Kwesi’s Firing Doesn’t Add Up
I can’t deny it: critics of Kwesi Adofo-Mensah have plenty of evidence at their disposal.
Kwesi’s draft hit rate is poor. The Vikings had a Super Bowl-caliber QB (Sam Darnold) in the building and let him walk. The anointed future franchise QB was the laughingstock of the league. And the team has yet to win a playoff game.
Yet, to some extent, all those criticisms miss the forest for the trees. Kwesi’s drafts have been full of misses, but the same can be said of any NFL GM. A quick scan of the literature suggests that the average hit rate of an NFL GM is roughly 25%, while Kwesi’s is probably closer to 20% (for an appropriate definition of the ambiguous term “hit rate”).
That’s almost surely not statistically significant, and more generally, a sample size of four drafts is never going to be enough to tell which GMs are good drafters: the draft is just too random. Kwesi might actually be the best drafter in the league, or he might be the worst. We just don’t know yet.
What we do know is that, despite all the draft misses, Adofo-Mensah has compiled a 43-25 record as a GM, and 10 of those 25 losses came when the Vikings had a backup QB under center. Success on the field is ultimately what matters in the NFL, and it’s clear that Kwesi has found a way to build successful teams.
A 0-2 playoff record is not ideal, but as I recently argued, this statistic is virtually meaningless due to the incredibly small sample size.
With all the criticism of J.J. McCarthy, it’s easy to forget that (a) he’s 6-4 as a starting QB, and (b) he just turned 23 years old. Plenty of QBs have struggled out of the gate and then turned things around, including Sam Darnold.
Speaking of Darnold: it was, in hindsight, a mistake for Kwesi and company to let him sign with another team. But you know who else made that mistake? Thirty other GMs in the league. The Vikings got one more season of high-caliber QB play from Darnold than any other team but the Seahawks, and it would be unfair to act as though the Vikings were the only franchise to underestimate him.
It wouldn’t be too surprising if the Vikings’ ownership simply decided that they had to clean house after the way this 2025 season went. Kwesi, Kevin O’Connell, and the rest of the Vikings’ leadership went all in on McCarthy, and (at least so far) they seem to have gotten it dead wrong. This suggests a failure of scouting, coaching, player development, and more, and I could understand it if the Vikings decided that everyone involved in that decision had to go, even if it seems premature to render a final verdict on the young passer.
Yet, remarkably, the Vikings have chosen to keep everyone else and make Kwesi the scapegoat. This is especially hard to fathom given that Kwesi is not a football guy: he is an expert in numbers, who specializes in synthesizing information from scouts and coaches and acting on it.
This immediately raises the question: which scouts and coaches gave the GM the reports that convinced him McCarthy was the future of the Minnesota Vikings while Sam Darnold was just a flash in the pan, and why are those people still in the organization?
At the end of the day, I don’t feel too bad for Kwesi, or any other NFL coach or executive who loses their job: he has already made millions doing a job that many of us fans would love to do for free, and he will surely find a position with a big salary somewhere else.
But I do worry that the Vikings will respond to Kwesi’s perceived failure by going the other way, looking for a hard-nosed football guy who eschews analytics in favor of a more traditional approach. In the end, analytics is just information processing, and if we can’t process information as well as the other teams, we’re going to fall behind, making bad decisions like firing personnel based on insufficient sample sizes.