The actual move wasn't a huge surprise, but the timing of the Minnesota Vikings' firing general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah was. Just the day before, he was in Mobile, Alabama, at the Senior Bowl, looking at, and presumably talking to, incoming draft prospects as a front-facing representative of the organization.
Adofo-Mensah's role in the Vikings' shortcomings is clear, but the subsequent narrative that has come out is patently unfair in the effort to make him the scapegoat. Yes, he had a lot to learn coming from a non-football background as a first-time GM.
He also had the audacity to offend the generally accepted NFL grind by taking a couples weeks of paternity leave during training camp, while working remotely.
But Adofo-Mensah was not making key decisions unilaterally. Any attempt to frame it that way is, at best, incomplete.
Minnesota Vikings reporter makes it clear where Kevin O'Connell sits on blame spectrum
On a recent episode of "The Alec Lewis Show", Alec Lewis of The Athletic did a deep dive into Adofo-Mensah's firing.
The Vikings' selection of J.J. McCarthy with the 10th overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft, after trading up one spot to get him, looks very bad two seasons in. The tentacles of McCarthy's failure are wide-ranging, from his base-level development to struggling with injuries to his own lack of situational awareness at times.
But McCarthy would not have been drafted if the professed "quarterback guru" in the Vikings' organization didn't want him, and Lewis has confirmed that unequivocally.
"The entire 2024 draft process, that led to the picking of JJ McCarthy, was orchestrated, designed, executed with Kevin O’Connell as the primary lead…No one hid behind that. No one overlooked that.
In the context of the QB decisions that were made last spring, in terms of...not re-signing Sam Darnold...the inability to secure Daniel Jones, and going down the road, whether you're talking Joe Flacco, Ryan Tannehill, Aaron Rodgers.
To absolve Kevin O’Connell from any and all influence in how that all played out would not be accurate to the nature of how that specifically played out.”
In typical Vikings' fashion, they were unable to lose enough games in 2023 to put themselves in the conversation to get one of the top quarterback prospects in a deep 2024 draft class at the position.
So getting the pre-draft evaluation of McCarthy right took on greater importance when the board fell in such a way that it was down to him and Bo Nix, who went to the Denver Broncos two picks after McCarthy. That evaluation, of McCarthy and all of the incoming rookie quarterbacks, was O'Connell's realm first and foremost.
O'Connell has a prominent media advocate to keep driving the narrative that he's blameless for McCarthy's shortcomings, and pretty much anything else that went wrong for the Vikings when Adofo-Mensah was the general manager.
But the rest of the world knows better, and O'Connell will no longer be able to avoid his rightful share of the accountability.