On Tuesday, Minnesota Vikings General Manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah spoke at the 2025 NFL Scouting Combine and took questions from the media in attendance. Courtesy of the team, we have both the video of what Adofo-Mensah had to say as well as a full transcript for those of you who would like to either follow along or just read the transcript yourself.
Good afternoon. Always excited to be in Indy here at the combine. Looking forward to – already started interviews – looking forward to do more in the hopes and the search of improving this team for 2025.
Where are you in terms of a possibility of bringing Sam Darnold back either on a franchise tag or on an extension?
Yeah, we’re still in that place where we’re having all these discussions. Every option is afforded to us. When we did the move originally, we wanted to create optionality and part of the optionality was believing and betting in a guy who is young, talented, believing in our infrastructure able to do the things we are able to do with quarterbacks, so right now we’re in a position where we have options and we’ll continue to work those options and figure out the best way for the Vikings to move forward.
One of those options is Daniel Jones? Do you see him as you could get him back as a backup or is he a starter in this league and you expect him to look for a job like that?
We try to not be as binary with the quarterback conversation as others are, where either you’re one of the top three or you’re nobody, and so we kind of talk about it a little differently. But Daniel’s somebody we wanted to bring in for that reason just to learn about him, see what he’d be like in our building, in our culture. He’s a great option for us. Again, he’s like the other options we have, we’ll think about them and go forward.
Talk about [Sam] Darnold, considering how his year went and everything that he did and then how it ended.
Yeah, it’s tough. I was telling my staff if I could’ve thought of a brain teaser of an experiment to think through that would have been a pretty tough one where Pro Bowl quarterback, win all those games and then you lose to two teams twice. So that was really kind of the core of our off-season, really thinking through that holistically. Not trying to be overweighted by those eight quarters, but not underweighting those last two games. And really, he played a lot of good football for us year one in the system so you can expect more later. We’re excited for the potential for Sam whatever that ends up being. It’s a tough exercise but I want to make sure that we’re continuing saying we’re so proud of what he did for us, we’re so proud of this team. It didn’t end the way we wanted it to but a lot of good things happened. We’ve continued to lay the foundation for the team we want to be and we’ll continue to go forward.
How involved is Vikings ownership in the quarterback decision this offseason?
Our owners are great. They allow us to do our job but it’s our job to present to them our logic, always every decision we make, what’s the why. They’re very big process people and they’re running a business so it’s my job to show them our logic and we do that. So they are involved, but they are very good at letting people do their jobs. They ask a lot of good questions, they’re really talented and I try to ask them questions about real estate so maybe I can maybe get on their level one day, but they’re great resources for us.
How much further ahead is J.J. McCarthy than he would’ve been at the start of his rookie year just based on being in the NFL with you that year?
Obviously the injury was unfortunate but just understanding you’re learning a new language. As anybody who’s – and I took Latin in high school so I don’t know if that’s a real language – but you get conversational you’re able to not just go out to dinner but have a conversation with somebody, learn about somebody. So he’s conversational in our language, in our offensive language, understanding the why, the intent behind things. You want to be able to go out there and play free and let his talent take over, so all these steps, all the learning he’s done this past year is going to allow him to be able to do that. We’re excited about the makeup of him, he’s been everything we want him to be, and we’re excited about his future.
Talk about binary discussion in the media when it comes to…
I didn’t say the media I just said binary discussions. I love you guys.
But when you talk about the media and the way they portray athletically forward organizations, it’s like alright you’re talking players who are young, have good size, good program, you guys have bucked that a little bit with some older players, undersized guys. How do you view the way you’ve acquired talent?
I think everything, we try and not be hard set in our rules per se. And I think, obviously, you always want the players who are the most at everything, the youngest, the fastest, the biggest, the smartest, there’s only so many of those players in every draft. So what do you do after that, how do you win on the margins, how do you find value elsewhere? We play a lot of great systems that tax other parts of a player besides pure athleticism, so we try to get value out of that. But look, I think if you look at our draft or even our free agent acquisition, it’s a portfolio. You’re trying to find different bets and different ways and we have a two, three year horizon where we’re trying to do those things and ultimately you go see where it shakes out, see where you figure out relative to your benchmark and you go from there.
When you look at the free agent running back market, it’s been somewhat depressed recently. How much do you think the success of Derrick Henry and Saquon Barkley this year will impact or maybe cause that market to have an uptick?
I think it’s probably accurate to say that, but you also named two unbelievable names that might be getting gold jackets one day when their careers are over. So, I think it’s about the person that is up in the discussion, but that was probably a position that maybe did get to a place where – you know markets aren’t perfectly efficient in a short period of time. I think long-term they typically get to their right water, but that’s a position that, obviously, if you have the front to be able to block for them they can change games and they can really impact not just your offense but your defense, control the clock and different things like that.
There’s a couple running backs that are projected to go in the first round this year, maybe early second. First-round running backs have been controversial but the fact they’re being mocked that high, does that suggest a change in NFL offenses and the appetite for a running back or is this just a really special class?
I can’t speak for the other 31 GM’s that might pull that card. It’s an interesting conversation because a draft pick is about a potential ceiling, ability to play at a certain level while you have those years under contract below free agency market level, you’re ability to sustain a second contract, there’s all these questions that come into that answer before you pull the card and I can’t answer for them. I can see why teams are deciding that, hey, can this player help overcome other things because that’s all we’re trying to do. When you bring in players of high assets, you’re trying to overcome other aspects of your team, no matter what position that is. If you have that unique skillset in a player you should go do that and that might be in the first round, that might be in the fifth round. This is a really good class of running backs in the draft so we’ll be excited to get a look at them.
There’s a lot of talk about the trenches for you guys this offseason on both sides. Can you take us through the scouting process maybe and how that works on draft day and who has a say in maybe how that goes in the draft room?
Ultimately at the end of the day we’re trying to be one of those last four teams first and then try to be one of the last teams standing. To play January football there’s a certain way you gotta play. You gotta be able to control the ball on offense and you gotta be able to get after the passer sometimes with just four. So I think these are things we all know and I’ve been on teams that have that, but when you’re going through your process over the years and you’re building two, three-year horizons, you’re always trying to make sure that you’re adjusting all your needs at once. And I think this is probably one where we need to get better at, and we will do that from different avenues. But as every decision we make here in this organization as long as I’m here, it will be about collaboration, so I lean on Kevin [O’Connell] a lot. We have a system of how we talk about players, how we evaluate players. As a group, we’ve kind of gotten better at our collective system, right, we’ve got a collective memory together, ‘Hey, we passed on this guy,’ all those things. So, we’ve gotten better as a group, after three years have actually had the chance to go back and look at the data and how was our board doing, and it’s consistently getting better. So how do you get results? It’s really about execution and finding pathways for people to play and get there and go forward. But we love our process, it’ll always change. You’ll show up next year and I’ll look you in the eye and tell you we’re gonna get better in some way because if you’re not doing that you’re not going to be doing this very long.
With so many different ways to measure speed now, how do you guys look at the 40 and its importance in the scouting process?
It’s a tough one. Coming in as the guy who used to show up with the model number and say, ‘Hey guys this guy is really good,’ having never watched the guy on film, there’s 40 speed, there’s play speed, there’s different components of the 40, is it the 10-yard split, is it the flying 20. Really, when I was first starting out I tried to ask scouts, really just experienced people, ‘Why do you look at it the way you do? Intuitively, what does a 10 mean, a flying 10, a flying 20?’ Just really learned from that. Now we have different measures with player tracking and different things like that, but you always got to make sure not to use a weapon of mass destruction because just because someone’s running at full speed, you gotta make sure the context is right and make sure you’re comparing apples to apples. We do a lot of great work to get it to a place where we feel good about it but it’s not gonna be perfect. So we kind of use those measures against each other and go from there and combine the information with what our scouts see, what our coaches see and then we’ll go from there.
How much of it are you able to get from colleges to measure speed that way?
There’s some great third parties. I’m not going to use this time to endorse them, but some guys that I’ve really known a long time. The information’s gotten really a lot better. You need a good enough sample size so sometimes for the smaller schools you don’t get a lot of snaps, so you really want to see somebody’s full-season work to really trust a number like that, but there’s some great stuff out there and it’ll continue to get better. There’s smart people working at every level trying to find an edge and you want to be aligned with those people.
How do you envision AI taking hold in the scouting community? Good, bad, indifferent?
I’m always optimistic. First and foremost is really narrowing down what does that word mean. Being in that space myself, it’s really just trying to find factors to help you make decisions in the future, right. So now with all these large language models and different things like that there’s ways of taking information and finding insight that I couldn’t have thought of or Kevin [O’Connell] couldn’t have thought of and that’s really encouraging. You want to make sure you check it – it’s kind of like a self-driving car; you want it to drive itself but you want to be able to grab the wheel if something’s off – I think that’s kind of how I think about AI. But I’d be crazy to tell you that it’s not something I’m excited about and looking forward to. I don’t know if you need to be the first team but you don’t want to be the last that incorporates it. We’ve got some really smart people in our football quantitative methods group that are working through that. They show up at my desk and sometimes I miss those Python days that I used to get to do stuff like that but they’re doing some great work for the Vikings and we’re excited to use the information. We use it a fair bit, but it’s really just trying to – a lot of it’s just pairing against other information we have to see what it is. A lot of that stuff you need to get a lot of data, right. You need to get large numbers of years, numbers of interactions, numbers of results to really get good insights, so we’re building towards that. You want to make sure that you don’t use a two-year insight – think about an AI model as a scout. Would you trust the one-year scout or the 10-year scout? So you want to get to a place where maybe it’s the three-year scout but you’re cautious and using intuition to make sure what its saying is right and then by the tenth year maybe you’ve got something really great that you wouldn’t even have known.
Kwesi, last year you had a great offseason, free agency in specific. You have a lot of free agents this year, you have cap space. What lessons do you take that you look at and go, ‘We succeeded through this last year,’ and apply it this year?
I think just being intentional about the planning. Like I said earlier, as a group you build this collective memory, this collective decision-making soul and I think that offseason is gonna serve us well because I remember those conversations with my executive staff and Kevin [O’Connell] who I treat as another member of our staff, and talking about potential options at quarterback and if we do this, what are the other moves we can make. You go back and look at those meetings and it’s execution after execution so a big part of that is just the collective belief in the group that we tried something, it worked out great, a lot obviously wasn’t seamless, wasn’t perfect, but we had a great offseason in that regard. It’s really just being creative with our ideas and just continuing to go forward but, yeah, a lot of it’s just about the belief that we built.
Thanks once again to the Vikings’ PR folks for providing not only the video of Kwesi Adofo-Mensah’s press conference, but for putting the transcript together as well.
We’ll have one of these for Kevin O’Connell’s Combine press conference as well. That will come out either later tonight (Wednesday) or early on Thursday morning.
