KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: Good afternoon. Welcome, everybody. We just finished the draft. Incredibly excited for what we got accomplished. We set a vision when we got here for what we wanted this team to look like, what we had in our roster, things we needed, things we wanted to add, competition depth-wise. And, again, we set a plan and ultimately with the help of this great staff, this coaching staff, this personnel staff, everybody involved, I think we were able to accomplish our vision.
I tell those guys that in this job there's a lot of leadership roles and things like that, so I have to use my time efficiently, so I need them to be the best personal shoppers in the NFL, and I think we have been. We've been able to use our time, narrow the list to a certain number of players that we thought the value for us met the value -- kind of exceeded the value that the league saw them at, and ultimately we set a plan in place to draft those players in those positions, and we did that. Incredibly grateful to everybody that took part in this process.
Right now I probably don't seem excited. It was a long process, a long day, but again, we're really excited for what we added. With that, open to take any questions.
Q. I guess, two-part question. Just talk about Evans, who was your first pick today. What he kind of brings to the table. Then in the larger picture just talk about how you guys were able to beef up the secondary in this draft with three of your top five picks being DBs?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: I always call those "dark room moments" where you're watching film, where your scouts tell you, "hey, take a look at this guy," and you get excited when you watch good players. You watch good players, and you see that other people maybe see them a little differently, and that's when as a general manager you get really excited because, look, the players that go in the first round, everybody loves those guys, right? Where you find great value in this draft is the players your scouts find later in the draft and kind of bring to your attention, so he was the guy I remember watching at night. I sometimes watch in the dark.
You're looking, and you are looking at him play, and you look at his size. He is a big guy. Man, he moves really well. He plays off. You see him doing things in our scheme that translate really well. You see him playing different coverages.
You are looking around, and you always get this look in your eye like, "am I crazy?" There's that look because you don't ever want to assume you're right and the rest of the league is missing something. It might not be the case, but we really like the talent, the skill set. We think he has great potential here, and we're excited to add him.
Obviously, generally to the group, I think in this league cornerback depth is important. You need four good ones at least. You need depth year in and year out. That position will get challenged, and we're excited to add the competition we had in that room. We had some great players here, and we're excited what we added to the room in general.
Q. What excites you most about what you did to your roster in the last couple of days, and what are you most concerned about that you couldn't get done in these past couple of days?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: We set a plan. To your point, we had a plan of attack for what we wanted to do, and we accomplished that. We addressed positions. Not just in needing this year. Sort of looking ahead to next year. Depth that might become starters or just general filling needs in advance of what could come.
Again, we had a really good process where we combine all of our information from personnel and coaching, really collaborative effort. That's what I'm most proud of. Setting a vision for the team and ultimately executing it like we did in this draft.
Q. I know you would never go into a draft thinking that you will intentionally move up/down all the time, but six trades, I guess, over the three days. Is that sort of just how you might operate? Thinking about this whole system, just maybe constantly trying to find the best values up and down.
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: Yeah, you typically want to target parts of the board. Because it's an option, all you need is one name to be called, so you always want to put yourself in a situation, well, hey, I think there's five good players of this area of the board or five good players in this area of the board. As you go down the draft and there's a sense that the five players that you would take at that pick are going to be available 20 picks later, that becomes an opportunity, right? That's kind of how you are looking at it.
You start with a plan. You always sort of adapt and evolve as the board takes shape and goes on. Ultimately, you sometimes get lulled into this false sense of security, and you are looking at your board, and you are so panicked, like, "oh, these players are going to go." You have to realize your board doesn't look like everybody else's board. That's why we have a draft. That's why different players go at different positions.
Once you take that in mind and just sort of know that those players that you want could be there later and you ultimately take those risks, sometimes you're rewarded for those risks in trading back and adding picks, but other times you trade up. We did both, and ultimately being able to target certain parts of the board for different reasons.
Q. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit specifically about Vederian Lowe, how you see him fitting into the offensive scheme here, but then also he kind of got into some detail with us about his family situation and background and just has shown a lot of maturity and gone through a lot of things in his life. Sort of how do you see him fitting in both from the off-field and the on-field perspective?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: I think we talk about all these words all the time: Smart, tough, competitive. That's fine on a football field, but you talk about that in life and what somebody has overcome and been through. You read the story, and it's incredible.
How does somebody overcome adversity on the field? Well, you can't always observe that, but I know somebody who has overcome adversity in life, and so I'm willing to bet on that person.
On the field he is long. He is a tackle. Good tackle depth in this league is hard to find, so any time you have somebody that's played as much football as he has played, has the size and length that we covet, our coaches identified him. R.G. is an O-line guru and identified him. He will be in my ear every other day when he finds a guy he likes, and so that was our process, and that's how we got to it. We're excited to add him to that group and ultimately add competition.
Q. Just circling back on trades, I'm just curious from a philosophical standpoint, how do you sort of define your bottom line when you are offered the final terms of a deal and deciding whether it's good enough to go ahead with it or what's the line where you say, you know what, we're not going to do that?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: So a lot of times people talk about the chart and the chart is kind of a guideline. I'm not saying you shouldn't follow the chart, but really you're comparing different alternatives. If your alternative is to stay and pick, that is some value, inherent happiness, whatever it is. If you trade, there is some inherent happiness, right? If you're more happy trading back and getting anything than picking the player you would pick, you should do that.
It doesn't really matter what the trade chart says, right? I try to view it as a scenario thing. Here are the different scenarios we could be in if we pick this player versus not and just compare them and see how we are. Obviously, there's mathematical ways to do it, but there's also just common sense and intuition ways of doing it as well, and we take input from everybody as we do that. That's how we come to our decisions.
Q. I guess to follow up on that, not that I expect you to give away the difference in your trade chart versus everybody else's, but as you have looked at those over the years and formulated how value gets formed on trade charts, what have been the big things for you in forming perhaps your own version of it or deciding how much to use it?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: Like I said, I think I've said it in the past. The hard thing to quantify in a trade chart is scarcity. So special players, there aren't that many of them, right? If you don't acquire them in the draft, they don't hit the free agent market for various reasons. That ability to quantify what that means.
There are parts of the chart where -- I know I'm an economist, and all the econ guys say there's overconfidence priced in the chart, and there is in a sense, but when you factor in the fact that great players are scarce, it's probably not as bad as people think it is. There's both dynamics.
So ultimately, again, I try not to be over-maniacal or detailed with it. I think it's probably somewhere in between the new charts and the old charts is probably the right answer. Ultimately, though, it's always going back to where is your situation right now? How happy are you with versus what is offered to you. I always start from that process and go from there.
Q. Seems like a lot of the picks here on day three, versatility was sort of the thing that kept coming up. When you look at guys who are potential developmental prospects, how important is that that they might have the possibility of playing in different spots?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: That's incredibly a great point to point out. When people start on your roster -- when you draft the player, you want them on your team. You want to make their team. To do that you have to define their role. A lot of times that role could be special teams or a sub or a different role as they develop into more. So what we want to do is really be clear with our vision. Going in, we had a plan. Hey, these are certain roles that could be filled so that this person could eventually become a starter or maybe something different later down the line.
That's kind of why you saw that versatility because it was planned out in advance really in looking for certain skill sets that we need on our roster to eventually value the roster spot to eventually become able to be a starter one day.
Q. Two things. How about the Vikings drafting a Minnesota Golden Gopher for the first time in 12 years?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: Absolutely. Happy to do it. He was a top 30 guy. Really enjoyed spending time with him. Yeah, he is incredible. I think he has a bright future. He is gritty. He is tough. He has a quiet leadership presence about him.
I haven't got to meet Coach Fleck yet, but he sent me the purple rower thing with all the team signature on it and excited to meet him. I've heard so much about their culture, and I think that does matter. I think growing up in those cultures carries over to what they are on the NFL, and we're excited to have him.
Q. Just as a follow, you drafted a couple of maybe big play type guys today with Chandler and Nailor. What do you think they potentially can add? Chandler talked about hoping to make some home run plays.
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: We always want guys to shorten the field for us. That's ultimately what the goal is. Again, we sought skill sets. When you talk to someone like Chandler, not just the explosiveness, but in the passing game we see as a weapon and an asset.
Nailor has a really good separation skill set, a playmaker. We have playmakers on this team. We just want to add them, bring competition. It's a long season, and the NFL season is long. It's a bit of an attrition game. We want to make sure we have depth on the roster to make the run we're trying to make ultimately.
Q. I know a lot of future GMs have sat in draft rooms and thought in the back of their mind or reflected afterwards how they would have handled certain situations or what they would have done. I'm curious if you had done that in the past, and now that you have gone through it, did it go the way you anticipated it would? Was there a moment where no matter how much prep you could have done there was nothing that you could have prepared for for that particular thing?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: That's a great question. Coming from my old background, the great part about being at Wall Street is you make decisions, and they keep score very quickly. The sort of sureness of yourself goes away immediately. There's a humility that I have because you spent half of your week being wrong.
So when I sat in these draft rooms with John Lynch and Andrew Barry, first of all, when you sign up for a leader, you are signing up to follow decisions even if you are unsure of them yourself, but you believe in that person enough to want to follow what they're doing. That's why you are there. I never really questioned those guys in that sense because I believed in the leadership, and I believed what they were doing.
Now being in that seat, I will say that I get it. At the end of the day everybody wants to be heard. They want their voice heard, but sometimes people want to be listened to. We all have our emotional needs, and we want to be listened to. That dynamic is interesting.
The only thing that I thought was a surprise was how deadline-oriented the league is. I probably wake up and think of all these scenarios. I plan a lot of stuff out, and then shoot, somebody calls you ten seconds into your pick, and you are, like, "what?"
That was an interesting dynamic. We were ready for it. It's great having Rob Brzezinski right next to me. He was right next to me and saying: "This is how it goes; this is how it happens." Again, I'm not so arrogant to think that I don't have things to learn and people that I can't learn from, so it was great to have him and just helping that dynamic for me.
Q. What does that mean deadline-oriented? That people were calling after you thought all the information was -- you already had all the information?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: Correct. You think you have your whole strategy planned out, okay, this is our best deal. Then the phone rings 30 seconds later when you have already planned your attack. Hey, it's time to adjust. You have to be nimble.
Credit to all the other GMs and front offices. There's a lot of nimble minds going on, and it's a fun exercise. That was incredible. My heart is still pumping. I haven't slept a lot, but I feel like I could run a marathon right now.
Q. Probably rightly or wrongly and history will I suppose judge this, there's going to be a lot of reflection on this draft around the trades with the Lions, the trade with the Packers, and the fact that there's those receivers that you are going to see all the time. How much does that factor into it for you, or how much should it, and how much do you expect to kind of watch those receivers in the future knowing you're going to have to try to stop those guys now?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: Absolutely. That was something we thought about, but I think what people have to realize is, again, going back to that happiness thing, what is your happiness in this scenario versus the other scenario? That's ultimately what your job is. Part of our happiness is to make sure we have the best team we can possibly put on the the field.
The other thing people should realize is they can call other teams. We were pretty sure that the team behind us was going to get the same deal, and so having that team get that player and us not get those picks isn't a better outcome. The only better outcome would be maybe to take that player. In our situation we just didn't think that was the best decision to do.
Another trade we made, again, the same thing I think the same dynamic was in place. Ultimately, again, you have to make those decisions. That's the choice we made. We also knew that they could trade with somebody else. We would rather reap the benefits of the trade if we so thought, and ultimately, we're okay. We know this is a great league. Those are great organizations, and we're going to have for compete with them either way. We're happy. We'll be ready for the challenge.
Q. One of today's trades was moving up 23 spots in the seventh round. How did that position you guys to get a start on undrafted free agents?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: Yeah. That wasn't necessarily the plan. That was part of a pick swap with one of the trades we did. As you guys said, we did a lot of trades. Trying to remember them all.
It's one of those things where this was -- I think partly because of -- there's a lot of players, a volume of players. Part of our plan was to be in this back part of the draft so that we could have access to a lot of these good players that we thought would fall to us, and a lot of them did.
We have a pretty big draft class, but we're excited about all these players to add depth and competition to what we have here. That's not to say anything about the players we have in this building because we like a lot of them. They've been here. They've been doing everything Kevin has asked of them, and we're excited to add everybody together and see what we've got.
Q. The word "seventh rounder" almost became like a punch line at the end of Rick's time here. I was curious in general what's your vision of what you are looking for as in a "seventh rounder," your last crack at a guy in general, and, also, in particular Nick Muse. What are your expectations for him?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: Ideally, like we talked about, there is a vision for what you want your roster and team to look like over the next few years, but at its very simplest, you want draft picks to make your team. If you don't believe that they have a skill set or an ability to do so, it's probably not something you should do, and so at times that can get a little scarce at that point in the draft. If you just don't have players at positional needs that you need that are available, then maybe you don't want to take a seventh round pick.
At the end of the day every pick has a sort of -- not a monetary, but just a value, and so you can use them to pick a player. You can use that to move up a different round. There's lots of ways to do it. I don't like to assign myself to set core philosophies. I just do know that generally you want those players to make your team and have a defined role with your coaching and personnel that we're all aligned in getting the best out of that player. If that doesn't happen, you should try to maybe do something else with that asset.
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