What Was Kwesi Doing?
Seth Walder of ESPN Sports Analytics drew the ire of Vikings fans when he accused the Vikings of “losing” the first round of the NFL draft:
Walder’s take on the Vikings is overstated here (more on that later), but he does raise a legitimate puzzle: why has the most analytics-minded GM in the NFL consistently spurned the advice of analysts over the past three drafts?
Back in 2022, Vikings GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah became the darling of the analytics community when he traded down with the Lions…against the advice of the Jimmy Johnson trade value chart. As Walder’s third point illustrates, analytics generally suggests that teams should trade down for extra picks whenever possible due to the unpredictability of the NFL draft, giving themselves as many lottery tickets as possible.
Nonetheless, Kwesi and company seem to have done an about-face with their first-round draft strategy after 2022, sticking and picking WR Jordan Addison in 2023, trading up (twice!) for EDGE Dallas Turner in 2024, and now sticking and picking G Donovan Jackson in 2025. In all three cases, the Vikings’ front office drew criticism from analytics gurus at ESPN and PFF for refusing to trade down.
There are several explanations for Kwesi’s strategy in recent drafts, but most of them don’t hold water for me. Some would say that Kwesi simply “learned from his mistakes” in the 2022 NFL draft, which failed to produce a single impact player for the Vikings. However, the failure of the 2022 draft class could easily be attributed to a small sample size (as well as a dramatic change in the Vikings’ defensive scheme under Flores) rather than an inherent flaw in the Vikings’ draft process.
In contrast, the analytics models are based on thousands of data points, and they show convincingly that teams that have traded down in the NFL draft have historically fared better. I simply cannot believe that someone as data-driven as Kwesi would prioritize one bad personal experience over mountains of NFL draft data.
A second possibility is that extenuating circumstances have led the Vikings to ignore the general recommendations of the analytics community. After all, despite what Seth Walder seems to think, the decrees of NFL analytics models are better viewed as “guidelines” rather than “rules.” The Lions similarly infuriated the analytics community by drafting multiple players at non-premium positions in the first two rounds of the 2023 draft, but that draft class is now widely viewed as one of the best of the past decade and has helped produce the most formidable Lions teams in franchise history.
Taken one year at a time, it’s easy to find reasons why the Vikings may have refused to trade down each of the last three seasons. Jordan Addison was selected last in a run on first-round receivers, with a steep dropoff in talent afterwards. Dallas Turner was considered by many to be a top 10 talent who slid to 17. Jackson was arguably just the right player to fill the biggest hole remaining in the Vikings’ roster. Perhaps the Vikings wanted to trade back, but there just wasn’t a serious offer on the table.
But after three straight years, it’s hard to believe that the Vikings’ aggressive first-round strategy is an exception rather than the new normal. In 2025, at least, we have reason to believe that the Vikings could have made a good trade down with the Giants, who paid a decent price to select Jaxson Dart with the following pick. For whatever reason, Kwesi and his team seem to have decided that the advice of the analytics community just doesn’t apply to them.
The only halfway decent explanation I can think of is that Kwesi is confident that his scouting department can do better than the historical average. If the Vikings can say with high confidence that Donovan Jackson will be significantly better than any other guard they could have picked, the decision to stick and pick may well prove worthwhile.
The problem is, lots of teams throughout NFL history have thought they could do better than the historical average. This overconfidence is precisely why trading down has generally proven to be the best strategy. But Kwesi is well aware of this pitfall, so if he thinks that his strategy is the optimal one, it’s probably because he has data to back it up.
If so, that bodes very well for us Vikings fans, and it suggests that the Vikings’ unexpected success in 2024 was not just a fluke but a product of strong scouting and team-building strategy, which will undoubtedly pay dividends in the years to come.
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