What If This Had Been Kwesi Adofo-Mensah’s First Offseason?

It’s easy to forget how well most of the fanbase received Kwesi Adofo-Mensah when the Minnesota Vikings hired him in January 2022. He charmed everyone with his million-dollar smile and Wall Street wit. The former Princeton University basketball walk-on came equipped with a master’s degree from Stanford and front-office experience with the San Francisco 49ers and Cleveland Browns. He satisfied the fans who were concerned about Minnesota’s culture at the end of Rick Spielman and Mike Zimmer’s tenure while also satiating more numbers-focused followers with his analytical background.

He made a home-run hire in Kevin O’Connell. The more reticent Adofo-Mensah could make the charismatic, California-cool O’Connell the face of his new regime while pulling the financial strings in the background. Adofo-Mensah has made it clear that he won’t tank, and O’Connell guided the remnants of Spielman and Zimmer’s regime to a 13-win season. But while many fans fell in love with O’Connell’s illusion of complexity and post-game speeches, some have soured on The Wolf of Chicago Ave.

Adofo-Mensah was critical (and honest) about Kirk Cousins in a USA Today interview and limited his public visibility. He created a lot of dead money to keep the old core together, and they lost in the first round of the playoffs. Now he’s taking on a lot of dead cap to cut fan-favorite players like Adam Thielen, Eric Kendricks, and Dalvin Cook. Furthermore, Za'Darius Smith signed with the Vikings to spite the Green Bay Packers, then left in a huff. Danielle Hunter remains at large.

Still, in some ways, Adofo-Mensah is doing what many fans wanted. He hit the reset button, albeit a year after doling out money to much of the veteran core. But he’s also gambling on Jordan Addison, Marcus Davenport, and Brian Asamoah. Like Bill Belichick, Adofo-Mensah is trying to be a year too early on players rather than a year too late. But he doesn’t have Belichick’s rings or pedigree.

As training camp nears, it’s worth examining what the Vikings have done this off-season and what they still need to do. However, it’s interesting to do so through a separate lens. What if they had retained Spielman and Zimmer last year, and this was Adofo-Mensah’s first season on the job? It’s a little far-fetched. Things had gotten pretty tense under Spielman and Zimmer in 2021. But a common complaint about Adofo-Mensah’s first season is that he ran it back, essentially doing the same thing Spielman would have done with the roster. Then a year later, he removed half of the team captains, clearing cap space while seemingly trying to win 10 or so games and take the NFC North again.

If you’re firmly in the camp that the Vikings should have tanked last year, then you probably think Adofo-Mensah didn’t do enough to destabilize Minnesota’s core. Conversely, if you’re highly attached to the remnants of Spielman and Zimmer’s core, there’s little outside of another 13-plus win season and a playoff run that will get you to buy into Adofo-Mensah’s vision.

But if you land somewhere in between, it probably matters that the front office went Wile E. Coyote on the core in the second season. They gave the previous group a chance to go as far as they could, the old group lost as an underdog to Daniel Jones and the New York Giants, and management pressed down on the TNT trigger. Even if the Vikings had gotten past the Giants, they wouldn’t beat the San Francisco 49ers and Philadelphia Eagles on the road. The old group wasn’t good enough to win it all.

Ask any player, and they’ll tell you that the most challenging part of tanking is that teams have to do it in front of 60,000 fans every week. That’s half the truth. The other half is that there’s a 100% injury rate in the NFL, careers are short, and it’s hard to put your body on the line for a tanking team. That’s why Adofo-Mensah says it’s unconscionable to tank in professional football. NFL franchises can’t tank and build a winning culture. They have to find a way to create a championship standard, as Adofo-Mensah and O’Connell call it, without completely bottoming out. The logic checks out. Not only do losing teams promote a losing culture, but not every quarterback taken among the first few picks pans out. When they don’t, the team has to tank again. Unsurprisingly, losing teams often get caught in a vicious cycle of losing.

Tanking harms players in almost every sport, but it’s different in basketball. It’s hard to compare football to baseball and hockey. MLB prospects go through multiple minor-league levels to get to the majors. The NHL draft is incredibly high-variance because teams are selecting players from all over the world. Few, if any, play in the league right away. But great college football players can make an immediate impact in the NFL, just like great college basketball players in the NBA.

The issue is that locker rooms can splinter quickly, given that football teams invest heavily in a few stars, the average career is three years, and it sucks to lose in front of a packed stadium. Tanking NBA teams play in front of half-empty arenas, and they can trade their best players to contenders at the deadlines. That’s not how the NFL works. Think of how bad things got under Spielman and Zimmer, and remember that those were .500 teams. It’s that much worse when a football team only wins three games.

Adofo-Mensah and O’Connell set the culture in Year 1. They want players to want to play in Minnesota. The organization will take care of them with cutting-edge medical care, provide them with a state-of-the-art weight room and nutritious food, and take care of their friends and families at games. Above all else, the Vikings are committed to winning, from the ownership on down. In Year 2, they’re going to clean up the books and turn the roster over to younger players, all while trying to defend their NFC North title. Year 3? We’ll see. But setting the culture was a big part of what they were trying to accomplish last year. Players like Thielen, Kendricks, and Cook had to be there to do that. But next year, the front office is asking the next generation of players to pick up where they left off.