Vikings GM losing job against backdrop of Sam Darnold’s Super Bowl berth seems directly related — but Kwesi Adofo-Mensah's decision wasn’t that wild

Mere months after the Minnesota Vikings hired Kwesi Adofo-Mensah as general manager and Kevin O’Connell as head coach, I sat down with each during their offseason practices to better understand their philosophy.

I learned about their visions for elevating the talent on their roster and their beliefs about the threshold of talent required to win a championship.

Discussions, particularly with Adofo-Mensah, turned to his philosophy around quarterback.

“I’ll be frank: The one asset where you get nervous about not burning it down is quarterback,” he told me in May 2022, because teams are “more likely to win” the Super Bowl “if you have that quarterback.”

Then he added: “It’s very unlikely to have that quarterback.”

With the Vikings firing Adofo-Mensah on Friday after four seasons and an additional four-week delay, those sentiments are worth revisiting.

Because going forward, NFL decision-makers may reexamine the decision Adofo-Mensah made and pivot in another direction. But a year ago, the Vikings’ GM followed a decision-making path that was common in the NFL: Trying to avoid overpaying a player at a key position if they didn’t believe that player could take them to the Super Bowl.

When the Vikings decided last March not to re-sign quarterback Sam Darnold, they factored in multiple variables.

Sam Darnold shares a moment with former teammate Justin Jefferson after a Seattle victory on Nov. 30, 2025. (Photo by Jane Gershovich/Getty Images)

(Jane Gershovich via Getty Images)

There was, of course, the 2024 10th overall pick J.J. McCarthy in the building expected to fully rehabilitate before the season’s start.

There was also, the Vikings believed, a chance to keep the quarterback whom they’d signed in November when he became available: former New York Giants starter Daniel Jones.

And then there was the philosophy of Adofo-Mensah, who believed in a threshold of championship talent.

“If you don’t have [that threshold],” you don’t win — that’s very binary,” Adofo-Mensah said during the 2022 OTAs sit-down. “The way you can screw up in this job is deceiving yourself that you’re there.”

Adofo-Mensah’s discussion of a talent threshold may have been cast in more quantitative language than that of most NFL decision-makers. But his reasoning and philosophies resembled those which teams had preached for decades.

Realism about a team’s place in the competitive lifecycle is integral, coaches and executives often admit off the record and occasionally on it (see: the Cleveland Browns’ statement this week when hiring head coach Todd Monken). And the most important position, they say often, is that of quarterback.

Adofo-Mensah agreed with that. He believed in maintaining draft picks to increase the chances of finding the next Patrick Mahomes or Tom Brady. And he worried about going all in on a quarterback who had not proven to be that ultimate winner.

So when Darnold had one very good season last year, to follow six NFL seasons with nowhere near that level of success, the Vikings were not ready to ignore their high draft pick.

Adofo-Mensah reflected on that in a Jan. 13 interview with Vikings reporters, discussing how he’d stay up at night wondering about the process. But ultimately, as he said, disappointing results don’t always mean the process was poor.

“It’s easier to go and be revisionist and results-based, but going to really think through what we had at the time, I still understand why we did what we did,” Adofo-Mensah said earlier this month. Jan. 13. “In my conversation with Kevin, just doing the analysis we’ve done, we’ve set a standard here for winning when we’ve gotten a certain level of play in that position, allowing us to be explosive enough on offense to set the table for how we play defense, special teams and things like that.

“So our conversation is about returning the room to a competitive, deep enough standpoint to get that play style, that ability to win games.”

Darnold, whom the New York Jets selected third overall in 2018, posted his by-far career-best year in the process, completing 66.2% of his pass attempts for 4,319 yards, 35 touchdowns and 12 interceptions.

The Vikings won 14 games in that process, but they also lost their regular-season finale and wild-card games. In those two games, Darnold completed 53% of his 81 pass attempts and threw one touchdown to one interception. In the playoff loss to the Los Angeles Rams, he absorbed nine sacks.

So the Vikings decided not to offer the three-year, $100.5 million payday that the Seattle Seahawks did. Seattle gave Darnold $37.5 million guaranteed at signing and $55 million in total guarantees, per Spotrac.

Minnesota also lost Jones when the Indianapolis Colts paid him $13 million with the chance to start. Jones led the Colts to an 8-5 start before tearing his Achilles, completing 68% of his passes for 3,101 yards, 19 touchdowns and eight interceptions.

The Vikings made a key firing right after two men at the position he was most tasked with fixing succeeded elsewhere. That influenced the decision to move on. But this dismissal is not as simple as a one-year quarterback failure. And it’s not as simple as a firing on the basis of Darnold advancing to the Super Bowl.

“It’s not about any one decision or move,” team owner Mark Wilf said Friday after the team announced Adofo-Mensah’s dismissal. “We looked at the decision cumulatively. We just didn’t feel confident going through the entirety of the offseason, an additional draft and free agency with this structure.

“We have an urgency to create a winning football team and establish sustainable success.”

The Seahawks showed this season that a quarterback without All-Pro histories, a track record of playoff wins and a cemented place in the top tier of the position in the league can, indeed, make it to the Super Bowl.

The recipe is leaning not only on the quarterback but also on a strong run game, excellent scheme and top-tier defense. The recipe also included giving a quarterback time to develop: Darnold is succeeding with his fifth team in his seventh NFL season. He’s succeeding in his third year learning the Shanahan-McVay system.

The Vikings can remind themselves that McCarthy is only one year into playing and two into learning the principles.

His story is not yet closed.

And while Adofo-Mensah’s successor, like most NFL general managers, may wonder if they should worry about not burning down the quarterback position, Darnold will be a glaring reminder that players given time and plans given a chance can succeed just as superhuman like Mahomes, who waited behind Alex Smith his rookie year.

“We understand there will be questions on the timing and why now,” Wilf said Friday. “I think you know how we want to operate as owners. We want to avoid knee-jerk reactions, be pragmatic, thoughtful, methodical making these decisions.”

Perhaps the Vikings then will be pragmatic, thoughtful and methodical with their next decision at quarterback.

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