Just over a week after the 2025 season ended, Minnesota Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell and general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah held their end-of-year press conferences. The combined 50 minutes hit everything you would expect on the bingo card, ranging from disappointment that they didn’t make the playoffs to O’Connell lamenting about a September practice that J.J. McCarthy missed to attend the birth of his son.
O’Connell said that he was excited to continue the crusade to find McCarthy’s fundamentals this offseason, but also that he wanted the “deepest, most talented quarterback room he could find.” Adofo-Mensah sidestepped a question about McCarthy being the team’s starter in 2026 in much the same way that many wanted Kirk Cousins to evade a pass rush during in his six seasons in Minnesota.
Both mentioned the need to bring explosive plays to an offense whose yards per play dropped from 5.6 last year to 4.9 this year, and they pledged they would do what it takes to get the Vikings back to the standard of making the playoffs.
A lot of this was expected, but there were some surprises. While the regime has operated in the name of collaboration, the cracks in the partnership may be showing, and it could lead the Vikings back to square one — or more specifically, where they were sitting at the end of the regime led by Mike Zimmer and Rick Spielman.
Many remember the explosive way the partnership ended, with Zimmer jumping on an interview with the Star Tribune’s Mark Craig to air his grievances. But while Zimmer didn’t talk to Spielman toward the end of their tenure, there was a time when the two sides were on the same page.
That was the 2014 season when Zimmer was hired by Spielman as the team’s new head coach. A culture that lacked accountability under Leslie Frazier was quickly tightened up by the Bill Parcells disciple and Spielman started making moves that would build a team that would compete through the end of the decade.
The signing of Linval Joseph and the UDFA discovery of Adam Thielen played a large role as did a 2015 draft class including Stefon Diggs, Danielle Hunter, and Eric Kendricks. A nucleus that was already there, including Harrison Smith and Xavier Rhodes, began to flourish and the Vikings could have won their first playoff game in 2015 if Blair Walsh hadn’t sent a 27-yard field goal into the Mississippi River.
Teddy Bridgewater’s leg injury momentarily derailed the plan in 2016, but the Vikings bounced back to reach the NFC Championship game in 2017. At that point, trust in the regime was sky high until the first sign of disagreement showed up.
Spielman was a solid general manager, but his biggest flaw was at the quarterback position. The man who once chose Daunte Culpepper’s bad knee over Drew Brees’ mangled shoulder with the Miami Dolphins had failed twice to find his own franchise QB with the Vikings and knew that the team was a signal caller away from reaching the Super Bowl.
With expectations heightened, Spielman made the all-in move to sign Cousins in free agency. Fearing for the future of his defense, Zimmer looked like the groom at a shotgun wedding during the introductory press conference and the streak of going “Full Vikings” – going all in without actually going all in – began.
Vikings fans know how this ended. The Vikings won a playoff game with Cousins in 2019, but it was a distraction from a series of moves where Spielman and Zimmer tried to save their jobs. The 2020 draft included Justin Jefferson, Ezra Cleveland, K.J. Osborn, and Josh Metellus, but it came with a series of trade downs that gave Minnesota 15 draft picks, many of which did not pan out.
After failing to make the playoffs in 2020, Spielman attempted to make it up to Zimmer with a spending spree that included Dalvin Tomlinson, Patrick Peterson, and Bashaud Breeland. But another difference in draft day philosophy included a lost third round Kellen Mond, Chazz Surratt, and Wyatt Davis better off locked in the broom closet at TCO Performance Center than being coached by Zimmer.
With each move, the Vikings went further into the quicksand and by the end of the 2021 season, they had a broken culture and a disconnect between the front office and the head coach. Both were fired the day after the season ended and the Adofo-Mensah/O’Connell era was supposed to be everything it wasn’t.
For a while, that was the case. O’Connell got the most out of the Zimmer/Spielman core in 2022 and probably would have made the playoffs if Cousins didn’t tear his Achilles in 2023. Sam Darnold was a pot of gold with a 14-win season at the end of the rainbow in 2024 and led to high expectations in 2025.
While O’Connell worked his magic on the field, Adofo-Mensah tried to rebuild the roster around him. Some of the moves, mainly in the four drafts, haven’t panned out. But each one had a specific goal in mind: to create a long-term contender with multiple bites at the apple.
Adofo-Mensah mentioned that goal during Tuesday’s press conference, but it didn’t feel the same considering the situation the Vikings are heading into this offseason.
When your quarterback is sailing passes to Wally the Beer Man regularly, you need to bring competition in. But taking a big swing to fix the problem has ramifications. Joe Burrow, Lamar Jackson, and Justin Herbert are likely pipe dreams and even then, the Vikings could be back in the same situation, trying to make big moves to save their jobs.
In addition, even a smaller trade for Mac Jones or Kyler Murray would be a signal of distress. Each team in the NFC North has won a playoff game since Adofo-Mensah and O’Connell took over in 2022 and if it doesn’t happen in 2026, both will be on a hot seat that would make the folks in Fansville proud.
Another concern is that this could be the first domino in a string of ill-advised moves. We’ve already seen the Vikings do this when trading for Adam Thielen before the start of this year and the entire situation with Christian Darrisaw’s knee felt like a knee-jerk reaction to Justin Skule not being what they thought he would be.
If the Vikings do make a trade, what’s stopping them from going all-in on another aging free agent or another draft-day deal that sees the Vikings try to patch their roster holes immediately? And if you really want to speculate, you can see it in the fact that Adofo-Mensah and O’Connell had separate press conferences as opposed to the long card table with two kids acting like their teacher made a mistake by placing them together on the seating chart.
They may not admit it, but desperation has set in for the Vikings. If it leads to O’Connell and Adofo-Mensah entering preservation mode, it will be detrimental for the franchise’s future.
