You may or may not have heard by now that the Seattle Seahawks will be representing the NFC in Super Bowl LX in a couple of weeks. You also may or may not have heard that the Seattle Seahawks are quarterbacked by Sam Darnold, who was the quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings in 2024 and had a fabulous season in Minnesota after being dismissed as a huge bust at his three previous NFL stops. With Darnold now leading the Seahawks to the Super Bowl, the Vikings’ decision to let him go is now being heralded as the worst decision in the history of ever, because that’s how the internet works. Everything is either the greatest or the worst, with basically zero room for any sort of nuance in between.
Yes, it’s a bit annoying to see for Vikings fans, but the bigger annoyance is for people to be retroactively annoyed and/or angry about it after the Vikings did exactly what they were, by and large, expected to do all along.
When Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and Kevin O’Connell took over the leadership of the Minnesota Vikings ahead of the 2022 season, they had a bit of a mess on their hands. The team was paying good money to Kirk Cousins, a top ten-ish quarterback who had a reputation for coming up small when it counted the most. They had other bad contracts that they were trying to get out from underneath, and not a lot of wiggle room as far as salary cap space. People scoffed when Adofo-Mensah talked of a “competitive rebuild” for a team that had finished 7-9 and 8-9 in the last two seasons of the Mike Zimmer era, given the roster issues that the team had.
And yet, in that first season with Adofo-Mensah in the front office and O’Connell on the sideline, the Vikings put together a 13-4 record and won their first division championship since the 2017 season. The Vikings mounted numerous late-game comebacks, won a bunch of one-score games, and rode a wave of momentum and good vibes into the playoffs. Then, they fell apart against a New York Giants team led by Daniel Jones, thanks to a defensive performance so bad it may have single-handedly earned Jones a $40 million/year contract extension that the Giants almost immediately regretted, and Cousins (in)famously throwing a 3-yard checkdown to T.J. Hockenson on 4th-and-8 on the Vikings’ final drive.
The Vikings fixed the defensive issues in 2023 by firing Ed Donatell and bringing in former Dolphins’ head coach Brian Flores as the defensive coordinator. The Vikings’ offense struggled through the early portion of the season with turnovers and an injury to Justin Jefferson, but the defense kept the team in games, for the most part. Then, the Vikings pulled off an upset against the San Francisco 49ers on a Monday night and appeared to be finally getting things rolling at Lambeau Field the next week against Green Bay. Late in the third quarter in that game in Green Bay, Cousins tore his Achilles tendon and limped off the field, taking the competitive portion of the Vikings’ 2023 season with him. The Vikings managed a couple of wins behind Josh Dobbs, but ultimately couldn’t sustain anything offensively and wound up finishing 7-10.
Cousins signed with the Atlanta Falcons right away in free agency in 2024, and the Vikings found themselves in a situation that we have been told for years is the ideal situation for an NFL team to be in. They finally weren’t paying big money for a quarterback, they were in a position to potentially draft a young quarterback to build around, and they had money to spend in free agency to try to bolster the roster around that young quarterback. That’s exactly what they did, and it’s hard to argue that Adofo-Mensah didn’t positively kill it in free agency that year.
Blake Cashman? Unquestionable hit. Andrew Van Ginkel? Same. Jonathan Greenard? Hit. Aaron Jones? Hit. And, yes, Sam Darnold. Hit. The Darnold signing was dismissed by many, even by a lot of Vikings fans, as an afterthought. After all, he was here to, at most, compete with whoever the Vikings were going to take in the first round of the 2024 NFL Draft and, most likely, wear a baseball cap and carry a clipboard on the sideline.
As we know, the Vikings wound up selecting Michigan quarterback J.J. McCarthy with the 10th overall pick in 2024, the first time in the history of the franchise that they had ever used a top-10 selection on a quarterback. O’Connell and Adofo-Mensah finally had “their guy,” and their success. . .and future employment in Minnesota. . .was going to ride on whether or not McCarthy could be the face of the franchise for the long term.
McCarthy wound up playing in one preseason game in 2024 before suffering a meniscus tear and undergoing surgery that would end his rookie season before it even really got started. Darnold was thrust into the spotlight and, as I’ve already mentioned, played brilliantly for most of the season. There was a rough stretch in the middle of the year, but he turned it around by the end of the season and ultimately had the Vikings in a position to face off against the Detroit Lions for the #1 seed in the NFC playoffs in Week 18 at Ford Field.
This is where things start to get complicated.
Darnold was awful in what was, at the time, the biggest game of his career. He completed less than 50% of his passes. The Vikings made four trips into the red zone, including three times where they got into goal-to-go situations, and scored zero touchdowns. And for as lopsided as the 31-9 final score was on the scoreboard, it was a one-score game going into the fourth quarter. The Minnesota defense held up for as long as they could until they just couldn’t do it anymore, and then the floodgates opened for Detroit to start racking up points.
You can scream about the offensive line. You can scream about Kevin O’Connell’s play-calling. And yes, those are valid concerns. But the Vikings ran the same sort of offensive scheme that got them 14 wins and got them to where they were at that point in the season, and Darnold fell apart. That’s not revisionist history, that’s actual history. That’s what happened.
The next week, the Vikings went to Arizona to face the Los Angeles Rams in the Wild Card round of the playoffs, becoming the first team in NFL history to win 14 games and not host a playoff game (because that’s totally a Vikings thing to do). That game. . .wasn’t close. The Rams won 27-9 as Darnold got sacked nine times, which tied a playoff record. Again, you can blame the offensive line, and you can blame Kevin O’Connell, but there were multiple occasions where Darnold, for whatever reason, was just holding on to the ball forever as the entire Upper Midwest simultaneously yelled “JUST THROW THE EFFING BALL!”
After that, the Vikings had a choice to make. Did they back up the money truck for Darnold, who had just put up a brilliant season but came up small in the biggest possible moments. . .just like we saw with Kirk Cousins during his tenure in Minnesota, the scenario this franchise spent the first two or three years of the Adofo-Mensah/O’Connell era trying to get away from? Or did they do what they were intending to do in 2024: Turn things over to the quarterback on a rookie deal and, once again, try to build things around him?
I’m pretty sure I’ve said this in this space before, because I’m not entirely sure if I missed it or not, but I don’t recall a huge clamoring for bringing Sam Darnold back here for 2025. Not here, not from other Vikings blogs, not from the Really Smart Football People™, and not from social media. Again, the “try to build around a quarterback on a cheap contract” scenario is, apparently, what teams are supposed to try to do in this league, and that’s what the Vikings ultimately decided to do.
Obviously, it didn’t work. . .for 2025. McCarthy had his ups and downs, as you’d (realistically) expect for any young quarterback, he dealt with a number of injuries, some of which were fluky, and the “rebuilt” offensive line that the Vikings envisioned to protect him and the team’s other quarterbacks didn’t even play 100 snaps together over the course of the 2025 season. Of course, a lot of people have already dismissed McCarthy as the worst quarterback ever because, as I mentioned in the opener, that’s just what the internet does. Everything is either the greatest or the worst with no in-between.
For better or for worse, this is the vision that the current leadership of the Vikings had for this team when they took over ahead of the 2022 season. And, for better or for worse, that vision has compiled a record of 43-25 in the four years since that leadership took over in Minnesota. The direction that they’ve taken the franchise in is the direction that a whole lot of folks wanted them to take, Sam Darnold’s results in Seattle be damned, and you’re not stupid for being on board with wanting them to go in this direction. We don’t know what’s going to happen with the Vikings or the front office or O’Connell or McCarthy in 2026, but there is going to be a 2026 NFL season, from my understanding, so we’re all going to get to find out.
Now, if that vision doesn’t do something impressive in 2026, there’s a good chance that someone else will be executing their vision in 2027 and beyond. Then, perhaps, we can start talking about “worst decisions ever.” Right now, though, it seems to be a little excessive.
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