, by economic interests,” said Zalabata Torres, whose country requested the meeting.

At the same time, Democrats are questioning whether Trump’s actions have created a permission structure for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has designs of capturing further territory from neighboring Ukraine, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has vowed to annex the self-ruled island of Taiwan.

“What the president’s done in this case has essentially given Putin and Xi Jinping a hall pass,” said Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, in an appearance on CNN.

The Russians, for their part, have condemned Trump’s action in Venezuela. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, the country’s U.N. envoy, said the world body “cannot allow the United States to proclaim itself as some kind of a supreme judge” to the world.

AP writers Jennifer Peltz and Farnoush Amiri at the United Nations contributed to this report.

By MEAD GRUVER, Associated Press

FORT COLLINS, Colo. (AP) — Abortion will remain legal in Wyoming after the state Supreme Court struck down laws including the country’s first explicit ban on abortion pills, ruling Tuesday that they violate the state constitution.

The justices sided with the state’s only abortion clinic and others who had sued over the bans passed since 2022, the year that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

Wellspring Health Access in Casper, the abortion access advocacy group Chelsea’s Fund and four women, including two obstetricians, argued that the laws violated a state constitutional amendment. They told the court that competent adults have the right to make their own health care decisions.

Attorneys for the state, however, argued that abortion can’t violate the Wyoming constitution because it is not health care.

One law sought to ban abortion except to protect a pregnant woman’s life or in cases involving rape or incest. The other law would have made Wyoming the only state to explicitly ban abortion pills, though other states have instituted de facto bans on abortion medication by broadly prohibiting abortion.

Abortion has remained legal in this conservative state since Teton County District Judge Melissa Owens in Jackson blocked the bans while the lawsuit challenging them went ahead. Owens struck down the laws as unconstitutional in November.

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By MATTHEW LEE, AP Diplomatic Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has made broad but vague assertions that the United States is going to “run” Venezuela after the ouster of Nicolás Maduro but has offered almost no details about how it will do so, raising questions among some lawmakers and former officials about the administration’s level of planning for the country after Maduro was gone.

Seemingly contradictory statements from Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have suggested at once that the U.S. now controls the levers of Venezuelan power or that the U.S. has no intention of assuming day-to-day governance and will allow Maduro’s subordinates to remain in leadership positions for now.

Rubio said the U.S. would rely on existing sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector and criminal gangs to wield leverage with Maduro’s successors.

The uncertainty on definitive next steps in Venezuela contrasts with the years of discussions and planning that went into U.S. military interventions that deposed other autocratic leaders, notably in Iraq in 2003, which still did not often lead to the hoped-for outcomes.

‘Disagreement about how to proceed’

The discrepancy between what Trump and Rubio have said publicly has not sat well with some former diplomats.

“It strikes me that we have no idea whatsoever as to what’s next,” said Dan Fried, a retired career diplomat, former assistant secretary of state and sanctions coordinator who served under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

“For good operational reasons, there were very few people who knew about the raid, but Trump’s remarks about running the country and Rubio’s uncomfortable walk back suggests that even within that small group of people, there is disagreement about how to proceed,” said Fried who is now with the Atlantic Council think tank.

Supporters of the operation, meanwhile, believe there is little confusion over the U.S. goal.

“The president speaks in big headlines and euphemisms,” said Rich Goldberg, a sanctions proponent who worked in the National Energy Dominance Council at the White House until last year and is now a senior adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish think tank.

Goldberg does not see Rubio becoming “the superintendent of schools” but “effectively, the U.S. will be calling the shots.”

“There are people at the top who can make what we want happen or not, and we right now control their purse strings and their lives,” he said. “The president thinks it’s enough and the secretary thinks it’s enough, and if it’s not enough, we’ll know very soon and we’ll deal with it.”

If planning for the U.S. “to run” Venezuela existed prior to Maduro’s arrest and extradition to face federal drug charges, it was confined to a small group of Trump political allies, according to current U.S. officials, who note that Trump relies on a very small circle of advisers and has tossed aside much of the traditional decision-making apparatus.

These officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss their understanding of internal deliberations, said they were not aware of any preparations for either a military occupation or an interim civilian governing authority, which has been a priority for previous administrations when they contemplated going to war to oust a specific leader or government. The White House and the State Department’s press office did not return messages seeking comment.

Long discussion among agencies in previous interventions

Previous military actions that deposed autocratic leaders, notably in Panama in 1989 and Iraq in 2003, were preceded by months, if not years, of interagency discussion and debate over how best to deal with power vacuums caused by the ousters of their leaders. The State Department, White House National Security Council, the Pentagon and the intelligence community all participated in that planning.

In Panama, the George H.W. Bush administration had nearly a full year of preparations to launch the invasion that ousted Panama’s leader Manuel Noriega. Panama, however, is exponentially smaller than Venezuela, it had long experience as a de facto American territory, and the U.S. occupation was never intended to retake territory or natural resources.

By contrast, Venezuela is vastly larger in size and population and has a decadeslong history of animosity toward the United States.

“Panama was not successful because it was supported internationally because it wasn’t,” Fried said. “It was a success because it led to a quick, smooth transfer to a democratic government. That would be a success here, but on the first day out, we trashed someone who had those credentials, and that strikes me as daft.”

He was referring to Trump’s apparent dismissal of opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, whose party is widely believed to have won elections in 2024, results that Maduro refused to accept. Trump said Saturday that Machado “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country” to be a credible leader and suggested he would be OK with Maduro’s No. 2, Delcy Rodríguez, remaining in power as long as she works with the U.S.

Hoped-for outcomes didn’t happen in Iraq and Afghanistan

Meanwhile, best-case scenarios like those predicted by the George W. Bush administration for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq that it would be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East and hopes for a democratic and stable Afghanistan following the ouster of the Taliban died painfully slow deaths at the tremendous expense of American money and lives after initial euphoria over military victories.

“Venezuela looks nothing like Libya, it looks nothing like Iraq, it looks nothing like Afghanistan. It looks nothing like the Middle East,” Rubio said this weekend of Venezuela and its neighbors. “These are Western countries with long traditions at a people-to-people and cultural level, and ties to the United States, so it’s nothing like that.”

The lack of clarity on Venezuela has been even more pronounced because Trump campaigned on a platform of extricating the U.S. from foreign wars and entanglements, a position backed by his “Make America Great Again” supporters, many of whom are seeking explanations about what the president has in mind for Venezuela.

“Wake up MAGA,” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has bucked much of his party’s lockstep agreement with Trump, posted on X after the operation. “VENEZUELA is not about drugs; it’s about OIL and REGIME CHANGE. This is not what we voted for.”

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Sen. Rand Paul, also a Kentucky Republican, who often criticizes military interventions, said “time will tell if regime change in Venezuela is successful without significant monetary or human cost.”

“Easy enough to argue such policy when the action is short, swift and effective but glaringly less so when that unitary power drains of us trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, such as occurred in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam,” he wrote on social media.

In addition to the Venezuela operation, Trump is preparing to take the helm of an as-yet unformed Board of Peace to run postwar Gaza, involving the United States in yet another Mideast engagement for possibly decades to come.

And yet, as both the Iraq and Afghanistan experiences ultimately proved, no amount of planning guarantees success.