During his pre-draft press conference on Tuesday, Minnesota Vikings general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah had some interesting comments about late-round picks.
During the NFL Draft in each of the last three years, the Minnesota Vikings have made a combined total of eight selections in the seventh and final round. Trading back to acquire more picks in the sixth or seventh round became a staple of the approach former Vikings general manager Rick Spielman used to take in the draft each year.
This year, however, Spielman is no longer Minnesota’s general manager, and instead, it will be Kwesi Adofo-Mensah calling the shots. Given that this will be Adofo-Mensah’s first time as a general manager during an NFL Draft, everyone will be watching to see what he does.
On Tuesday, Minnesota‘s new general manager took some time to answer questions from the local media. Some of Adofo-Mensah’s comments were pretty basic, however, one of his responses featured some words about the value of late-round draft picks.
Did Kwesi Adofo-Mensah take a shot at former Minnrsota Vikings GM Rick Spielman?
During his tenure with the Vikings, Spielman tended to load up on as many picks as possible during the draft each year. When asked about this strategy on Tuesday, Adofo-Mensah had this to say.
"“In the NFL, it’s sort of somewhere between the NBA dynamic, where special players do matter. But you’ve got a big team [in football], and you’ve got depth needed and you’ve got things you’ve got to fill out. So I think volume is really important.Now, I would push that, whatever chart anybody’s using, there is no amount of seventh-round picks that would equal the value of a first-round pick. You could do 1,000 seventh-round picks, and that’s not going to equal the value, right? Because there is a specialness that comes with that first-round pick that isn’t replaceable very easily. And so those are things you’ve kind of got to back and forth and think of in your mind.”"
One can decide whether Adofo-Mensah’s comments are a passive-aggressive shot at Spielman, but at the very least, we shouldn’t expect Minnesota to be loading up on seventh-round picks as frequently as they have in the past anymore.
At the same time, we really don’t know what to expect when it comes to what the Vikings are going to do in this year’s NFL Draft with Adofo-Mensah now leading the charge.
Will Minnesota be more willing to trade up in the first few rounds to acquire more high-level prospects? Or will the Vikings be fine with trading back to add more picks to their arsenal for the 2023 draft?
We will all have to wait and see what Minnesota and Adofo-Mensah do with their selections this year. It’s certainly shaping up to be one of the most intriguing drafts for the Vikings in recent memory.