Vikings officially hire Kwesi Adofo-Mensah as new General Manager

The deal is done

The news broke yesterday that the Minnesota Vikings were going to be making a hire for the General Manager spot that’s been open for a few weeks now, and today it became official.

Per numerous sources, the Vikings have officially hired Cleveland Browns’ Vice President of Football Operations Kwesi Adofo-Mensah to run the football operations for the team.

The deal is reported to be a four-year, $12 million deal.

We’ve already detailed Adofo-Mensah’s non-conventional route to his new position, having gotten his start on Wall Street before getting into football with the San Francisco 49ers front office. He was with the Niners from 2013 to 2019 before moving on the Cleveland, where he was considered the right-hand man to current Browns’ GM Andrew Berry.

Adofo-Mensah will bring a radically different approach to the Vikings’ front office, as he is said to be heavily into analytics. It will be interesting to see how this changes the approach to the draft that we saw the Vikings take for much of the Rick Spielman era.

With Adofo-Mensah officially in the fold, the focus will now shift to the Vikings’ head coaching search, and Adofo-Mensah will play a significant role in that as well (obviously). The word was going around social media recently that the interviews that the Vikings were conducting with coaching candidates prior to hiring a GM were based around coaches that the potential GM candidates would have wanted.

If that’s the case, it’s tough not to see San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator DeMeco Ryans as the leader in the clubhouse for the job as things stand right now. Obviously there could be other candidates that get interviews and there might be a bit of a wait for Ryans. . .after all, he’s got an NFC Championship Game this weekend (and, potentially, a Super Bowl) to prep for. But I’m sure that the search for a new head coach will be finished here in the very near future as well, and if Ryans is the guy, he’ll be worth waiting for.

Congratulations to Kwesi Adofo-Mensah on being hired as the new General Manager of the Minnesota Vikings!