What should we call the next phase of the Vikings' plan?

The Vikings begin a new timeline now that the draft is over

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By Matthew Coller

Goodbye, competitive rebuild. It was certainly a journey.

From comments that Minnesota Vikings general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah has made this offseason, you get the impression that he might have some regrets about calling the team’s plan a “competitive rebuild” when he first arrived on the job. When he was asked on Saturday about overhauling the roster from the time he was hired until now, he joked that “overhaul” may have been a better term than the one he chose.

“We did have a plan to shape the roster…I think if you look big picture at it, you'll see what we were intending to do,” Adofo-Mensah said. “We're happy we've accomplished it.”

The Vikings’ GM shouldn’t feel any remorse over telling the world their overarching philosophy. When we looked at everything through the “competitive rebuild” lens, it made more sense than it would have otherwise. Not signing Kirk Cousins to an extension after a 13-win season and letting an all-star team’s worth of aging, expensive players go following 2022 rather than running it back in 2023 all fit the plan. The take-a-swing signings like re-signing Alex Mattison and adding Marcus Davenport appeared logical even if they didn’t work out. If the Vikings had said they were all-in on 2023, all of that would have seemed bizarre.

It’s nearly a lock that the Vikings would have won more games last year if they had all those players from the year before but the 2025 salary cap would have been in a very, very ugly place and we wouldn’t have found out what they have in key future pieces like Ivan Pace Jr. and Jordan Addison. It would have been a short-term sacrifice at long-shot odds to compete for a championship with negative long-term consequences.

As debates raged throughout last season about whether the Vikings should bring Cousins back, it never felt thematic with the competitive rebuild to spend $40-plus million on an aging quarterback to go along with the refreshed roster. Everything appeared to line up with drafting a quarterback in 2024, including the fact that the QB class was loaded with first-round talents.

The competitive rebuild ended for all intents and purposes on the first day of free agency when Cousins left for Atlanta. That made it nearly a lock that they would pick a quarterback in the draft. On Thursday night the competitive rebuild was buried when Vikings moved up one spot to select Michigan’s JJ McCarthy.

The moment McCarthy’s name was called, the O’Connell/Adofo-Mensah era truly began.

Now there is a new plan. A two-year plan, according to the GM.

“You can appreciate the journey but then you're excited for the next one, and that's kind of how we'll look at that next two-year period,” Adofo-Mensah said.

The two-year plan is a lot easier to explain than the competitive rebuild. The 2024 season will still come with expectations that the Vikings compete for a playoff spot and it wouldn’t be a tremendous shock if Sam Darnold performed better in Minnesota than he did in New York or Carolina but the broader goal is to have McCarthy ready to lead a contending team in 2025. That means preparing him, developing players and finding out who is going to be here long term.

The Vikings kept their first-round pick for 2025 — a bonus in comparison to what we thought they might have to pay for McCarthy’s services. They have $102 million (pre Jefferson extension) in cap space in 2025, meaning they can make plays for big-time free agents in ways we have never seen from this club.

Look at San Francisco. Look at Philadelphia. There is the model. Stack talent and give your young, inexpensive QB every opportunity under the sun to succeed.

That’s the broad strokes. The details will be important as heck. How they decide when McCarthy is ready to get on the field matters. Making the most of the recent draft picks and UDFA signings matters. O’Connell keeping the group together through possibly some rocky times matters. Ownership being patient matters.

What we know about the Vikings is that things will happen along the way that will test everyone involved. Not to mention the NFC North just got really scary, so it won’t be easy.

The hard part actually starts now. It’s much easier to take it apart than it is to build it back up. It’s easy to hang around in the middle. It’s hard to get to the top.

So what do we call this new plan? The last moniker came ready made by the GM.

How do we put a label on something we haven’t seen from the Vikings in a long time. It feels like yesterday but the last time the Vikings were entering a year with a young QB and a roster that has lots of promise and construction to still be done was 2014-2015. That’s a decade ago. The last time they picked a quarterback with this type of pedigree was 1998 with Daunte Culpepper.

Wrestling fans might like something like “The New Day.” Maybe we can test it out for a before committing.

It does very much feel like a new day. Like opening up the windows for the first time after a long winter.

But before we totally hit the refresh button on how we view the franchise, it’s worth asking whether the competitive rebuild was the right thing to do. Should they have rebuilt earlier? Should they have gone all in instead?

There is a pretty easy comparative team in Chicago, who hired their general manager at the same time as the Vikings. The Bears completely tore their team apart and just landed the No. 1 overall pick to go along with a budding roster.

It would be hard to argue that winning zero playoff games during the “competitive” part and picking 23rd and 11th in two drafts that had an abundance of QB talent at the top of the draft was a better result than picking at the top and rebuilding from scratch.

However, some important things happened along the way. O’Connell and the Vikings earned top marks over the last two years in the NFLPA survey. That has already been a talking point for players joining the organization in free agency. When it came to his ideal location, McCarthy had the Vikings on the top of his list from the start and noted that the other quarterbacks did too.

Would Brian Flores have joined a tanking organization? Would Justin Jefferson be comfortable signing an extension if the Vikings won two games last year?

There are ancillary effects to winning 20 games in two years with O’Connell and Adofo-Mensah in charge that could help them in the long run.

Overall the competitive rebuild will be determined by the result. If the tanky Bears, Commanders and Patriots ride their top-three QBs to greatness while the Vikings’ ceiling is limited, we may look back and wish they went 0-8 after Cousins tore his Achilles. If McCarthy’s supporting cast and the foundation that he’s inheriting plays a role in him being more successful than the bottom feeding teams, we will say that the Vikings’ approach paid off.

If you were making bets on whether the Vikings or the tank teams would be better in 2025, you would probably put even odds on it going either way.

For now, The New Day (patent pending) will need patience. Every bit of new information — i.e. OTAs, minicamp, training camp — will have a significance that hasn’t been felt in previous years. Somehow we will have to balance that with the desire to overreact to whether the plan is working.

That’s certainly a better problem to have than asking the same questions over and over of a team that was neither truly competitive or truly rebuilding for so long.

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