Matthew Coller: Throw collaboration to the wind, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah
EAGAN — From Day 1 of the Kwesi Adofo-Mensah era in Minnesota, the new Vikings GM and the team’s ownership have preached the idea of collaboration. They want the coaching staff and front office in lockstep. They want everyone using their talents to contribute to the decisions that will shape the future of the franchise.
During Adofo-Mensah’s pre-draft press conference he was asked about how he might put his own personal touch on this year’s draft.
“I hope they don’t say it’s my signature about anything,” Adofo-Mensah said. “It’s our signature…We’re going to do what’s best for this organization. We have a time horizon that we’re planning for and we have our needs in front. We’re just going to try to address them the best we can.”
Aside from the “time horizon” part, which is buzzwordy and nonspecific, all of that makes sense. Creating an improved culture from the toxic one left by Adofo-Mensah’s predecessors is important.
The problem is that everyone within the collaboration has their own agenda. Coaches want players who can contribute right away. Scouts want players with the best traits and top-notch character. Owners want excitement (and apparently to be in the hunt come playoff time). Collaboration can be the evil cousin of conflicting interests.
Adofo-Mensah paints the picture of a joyful front office and coaching staff, playing the song of the day before meetings and everyone putting their egos aside for the greater good. The analytics guys are even high-fiving over their spreadsheets. The utopian TCO Performance Center sounds awesome. If his depicted work environment is actually the case, everyone has to be thrilled to have Adofo-Mensah in charge.
It also can be interpreted as the band of merry football men joyfully coming to agreements on all the different routes that they could take in case of X, Y, Z and X1, Y2 and Z3 scenarios.
“If this guy drops, we go with that guy. Everybody in? Let’s go!”
I mean this is a truly non-snarky way: That’s a good way of going about it.
But sometimes the guy in charge has to call the shots. And if you polled 1,000 Vikings fans on whether they wanted Adofo-Mensah, an analytically-savvy, Wall Street-trained, Princeton man to call the shot or if he wanted to leave it to new coaches and front office people who have largely been here for the whole downfall of the last four years, you might make your bet with Adofo-Mensah.
It’s like, do you want a jury of your peers or the judge? If your case is complicated, maybe you take your chances with the judge.
The draft is complicated. No matter the amount of homework, there’s always surprising opportunities that present themselves. While a deliberate approach can easily be justified in this situation, there’s also a pretty good argument for the new GM to leave his stamp on this draft right away and make an aggressive play toward actually winning something someday.
Not that a cornerback won’t help the Vikings possibly do that. Cornerbacks are good. Nobody is going to be mad about a cornerback. We have all seen the cornerbacks lately. Someday in the future a cornerback could play a key role on a team that competes for a championship. But a cornerback is usually the last piece, not the foundation.
Nobody is screaming from the rooftops that Adofo-Mensah has to take his cellphone in the other room and call in a quarterback or wide receiver as the Vikings’ pick at 12 (or wherever they end up going) but everyone wants to walk away from this weekend feeling like there’s a reason the Vikings changed GMs, aside from vibes.
If that means taking the reins and making an aggressive play to get a star player — maybe that’s trading up, maybe that’s taking receiver Jameson Williams, maybe that’s trading back into the first round for Matt Corral or Sam Howell, maybe that’s something I never thought of because I didn’t go to Princeton. Something to change the narrative that this offseason has been a friendlier version of the same old song.
The NFL doesn’t always favor the bold but it doesn’t often bend toward teams that plod along picking for need, making their linebackers coach happy on draft night. It leans toward a team trading up for Patrick Mahomes or ignoring Josh Allen’s numbers or taking Ja’Marr Chase over an offensive lineman or picking Aaron Donald or Russell Wilson when they were too small or grabbing Mac Jones when his ceiling was supposedly too low or picking Dan Marino when he threw too many interceptions in college or trading your best running back for Minnesota’s whole draft.
Sorry, too soon.
Here’s the point: The last leadership group played it safe, drafted for need, never got criticized after the draft and lost a lot. On Wednesday, former Packers cap guy Andrew Brandt tweeted that his team received Ds and Fs for picking Aaron Rodgers. If draft night calls for Adofo-Mensah to look everybody in the eye and say, “I’m in charge, it’s my call,” then he should.
Ya know why? Because if it fails, nobody is going to care about the “we.” And we better not hear about the “we.” The guy in charge owns the picks. He owns the free agency moves, whether he was told by ownership to make them or not, and he owns the win-loss record. Not the scouts. Not the assistant coaches. Not the analytics guys. The person in charge. And he’s the guy who gets fired if it doesn’t work.
So if collaboration needs to be thrown out the window on Thursday night, fling it.
