It's the Nolan Teasley show now

The Vikings new GM spoke for the first time and Mark Wilf clarified the power structure

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EAGAN — If you look at the best organizations in the NFL, it isn’t tough to figure out who is in charge. The Eagles are Howie Roseman’s outfit. The Rams are Les Snead’s “bleep them picks” squad. Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch run the 49ers. Andy Reid and Brett Veach are top dogs in Kansas City.

After Wednesday’s introductory press conference at TCO Performance Center, we know that the Minnesota Vikings are Nolan Teasley’s team.

Owner Mark Wilf was asked who has the final say on the 53-man roster and he responded:

“Nolan is the general manager of the organization. He has final say on the roster of the 53. But in the end, he's going to lean heavily — and he'll say it himself — on our head coach and people like Rob Brzezinski in the building that have deep experience and skill sets that are complementary.”

The power structure and connection between coach and general manager has been a bit of a bugaboo for the Vikings organization in past years. The “Triangle of Authority” was once used in favor of a GM. Mike Zimmer and Rick Spielman spent an entire year not speaking to each other. Kwesi Adofo-Mensah was fired in late January after the owners discovered that the “collaboration” between the GM, front office and coaching staff was dysfunctional.

The message of Wilf directly announcing that Teasley has command of the 53-man roster was that there isn’t going to be anymore questions about who’s responsible for calling the shots.

That makes sense from a structure perspective because somebody has to hold the final gavel. It also makes sense because Teasley is walking into the Vikings’ building with a big giant Super Bowl ring that he played an enormous role in earning under all-time great team builder/evaluator John Schneider.

During Teasley’s time in Seattle, they had stability and patiently constructed the best roster in the NFL over a number of years of drafting effectively. They enhanced their good draft picks with a couple of key trades and signings and built a squad around the vision of their very good coaches.

All of that is what the Vikings are seeking to bring to Minnesota. They desperately need to improve their drafting. They also must avoid repeating history when it comes to overreacting to pop-up seasons.

Giving Teasley the reins to make up for the sins of the past doesn’t mean that he’s going to toss the idea of collaboration into the Mississippi River and cry out, “I am the captain now!”

Instead the collaboration has a “three pillars” structure.

“The way that we look at it is that we're gonna be guided by evaluation, we're gonna be anchored by data, and then the final piece, as we work through our three pillars of acquisition and evaluation, what's really important is the coach's vision for the player,” Teasley said.

So Teasley’s scouting department is going to evaluate the players, then they will cross check with data/analytics/research and then bring players to the coaching staff to determine how players will fit within their systems.

One of the advantages of Teasley being hired in late May versus back in January is that it gives him time to learn more about the coaches’ vision for players that fit them best.

“We’re going to get with the coaching staff, and we’re gonna talk about what their vision is for the systems,” Teasley said. “The players that they need to effectively operate within the scheme. And it’s ongoing because there’s levels of football, but we’re going to get into the weeds and we’re going to start working together immediately, and when we’re talking about acquisitions, we’re going to meet and communicate.”

What about when there are differences of opinion?

“If we have disagreements, we just go back to the beginning, we start over, we work together until we have that consensus,” Teasley said. “If you don't build that at decision making time, then that's part of our process, right? We're not moving forward with that particular acquisition.”

Put another way: We’re going to figure it out together and get on the same page or it isn’t happening.

O’Connell talked about the “consensus building” process being important to him when he was part of the interview process.

He noted one of the questions he asked to Teasley during their conversations was:

“‘Give me an example of when the collaboration helped a disagreement become a great acquisition in the end that everybody was on board with and 100% in alignment with, and he was able to articulate that in a way that I could envision,” O’Connell said.

The structure of decision making and the fact that Teasley is the one to push the button at the end of the day will become very important in the near future.

If we look down the road about nine months, the Vikings will have some pretty serious decisions to be made. There are a number of key players whose contracts are up and the quarterback position is totally uncertain.

Teasley was deliberate about not making any sort of definitive statement about the QB position.

“In terms of managing [the QB position], we're gonna rely on the coaching staff but I think the goal from the outset of the offseason was to build a deep and competitive quarterback room, and I think that was executed,” Teasley said.

O’Connell acknowledged that he and Teasley have already discussed how they view the QB position.

“We absolutely did…we obviously talked about our quarterback room but it's also the philosophical ways of doing it,” O’Connell said. “You think about how they were able to do it in Seattle, in multiple times, multiple ways. They weren't really ever picking in the top five, number one overall.”

That last part is very relevant to Teasley’s position.

The Wilf ownership has always rejected the idea of total rebuilds that include a team going all the way to the bottom of the league and drafting at the top. While Adofo-Mensah’s “competitive rebuild” tagline may have been tossed in his face when things went wrong, it was incredibly accurate for the way the Wilfs want roster overhauls to happen.

Wilf acknowledged that Seattle winning without tanking was part of the decision to hire him.

“That did have a factor in it but that's got to be along with the person, and I think the way Nolan carries himself, his football acumen, his devotion to process, and working with others, I think all of that combines,” Wilf said.

While the Vikings may be entering the season with a team that was built by a different GM under much different circumstances than we expect with Teasley in charge, Wednesday did feel like the beginning of a new era in Minnesota.

Teasley was the only candidate that had no real connection to either O’Connell or the Vikings in the past. Teasley can use all the resources at his disposal, especially Brzezinski, who set him up for flexibility with the cap and draft capital going forward, but he is going to shape where this organization goes in the future.

This team didn’t need to be blown to smithereens, it needed to find someone who could be an edge with their process, evaluation, data usage etc.

The difficult thing about figuring out whether Teasley’s process works or it is that we won’t start seeing it all come together for quite some time. He won’t draft or sign anyone for many months and won’t face any forks in the road until the trade deadline. There’s time to evaluate and plan.

All we can say right now is that the Wilfs’ decision to hire Teasley and give him final say on decisions was the right one. Where it goes from here, it will take a long time to find out.

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