Inside the stunning dismissal of Vikings GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah: ‘This is wild’ – The Athletic
MINNEAPOLIS — On Thursday, Vikings general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah was at the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala., scouting talent and conferring with agents. It was routine — one of the league’s most familiar settings to quietly discuss offseason business. He met up with an agent who represents a contributing player on Minnesota’s roster whose contract future remains uncertain. Adofo-Mensah wanted to gauge the landscape. The conversation ended on a positive note.
Less than 24 hours later, Adofo-Mensah was fired.
Once the initial surprise wore off, the agent’s reaction mirrored that of many Vikings staffers, players and executives around the league.
“I’m not shocked that he was let go,” one team source texted. “I’m just shocked at the timing.”
For weeks, executives and coaches inside the Vikings’ building and throughout the NFL had speculated that Adofo-Mensah’s job could be in jeopardy, even after he received an extension last offseason and even though the Vikings produced a 43-25 record over his four seasons. While Adofo-Mensah had close personal relationships with many players and staffers, questions about his job status persisted for several reasons.
Only four of Adofo-Mensah’s 28 draft picks are surefire starters for the future, a paltry return. The team’s 2025 quarterback plan, following a 14-win season, contributed to a playoffs-less finish at the same time former quarterback Sam Darnold was leading the Seattle Seahawks to the Super Bowl. Adofo-Mensah’s Wall Street-trading background created skepticism among some football people inside and outside the organization that never completely faded. And tension had spilled over between Adofo-Mensah and key members of the coaching staff, who questioned his experience to do the job.
This gnarly bundle of dynamics, in its entirety, contributed to Vikings ownership’s delayed decision. Almost no one expected the move to come now, 26 days after the Vikings finished their season. Not only did the decision torpedo internal expectations, but it also left the Vikings with a seismic shift in power ahead of a massive offseason, with quarterback uncertainty and salary cap trouble, and with the offseason scouting process already underway.
“This is wild,” one team source said. “We all thought the time passed and they decided to keep him. Something changed.”
“We knew there’d be a lot of pressure on (Adofo-Mensah) and rightfully so,” another team source said. “But we thought he’d at least see one more season.”
Three weeks ago, Minnesota’s ownership group began its end-of-season review process that led to this resolution. Typically, co-owners Mark and Zygi Wilf summon the team’s top brass to New Jersey, but this year they handled their initial audit virtually.
The owners’ initial conversations with several members of the organization revealed serious concerns about the organization’s ceiling under Adofo-Mensah given the overall body of work, team sources said. But no changes were announced, leading to a belief among many high-ranking employees that the general manager would be retained.
After discussions over a span of weeks, the ownership group reconvened this week. Those concerns regarding Adofo-Mensah’s leadership and the organization’s direction had become more pronounced with all of the cards on the table, and ultimately, they were impossible to dismiss. The owners decided to make a change.
In the end, the owners felt they needed someone who could lead with more experience and develop an accepted consensus among all of the critical key decision-makers. The tasks included managing an occasionally heavy-handed coaching staff that has had major influence on significant personnel decisions, according to team sources.
“Everyone is accountable here,” Mark Wilf said Friday. “And so, we need to move forward, support the team we have now and make sure we can compete and strive.”
Adofo-Mensah declined to comment to The Athletic on Friday night.
An accounting of the contributing factors to this decision begins with the 2025 quarterback plan. The Vikings declined to re-sign Darnold, who loved Minnesota. Even at the time, many within the organization believed he was an ideal fit for O’Connell’s complex, vertical passing-based system. One league source said he believed there was a time at which Darnold was open to staying in Minnesota for less money, but the organization ultimately weighed Darnold’s value against its investment in J.J. McCarthy, whom the Vikings had selected in the first round of the 2024 draft.
Adofo-Mensah said at the end of this season that “the information we had (on J.J. McCarthy) was all good, but it was admittedly incomplete and a small sample.” The comment, though, is at odds with concerns expressed by team sources about McCarthy’s readiness dating back to last spring. A torn meniscus in his right knee, which McCarthy suffered in August 2024 and forced him to miss his entire rookie season, had been an immense challenge mentally, and many team sources questioned his ability to lead an organization that would have high expectations following a 14-3 season.
The Vikings thought they could hedge their bet on McCarthy’s youth and progress by paying a premium for Daniel Jones, whom they’d strategically signed late in the 2024 season. Instead, Jones signed with the Indianapolis Colts. That created an opportunity to pursue future Hall of Famer Aaron Rodgers on a minimal contract, an idea many executives, coaches and even key players supported.
In the end, the Vikings opted against that route, thinking that they’d be better off assessing McCarthy’s talent early in his rookie contract. The Vikings assessed the potential fit of veterans Joe Flacco and Ryan Tannehill, who wanted a starter-level contract, according to league sources. The Vikings traded for backup Sam Howell, who did not establish trust in training camp, then later settled on Carson Wentz. The ramifications of those choices only added to the building-wide stress of McCarthy’s poor 2025 season.
Even this week, one team source brought up the subject again, saying, “I would still like to know who made that final decision (not to sign Rodgers). I still don’t know. What I do know is it affected a lot of livelihoods.”
From the time he arrived in 2022, Adofo-Mensah faced an uphill battle to build trust among his new staff. Not only did the Vikings keep a majority of the personnel who had worked for former general manager Rick Spielman, but Adofo-Mensah’s experience, mindset and work habits also differed from the NFL norm.
He had traded commodities on Wall Street. He had found his path into the NFL through analytics. Time as an executive with the Cleveland Browns did not school him in the life of the many on-the-road scouts and evaluators that he was now tasked with leading.
Adofo-Mensah’s first draft didn’t help, internally or externally. The Vikings swapped picks with the division-rival Detroit Lions, passing on a chance to take safety Kyle Hamilton and instead drafting Lewis Cine, another safety, late in the first round. Hamilton became a two-time All-Pro. Cine was released after playing 10 games over two seasons. Such draft results added gasoline to the already-burning fire of internal cynicism, even among some of the team’s most analytically inclined thinkers.
Rather than react to the consistently subpar draft results as fans and observers did, Adofo-Mensah often referred to the historical odds of succeeding and failing in the draft.
The next summer offered more evidence that Adofo-Mensah approached the work-life component of the role differently from many of his NFL peers. Following the birth of his first child, the general manager left for paternity leave, missing about two weeks of training camp meetings and practices and working remotely during that stretch. Word of his time away from the team traveled quickly around the league. Among some rival executives and coaches, it was met with disbelief.
In an NFL culture where many players, coaches, and executives proudly acknowledge missing the births of their children, taking time away to care for a newborn and support a partner remains uncommon. (Just this week, new Bills head coach Joe Brady openly shared that he missed the birth of one of his children and found out after a game that the baby had arrived.)
The Vikings were publicly supportive of Adofo-Mensah’s time away. He had made a commitment to his family well before the Vikings hired him. The NFL standard wasn’t going to affect that commitment.
The Vikings went 20-14 over Adofo-Mensah’s first two seasons. The 14-3 record in 2024 — helped by some effective choices in free agency — masked some early signs of disharmony between Adofo-Mensah and key members of the coaching staff, according to multiple team sources. In the NFL, disagreements between the two departments are not uncommon. However, the extent of the division over a span of years regarding trade targets, free-agent rankings and offseason brainstorming sessions chiseled away at attempts to establish a culture of cooperation and mutual respect.
The Vikings’ coaches had intentionally increased their role in scouting college players before the 2023 draft, openly talking about wanting to guard against a duplicate of Adofo-Mensah’s first draft. They showed up in the spring at all-star games en masse. Coaches’ priorities later played a major role in how the Vikings organized their draft board and prioritized which undrafted signings to target, team sources said.
Minnesota Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell and general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah before a preseason game in August 2025. (Bailey Hillesheim / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Personnel staffers often believed certain signings did not fit their direct timeline, but coaches tended to prefer veterans who could make immediate impacts. Team sources posited that they couldn’t always discern whose say weighed more than others, who made the final decision and why, even if Adofo-Mensah contractually oversaw personnel. The conditions were widely known throughout the league, with one prominent agent saying weeks ago, “I’ve seen and heard enough from leadership to question (the dynamics), personally.”
Those unsteady relationships contributed to the sense of unease after the season. But business continued as usual. Two other NFL general managers lost their jobs this season; one on Halloween and the other on the night the regular season ended. Adofo-Mensah, on the other hand, held his typical end-of-season news conference a week after the season ended. Had the Vikings planned to move on from him, most expected that he would have been spared that onslaught of questions.
“It’s weird because people know that change should happen,” a team source said at that time. “And it’s not.”
An impromptu video call Friday morning brought together the Vikings’ top decision-makers, including O’Connell. Some had already gotten texts before the news was formally delivered by ownership. After four seasons, Adofo-Mensah was out.
More conference calls followed. The rest of the football operations department was informed, then the coaches. They found out that Adofo-Mensah, who had returned to Minnesota the previous night from the Senior Bowl, was told that his tenure was over in an in-person meeting with Mark and Zygi Wilf. Executive vice president of football operations Rob Brzezinski would be overseeing the team’s personnel staff on an interim basis.
If Friday’s news proves anything, it’s that the Wilfs’ evaluations can, in fact, shift swiftly when given more information.
Last year, at the NFL league meetings in West Palm Beach, Fla., Mark Wilf said, “We have all the faith in Kwesi.” Not long after, even though many team and league sources hypothesized that the Vikings weren’t satisfied with their structure, Adofo-Mensah received an extension.
What changed in such short order? In the middle of ownership’s assessment of the organization this month, Darnold led the Seahawks to a win in the NFC Championship Game while throwing for 346 yards and three touchdowns, a bitter reminder of what the Vikings could have had. In their final meeting, the owners laid out the full picture — the quarterback decision, the draft history, the challenging internal dynamics — and decided that a change was necessary.
Ownership knew there would be questions about the timing. The focus was on the merits.
“The toughest part of this league is seeing good people fail and bad people succeed,” one league source texted. “Kwesi is a good dude.”
On Friday, Wilf did not rule out Brzezinski emerging as a candidate for the full-time general manager role. Multiple league sources believe he would be deserving of consideration. Another name circulating in conversations with league sources is former Vikings executive and current Broncos general manager George Paton, who still has strong internal relationships.
Paton remains under contract with Denver and is well regarded by both Broncos ownership and head coach Sean Payton.
The Vikings have said they won’t begin their replacement process until after the draft, which kicks off on April 23. But that future GM conversation — and how potential candidates might feel about taking over a team that will have made massive free-agent signings and draft picks without their input — is less pressing than others.
In the ensuing weeks and months, Brzezinski will be the point person in communications with players’ agents on potential negotiations. O’Connell’s priorities will also factor prominently, and his coaching staff’s influence on free-agent signings and draft picks will be judged accordingly. This adds more intrigue to the laundry list of important Vikings decisions yet to be made, which begins with the uncertainty at quarterback.
O’Connell has said that he thinks competition is paramount for McCarthy. Securing a franchise quarterback, whether it’s McCarthy or someone not yet on the roster, will become his and the team’s primary responsibility. All the while, the Vikings will be attempting to cultivate the organizational collaboration they have touted since ownership hired this regime in the first place.
