Vikings didn't panic and it paid off in franchise QB, elite pass rush talent

Vikings GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah chose not to trade up and still landed a perfect-fit QB and top pass rusher

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By Matthew Coller

As the hours ticked down to the start of the NFL Draft, the New England Patriots were still telling insiders that they would be willing to trade the No. 3 overall pick if they received the right offer. What became more clear as the festivities started was the “right offer” was going to take nothing short of Mark Wilf signing over the rights to US Bank Stadium to Robert Kraft in order to pry Drake Maye out of the Patriots’ hands.

So the top three quarterbacks went off the board without any shuffling of the draft order. Did the Vikings not offer enough? Unlikely. The more plausible explanation for why Maye became a Patriot was that he was always going to become a Patriot and the NFL would prefer that teams not spill the beans publicly so they can have their Christmas morning effect on their massive TV audience.

Alright, the Vikings never had a shot at Maye. Fans should have been prepared for that. They have to trade up, right? That’s what every mock draft told us for months. If they wanted to get the fourth QB off the board, they were going to have to spend No. 11, 23 and probably a 2025 first-round pick in order to land JJ McCarthy.

But then ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that Arizona was going to stay at No. 4 and take Marvin Harrison Jr. Makes sense considering he was thought to be a “generational” receiver prospect.

The Chargers always looked like a potential target for a trade up. Nope. Linemen.

Now the Giants. Throughout the draft process there was noise that the Giants liked JJ McCarthy. They were reportedly trying to trade up to get Maye, why wouldn’t they take McCarthy at No. 6? Nope, they went receiver.

Did the Vikings know that the Giants weren’t going to take McCarhty with the sixth pick? Is that why general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah didn’t trade up to the fifth spot? Did he try but the Chargers wouldn’t do it? Did he think that McCarthy wasn’t worth that price? Adofo-Mensah always framed the team’s love for QBs within the context of what it costs to get them.

At No. 7 or 8 it seemed like they had to trade up to box out the Broncos and Raiders.

Tennessee went with a lineman at seven. It would be weird to call the Falcons after the whole tampering thing but maybe they would let that go and swing the deal. Trading up to eight rather than four or five would be a win.

Then the Falcons shocked everyone — even their own owner from how it appeared on the draft room video shown on ESPN. They selected quarterback Michael Penix Jr. despite having guaranteed Kirk Cousins $100 million. Within moments national reporters were saying Cousins is shocked and disappointed. The Vikings must have been perplexed.

One thing you can’t help but wonder is who the Vikings would have picked if both Penix Jr. and McCarthy were on the board when they were up.

We never got that scenario. Instead when the draft reached the 10th pick, Adofo-Mensah slid up one spot to take McCarthy. They made sure that the Broncos couldn’t jump ahead of them and take their guy. They chose the younger and more moldable McCarthy over Bo Nix, who went 12th.

It always made sense that McCarthy and head coach Kevin O’Connell would be a fit together. McCarthy is an all-football-all-the-time type who appears to be obsessed with succeeding in this game. He’s a great communicator, which was evident during all of his interviews at the NFL Combine and he already has a sense for what NFL life is going to be like after playing with Jim Harbaugh.

“When big, big moments in games when they needed him.. to find a way, other ways just to make a throw, other ways to extend a play, he made a lot of those plays,” O’Connell said. “From a standpoint of how I evaluate quarterbacks, I've continued to learn and evolve and understand that there's information there that you're staring at that sometimes you take different routes to get there. By the time I was able to absorb all the film and really get to know J.J. a little bit more, connect some more dots, and understand what we're really projecting with a person and player like J.J. McCarthy, I'm really excited to have him on our football team.”

He may have ended up being QB5 but still a top 10 quarterback nonetheless. That is history for the Vikings. It also makes his odds of success just as good as anybody else taken in that range. With the things that the Vikings can provide him — from O’Connell and Josh McCown to the supporting cast of Justin Jefferson, Jordan Addison, TJ Hockenson and two top-notch tackles — he is going to get every opportunity to succeed. They even made his life potentially easier by bringing in Sam Darnold and allowing for more time to develop if McCarthy needs it.

If the Vikings had walked away with only McCarthy on draft night, it would have been a good result. Get the QB, mission accomplished. Since they didn’t have to give up No. 23, they had a chance to add more. And as more offensive players were taken, the possibility of the Vikings grabbing a top-notch defensive player started to come into play.

Adofo-Mensah did not let the board come to him this time, reaching into next year’s draft capital to slide up from No. 23 to No. 17 to take Alabama edge rusher Dallas Turner.

“We always talk about minimizing regret,” Adofo-Mensah said. “If you are sitting on your couch one day and you’re like, ‘that extra fifth [round pick] or whatever,’ and you could have had a chance at a guy that you think has traits to be special you are never going to care about that fifth-round pick and there’s ways of getting it back.”

Turner had 10.0 sacks last season, ranked 11th in the nation in pass rush grade by PFF (89.0) and sixth in pass rush win rate (19.6%). In terms of his fit with Brian Flores’ defense, it’s notable that Turner also dropped back in coverage more than 200 times during his career at Alabama. At the NFL Combine he ran an insane 4.46 40-yard dash and jumped 40.5 inches.

Suddenly Flores’ defense looks like it has the building blocks for the future. Jonathan Greenard turns 27 next year. Josh Metellus, Cam Bynum, Mekhi Blackmon, Byron Murphy Jr. and Ivan Pace Jr. are all 26 and younger.

So the Vikings walked out of the draft with a quarterback they can build around and a foundational defensive piece because the draft board was played as well as they could have managed it.

Job well done. But this one means more to the franchise than your routine draft night where we declare victory and wait until August to see how it all actually looks.

We will remember April 25, 2024 as the day that Adofo-Mensah completed the journey from his arrival in 2022 to the attempt to stock up the Zimmer/Spielman team and take one last shot to tearing down the old roster to forming a completely new roster. This team belongs to the new regime now. The “competitive rebuild” portion has come to an end, now it’s about spending the next year making progress toward being truly competitive. And in 2025 expectations will be through the roof as the Vikings will be out from under Cousins’ dead cap hit and in rookie QB deal bliss with McCarthy.

There are still risks to what they did on Thursday night. McCarthy hasn’t played a lot of football in comparison to other QBs taken in the first round of the draft. He hasn’t been in a situation where the team is on his shoulders. We never know how that’s going to work out on draft night.

“As we were talking and he said, ‘Is there a reason wouldn’t draft me?’ And I said, ‘Honestly, from a talent standpoint, no; you’re just a bit of an unknown because you played in an offense that's pretty run heavy and different things like that. So there's some guesswork,” Adofo-Mensah said. “But from what we've seen, we think you can do it. And in meeting you and knowing the person, all those different things.’”

And with Turner, they depleted 2025 draft stock to the point where they will need to find some gems in the late rounds this year and hit on free agent signings in the future.

But the bottom line is that Adofo-Mensah and O’Connell are traveling a path that we have seen work in Philadelphia and San Francisco. They are taking a swing at truly competing. Not just hoping to maybe make the playoffs.

The unknown is scary and refreshing as all hell for Vikings fans, who felt a malaise set in during the Cousins era. Hoping and praying that acquiring a zone blocking center or kicker/punter or tight who who could play slot receiver would be the difference between mediocre and title town stopped moving the needle after it failed to put them in true contention year after year.

In the end the Vikings stuck to their plan. Give them credit: They laid it out publicly over the last two years and brought it to life. Whether it succeeds or fails will take a long time to determine but it was the right direction and the right way to approach the draft. Now it’s their next job to make it pay dividends.

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