Minnesota Vikings fans want Kwesi Adofo-Mensah to find analytics edges that get them back into contention. The Vikings’ owners want him to collaborate with their front office and coaching staffs. The owners also have their own ideas about the roster. Coaches want him to listen to them. The scouts want him to listen to them. Agents want to get the best of the new guy. Players want to be heard. The salary cap has to be managed, short and long term — and it wasn’t left in very good condition by former GM Rick Spielman. We can only guess at all the other interpersonal dynamics along the way.
Over the first few months of Adofo-Mensah’s tenure, he’s been asked to shape the future of a franchise that has found themselves marred in mediocrity over the past four years since appearing in the NFC Championship game in 2017. He was instantly required to name a head coach and make a myriad of difficult decisions on core veteran players. He did so with many people pushing and pulling in different directions.
While his predecessor was doing a media tour explaining scouting and GM’ing to the world and dropping subtle hints that the recent failures of the Vikings weren’t all his fault, Adofo-Mensah was getting thrown into the deep end of the draft.
“I probably wake up and think of all these scenarios – I plan a lot of stuff out – and then somebody calls you 10 seconds into your pick and you’re like, ‘What?’” Adofo-Mensah said following the draft.
“I’m not so arrogant to think that I don’t have things to learn,” he added.
One thing we learned following the draft is that there are some folks around the league who aren’t charmed by Adofo-Mensah. This week, in quotes published in The Athletic from unnamed executives, it was clear that the old boys club of GMs didn’t think Adofo-Mensah won his first trade.
“You set a precedent for future trades,” an executive told writer Mike Sando about Adofo-Mensah’s trade down with the Detroit Lions. “They already know you are an analytics guy, so you are probably going to want to trade down, and then with your first trade, you go pretty far from the traditional point system, so it sets the tone.”
Should we take the comments of other executives seriously?
One thing we have to consider is that there are execs around the league who weren’t happy that he jumped the line to GM without having taken a more traditional path. The grapes might be sour. But there is a point being made that historically teams have required more return when it comes to trading up from the back half of the first. The Saints gave up a future first to move up 13 spots and select Marcus Davenport in 2018. To jump up to get Patrick Mahomes, the Chiefs handed Buffalo a future first. Justin Fields cost the Bears a future first.
The criticism of Adofo-Mensah’s trade down hasn’t been limited to colleagues cloaked in anonymity. A community of draft grades from top experts gathered by a fella on Twitter named René Bugner (@RNBWCV) ranked the Vikings 20th.
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Analytics charts said Adofo-Mensah did well. Maybe it’s like this: Imagine selling the couch you bought for $150 on Craigslist for $350. You did a good job there, right? Yes but if other people who sold the same couch got $500, selling the couch at a low price might not make sense.
On the other hand, we wanted Adofo-Mensah to not care about the old guard. Follow the numbers, Captain Abacus.
It’s not like he used the picks on running backs and long snappers. The Vikings may have vastly improved their secondary by taking Lewis Cine and Andrew Booth Jr. Defense does not win championships in 2022 but having good pass defense is pretty darn important. Home runs win baseball games, though it’s helpful to have pitchers who strike out home run hitters.
Neither of those points mean Adofo-Mensah won the trade with Detroit nor do they invalidate the sentiment coming from The Masked NFL Executive. But we can safely say that the odds that it works out for either the Lions or Vikings is probably a coin flip. Nobody wanted 50-50 odds out of the new GM, they wanted to smash the league’s face in like it was dealing on the Madden trade block.
There is additional risk that the deal working out for the Lions will be directly harmful within the division. Again, at least it was non-traditional. Saying, paraphrased, “They gotta play us too,” is tempting the sports gods but believing in analytics is to choose numbers over fear of testing fate. That’s what everybody wanted.
Also Adofo-Mensah shouldn’t give a rat’s calculator about bringing down future trade-down prices. It’s probably not true (see: Next year’s good QB class) and it’s not his problem if previous GMs made silly trades like New Orleans’ goofball Davenport move. There are 48 players with more sacks since 2018 than Davenport, if you were wondering.
The criticism has some merits. The move has some merits. Let’s put the trade down under the category of To Be Determined.
As it relates to the rest of the offseason, it’s fair to have wanted more things like the draft day approach. Bold, literally calculated and questioned by NFL’ers who are sitting in shadows with voices altered so they cannot be identified.
Signing veteran defensive players, reworking contracts for expensive veterans and adding almost nobody on offense lacked the spice that the draft gave us. The Vikings sat on the sidelines while other teams went hog wild this offseason. We move on from crazy move to crazy move so quickly that we haven’t even processed that Russell Wilson plays for the Broncos, Tyreek Hill is a Dolphin, Davante Adams somehow plays for the Vegas Raiders who moved from Oakland to freaking Vegas and DeShaun Watson is Cleveland’s quarterback. The team that started Charlie Frye, Brandon Weeden and DeShone Kizer now has DeShaun Watson. Wild times.
With respect to their talent, there’s not much wild about signing Harrison Phillips and Jordan Hicks and two guys to compete at right guard.
The expectation was that the Vikings would go from a hotel painting to a Picasso — something twisted and beautiful if you looked at it the right way. That’s simply not what happened. And that influences how we view the Vikings’ draft.
With trades down and (some) lesser valued positions being picked early, it’s easy to say: What’s different? Nobody thought we’d have to look with a microscope to see changes. “Different in a nuanced way,” doesn’t quite pack the same punch as, say, trading for AJ Brown.
That doesn’t mean Adofo-Mensah got it all right or all wrong in his first offseason. It did, however, unveil how difficult it can be to make everybody happy, especially while being pulled in many different directions at once.
No excuses and no takebacks, though. Being a new GM may be difficult and all the ideas might not come out as ideal in the supercomputer but the decisions will go in the ledger next to Adofo-Mensah’s name. If the choices work out and the Vikings go deep in the postseason, the NFL Exec Behind Door No. 3 won’t have much more to say. If not, there will be plenty of I-told-ya-so’s.
