If you’ve paid close attention over the past several weeks, you’ve heard the Minnesota Vikings’ top decision-makers emphasize two things above all else as they try to make a major switch from Kirk Cousins to a rookie quarterback that they intend to draft this month.
During the annual NFL meeting last week, coach Kevin O’Connell stated, “We need another team to be complicit.”
General manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah stated, “We have the flexibility to go either way when we enter this draft.”
The middle ground the Vikings are operating in is the hunt for a complicit team willing to help facilitate a trade up in the draft, and the requirement for flexibility to react if they don’t find one.
With the better of their two first-round picks at No. 11 overall, they almost likely can’t draft LSU’s Jayden Daniels, North Carolina’s Drake Maye, Michigan’s J.J. McCarthy, or even USC’s Caleb Williams, no matter how much they might want to.
Furthermore, the league meeting last week helped illustrate the competitiveness they’ll have even in the event that they locate willing trading partners. One coach, Sean Payton of the Denver Broncos, stated last week that he thinks it’s “realistic” to move up from his team’s No. 12 ranking in order to get a replacement for Russell Wilson.
Interviews conducted during the league convention in Orlando, Florida, disclosed that the Vikings are pursuing separate strategies to account for two possible outcomes.
On the one hand, they have established detailed plans to assess the best possibilities through visits and/or private workouts, and they have created the framework for a system aimed at producing a rookie quarterback. Conversely, they’re getting ready to ride with 2024’s offseason free agent addition Sam Darnold before regrouping with a quarterback selected with a later choice or possibly a 2025 class prospect.
Of course, some degree of gamesmanship is present in their remarks. In their situation, no team would openly commit to a single result. But even with the additional draft capital they acquired, including the No. 23 overall pick from the Houston Rockets, the Vikings also understand that they cannot force themselves to select a highly sought quarterback prospect.
“There are numerous possibilities,” Adofo-Mensah stated to the Orlando-based Vikings website. “I appreciate the freedom those two selections offer us. They don’t, in my opinion, force us to use a specific tactic. Since mock draft season has begun, I’m sure many people believe they know more precisely what we’re going to do than the Vikings. However, we’re thrilled about our flexibility and will approach our board in that spirit.”
Adofo-Mensah has laid up a detailed schedule to finish the team’s assessments of the best candidates in the interim, the majority of which will take place in private. He and O’Connell didn’t go to the first pro days of a number of promising possibilities.
Instead, though, they are setting up private training sessions and visits, which may happen on campus, at the prospect’s hometown, or at the team’s Minnesota practice site.
Before joining the NFL coaching ranks in 2015, O’Connell worked as a quarterback draft consultant, so he has a wealth of knowledge with the performative parts of pro days.
“This year, I attended the combine,” O’Connell remarked. “I watched the guys who did throw from the seventh row.” Of course, the video or tape will always be the best indicator of a man’s current state because it shows his development from the start of his college career to the finish.
Pro days, in my opinion, are fantastic for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with the screenplay or what you can truly see if you make the effort to go. However, nothing comes close to actually finishing the entire process during a visit or perhaps their arrival in the Twin Cities.”
According to O’Connell, the purpose of private visits is to “start the process of teaching” and then assess the prompt reaction.
