What Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and Kevin O'Connell Have Been Up To Since Joining the Vikings
Kwesi Adofo-Mensah was hired as the new general manager of the Minnesota Vikings on January 26th. Three weeks later, on February 16th, Kevin O'Connell was hired as the team's new head coach.
Less than two weeks after that, Adofo-Mensah and O'Connell got on a plane and flew to Indianapolis for this week's NFL scouting combine, where they'll evaluate and interview draft prospects and chat with decision-makers from other teams across the league.
For both men, O'Connell in particular, it's been an all-out sprint ever since they were introduced to reporters at TCO Performance Center. In a matter of weeks, they've had to dive into learning the roster and getting to know other key people in the organization, building a coaching staff, and preparing for a crucial first offseason in their new roles. Free agency and the start of the new league year are right around the corner and the draft isn't far behind. There's a lot to do.
Thanks to a couple recent interviews, we know a little bit about what the Vikings' new leaders have been up to since they were hired.
A big early task in Adofo-Mensah's first month on the job was going through the coaching search that led to O'Connell being hired, but he's also had a ton of other things to do as a first-time GM.
"Sometimes it feels incredibly quick, and other times it feels like I've been here for months on end," Adofo-Mensah said in a video posted on the team's YouTube channel. "We've been able to accomplish a lot: hiring a coaching staff, getting Kevin in the building, getting up to speed with these scouts. Obviously, it's a compressed timeline, so we're working pretty hard here, but I'm incredibly excited about where it's going and what we've been able to do."
One specific thing Adofo-Mensah mentioned was diving deeper into the roster by learning about young players and guys further down the depth chart, and then evaluating whether or not those players have the potential to work their way into the team's plans in 2022 and beyond.
"When you first go through the interview process, you are kind of looking at some of the bigger decisions, some of the pending free agents or even the quarterback, so you don't really get to dig in to the depth, some of the young guys and things like that," he said. "That's probably my favorite part of the job. My original background was kind of the analytics person, right? So trying to find sleepers and things like that. There's always some part of me that loves seeing that untapped potential.
"You go towards the back of the roster now, as I really have to get familiar with the roster, and you get excited about some of the young guys we have and their potential going forward. Obviously, there's guys who didn't play last year. So when you're trying to put together the vision for the team, you really want to be particular about what guys have a probability, some chance, of making that next jump, and maybe giving them that opportunity to do that and maybe using your assets for a different position."
Adofo-Mensah will be using data and algorithms and resources of that nature as one piece of the puzzle when examining draft prospects in the next two months, but he's also using those methods to evaluate players already on the Vikings' roster.
Four Takeaways From Kwesi Adofo-Mensah's Introductory Press Conference
Looking at raw numbers that show a player's size and athleticism is part of that process. However, as the combine is set to begin, he also notes that everything needs to be weighed appropriately.
"It's a part of it," he said of athletic testing for draft prospects. "But you always want to make sure you weight the information by the amount of it and also the predictiveness of it in the future. If you've got three years of watching this person do the exact thing that they're going to do on Sundays, how much do you want to weight a three-cone drill, you know? There's some evidence from that, but you probably want to [give more weight] to the thing that correlates more to the success of the player. Do you want to relate a third-party testing system or the anecdotal evidence that a coach has told you over the four-year career of that player? You just want to make sure you consider it all and have a system in place to weight it the appropriate way."
Adofo-Mensah also said that his collaboration with O'Connell has gotten off to a great start in things like draft meetings, to the point where everyone else in the room can sense them clicking at a high level.
If it's been a crazy couple months for Adofo-Mensah, it's been even crazier for O'Connell. He had to prepare for multiple head coaching interviews all while helping lead the Rams on a deep playoff run. After unofficially landing the job, he began building his staff while getting ready to coach in a Super Bowl. And now he's been in Minnesota for less than two weeks and is doing everything he can to catch up.
To put it in perspective, O'Connell being hired on February 16th was the latest a head coach has been hired in modern NFL history, thanks to the 18th week that pushed the Super Bowl back this year. He's dealing with an unprecedented timeline.
For at least the first couple weeks of his tenure, O'Connell was staying at the hotel right by TCO Performance Center. He arrives at the facility at 5 a.m. every morning and stays until 9 or 10 p.m., he told SI's Albert Breer in a recent interview.
When he and I talked, he had been on the job a week. With the combine was just days away, he was acutely aware of the time crunch.
“I’ve got to steal time in the mornings, at nights, whatever I can do to make sure that I feel good about where I’m at from a standpoint of our offensive, defensive and special teams systems, while also having a great feel for our roster and how it's all going to come together with free agency and the draft,” he says.
To steal the time he needs to watch tape, he closes his door for the first and last few hours of each day. It’s something he picked up from his old boss, Sean McVay, who has long practiced the art for sectioning off a part of his day to get his personal work done so he could be available to others. “I’ve learned it from him, because I know I was always waiting to come in and start bugging him,” he said. “I learned to kind of give him his time.” O’Connell joked that he is working on teaching his own coaches to do the same.
Finalizing his coaching staff was the first major task. That happened quickly, and O'Connell introduced coordinators Ed Donatell, Wes Phillips, and Matt Daniels to reporters on Thursday the 24th.
After less than two weeks of grinding through tape-watching, roster evaluation, meetings, and so much more, it was off to the combine in Indy. Then it'll be right back to work in Eagan next week.
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"O’Connell and his assistants are deep into work on learning the Vikings’ roster," Breer wrote. "They’ll teach the scouts the new system and work on the free-agent and draft classes from there."
As both Adofo-Mensah and O'Connell have hit the ground running, it has benefited them to be on the same page in how they view team-building. That connection and synergy was something they felt back in the interview process, as the two men who first met while working for the 49ers in 2016 quickly clicked on both a personal and professional level.
They even took a break from the late-night grind last Friday night to attend a Timberwolves game together.
Adofo-Mensah and O'Connell are in the very early stages of not just trying to build a championship-caliber roster, but trying to implement a new culture in an organization that needed change. Their focus is on constant communication and collaboration between everyone in the building so that everyone feels ownership of what they're doing. That's something they're working on now that will take on added importance when players report to TCO for offseason activities in April.
"We're running a race, a long race, and this is just the start of it," Adofo-Mensah said. "Yeah, maybe we started a little bit behind the blocks, but I'm confident in where we're going to end up."
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