FILE - Minnesota Vikings general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah watches his team prepare before the start of a preseason NFL football game against the New England Patriots Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Bruce Kluckhohn, File)
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The Minnesota Vikings won 43 games over the last four years. The organization has frequently received high marks on recent player report cards. Their fan support, for a franchise that has not won a Super Bowl, is among the strongest in the league.
Dissatisfaction with above average or pretty good results was never more apparent than on Friday, when general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah was fired after four seasons and a contract extension just eight months ago.
“It’s a body of work. It’s a cumulative set of decisions. It’s four years of where we’ve been. We as ownership feel, and I know our fans feel it and our entire organization feels it: We need to get to a better place,” owner and president Mark Wilf said on a video conference call with reporters.
Executive vice president of football operations Rob Brzezinski was appointed as the interim replacement through the NFL draft, after which the full general manager search will take place. The timing of this decision was unusual nearly four weeks after the regular season ended, but Wilf and his older brother, co-owner Zygi Wilf, wanted to conduct their annual end-of-season organizational meetings and reflect further about the trajectory of the team before making the bold move.
“We talked to all the stakeholders, all the people involved in our football operations, and we really came to this decision in a methodical way,” Wilf said. “This was about our long-term success.”
The Vikings finished 9-8 and missed the playoffs for a second time in Adofo-Mensah’s four years, which have paralleled the tenure of coach Kevin O’Connell. They have not won a postseason game in six years, and over 21 seasons the Wilfs have enjoyed only five division titles and two NFC championship game appearances despite owning one of the NFL’s most consistently competitive teams.
The most obvious mark against Adofo-Mensah was the decision to let Sam Darnold leave last year as a free agent for draft pick compensation and pivot to 2024 first-round draft pick J.J. McCarthy, with Darnold leading Seattle to the Super Bowl and McCarthy stumbling through an injury-ravaged debut.
Considering Darnold’s struggle in Minnesota’s playoff game loss last season and the salary cap benefit of a starting quarterback on his rookie contract, the move made plenty of sense. But the Vikings must now build a roster for 2026, not knowing if McCarthy is worth sticking with and needing to address salary, performance and injury issues at several key positions while trying to match Chicago, Green Bay and Detroit in the stacked NFC North.
The draft is where the Vikings have hurt themselves the most over the last four years. After entering his first such test with the 12th overall pick, Adofo-Mensah aggressively traded down to accumulate more selections without success. Only sixth-rounder Jalen Nailor, who was the team’s third wide receiver, was a meaningful contributor this season from the 2022 draft.
“We need young players that we can build on for the future and keep this thing moving forward,” Wilf said.
Brzezinski has been a key executive in the front office since 1999, becoming one of the league’s most respected salary cap managers. He’ll be a candidate for the GM job, Wilf said.
The 44-year-old Adofo-Mensah, who has economics degrees from Princeton and Stanford and started his first career on Wall Street as a commodities trader and portfolio manager, entered the league in 2013 with San Francisco as a research and development specialist. He was hired in 2020 as a vice president of football operations with Cleveland, before taking the job with Minnesota.
After signing O’Connell to a contract extension a week after the Vikings were ousted from the postseason, ownership curiously didn’t get a deal done with Adofo-Mensah until more than four months later. Wilf downplayed the notion of power struggles and internal tensions when asked to elaborate on the dynamics between the front office and the coaching staff. Ownership ultimately felt they’d be better off with a different strategy and style.
“It’s a good collaborative situation. People get along here. Everything was good. It’s strictly a professional decision on where we think the dynamic was best going forward,” Wilf said. “So yes, we got input from everybody, but nobody said, ‘Hey, you’ve got to fire Kwesi.’ It was about, as ownership, we said we’re not satisfied. We need to be better as an organization, and this is the direction we have to go.”
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AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/NFL
By DAVE CAMPBELL
AP Pro Football Writer
This post was last modified on 01/30/2026 2:40 pm