A spending spree in 2025 free agency raised expectations for the Minnesota Vikings, and a 9-8 record with a five-game winning streak to salvage that above .500 mark last season was not it. Someone was bound to take the fall, and that man was general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah.
Mensah's shortcomings in the draft are well-documented, starting with a first draft class in 2022 that was an epic disaster. Of course, defenders of the now-former general manager might note that a scouting staff put together by his predecessor set that first draft class up to fail from the start.
It's also fair to say Adofo-Mensah didn't make decisions (in the draft or otherwise) unilaterally, without strong input from anyone else around him. He may have lacked ideal capacity as a leader of a front office, or not been an ideal connector of people across departments, but organizational failures are never just on one person.
Minnesota Vikings analyst outlines key points about effort to isolate Kwesi Adofo-Mensah for blame
On a recent episode of SKOR North's "Purple Daily", co-host Judd Zulgad addressed some key things when it comes to the Vikings turning around their recent run of dismal drafts.
"Kwesi's taken so much shrapnel now for everything that went wrong. It's just like, 'We got him out of the building, and now it's all fine!' But my question is, on these four drafts, how much is on Kwesi?
But I also want to know, much broader than, 'Oh, is this on O'Connell as well?' [It's] the entire building, right? Like the personnel staff.
You have to draft better. We could talk about it's a crapshoot, but there's a lot of teams that are really good [at drafting], and you don't need to be the best team. But you can't be at the bottom.
And so my question is, who was Kwesi listening to? And there are people [that we] like there. But I do need to know what role did they play?
What went right? What went wrong?”
Interim general manager Rob Brzezinski's ability to handle the job, should he have the interim tag removed, is not a question. But as Zulgad noted, it's worth wondering if he can "take a step back" and say "these three people didn't do their job, I'm going to have to fire them."
Zulgad then hit the key punch line(s) when it comes to how things may take shape moving forward for the Vikings with Adofo-Mensah gone.
“The internal audit that the team is now basically telling you was, 'All Kwesi. He did everything wrong.'
And so, I guess I refuse to believe that completely.
Was he the right guy for the job? Probably not. But does he take all the blame?
He was deferring to people. He deferred to the wrong people. Who were those people, and should they have jobs?”
Adofo-Mensah was the easy and obvious scapegoat for last season's underachievement, but the subsequent effort to place him alone on that hill of blame is slowly losing its juice.
There are surely people still in the Vikings' building who should also be held accountable for the failures of the last four drafts, etc., and that time of reckoning may be coming.