KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: Since I last saw you yesterday I've been able to add and improve this team which we're really excited about.
First pick was Tai Felton, a receiver out of Maryland who we're really excited to add. You talk about a player with the type of speed he has. And for a speed guy he's physical. He'll insert in the run game and he'll block down field and he's really good with the ball in his hands. A type of player that will play all four phases, special teams, potentially be a returner.
We were drawn to his play style, his competitiveness, the ability to contribute to this culture. All the recommendations we got from his coaches at Maryland and just all the work our scouts did on him, everything pointed to the type of player the Vikings want, just a role we were looking to fill. Excited to add him.
Next was Tyrion Ingram-Dawkins from Georgia, a player we were fortunate enough to bring in on top 30, someone who was really intriguing to us in the film process. Versatility is something we crave for our defense.
And he stuck out as somebody who is able to do that, able to set the edge working outside in. And then in the rush game has some ability to win over the guard with a unique skill set. It's not refined yet, but there's some stuff in there that's pretty unique.
We think he's an incredibly intelligent player and his best football is in front of him. And we think he's going to achieve that best football in this building.
Next would be Kobe King, linebacker from Penn State. Really excited to add him. A lot of times in football we make it harder than it is, but it's a meat-and-potatoes game in some positions, and linebacker is one of them. You need somebody to tackle the person trying to advance the ball up the field against your team, whether that be special teams with the ball in his hands or defending the pass.
He's somebody that plays with range, tackles. He's a really physical, knock-back, impact tackler. And we're excited to add him, not just to our fourth-down units but potentially to be a starter one day in this league.
A great communicator, was able to move people around in the Penn State defense, a great defense in its own right. You talk about a great culture and group there that's been able to win and build something special up there in State College.
Lastly Gavin Bartholomew, Pittsburgh tight end. I think one of the cool things that jumped out with him, as you all know, you talk to Jordan, and Jordan can be -- he's not the most loudest guy in the room, I would say, but he's an incredible personality and funny, once you get to know him.
But we asked him about Gavin and he lit up. Before he even said words you could see in his demeanor and the smile on his face.
He came in as a freshman there and on a really good team and played good football for them. That means a lot. The ability to come in at that age, the pressure of that environment, come from high school, just a lot of stuff he can do. We think he can be a hybrid (indiscernible) tight end for us. He's got some route-running ability.
We think he's got a lot the ability in his body. His pro day showed a lot of that. We think our coaches, Coach Angelicho and Coach Cordell are some of the best in the league to get that out of him. And we think he's got a lot of lower-body strength to kind of help him in the run game and be somebody to help us in the run game and special teams.
A good athlete. A good football player. Competitive. And you'll hear those words a lot, but those are the type of people we're trying to add to this building.
Lastly, I would add, just incorporated in the draft, was the ability to kind of manipulate the board and end up with Sam Howell, somebody we had been in conversations with. And we had targeted, we had watched Sam in our quarterback journey, our process over the past couple of years, and somebody that a lot of people in this building had appreciation for.
When the opportunity struck we decided to add him and we're excited to add him. He's excited to be here. And we're excited to go. After this is over we're going to get in the grass. Can't wait to be around the guys. Can't wait for rookie mini camp and all of it after I talk to you smiling faces.
Q. Do you imagine that your quarterback room is where it's going to be here for a while or how do you sort of view the guys you have in that room right now?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: We feel great about it. I think at times, going through OTAs and training camp, sometimes you add a fourth. So there's a potential for that. We're going through the CFA process right now, actually, in fact. We'll start the CFA process right after the draft ends. But once I get back there I'll know a little bit more about who potentially could come here.
But we're really excited about the room. If the season started today we'd be fired up about the guys in that room. That's how I would say that.
Q. Sticking on Sam Howell. You mentioned having an eye on him through the past couple of years. If I'm not mistaken he was drafted in '22, which obviously was your first year here. Did you do much work studying him coming into the '22 draft? If so, was there something -- did you learn anything about him in that process that kind of helped you to make this decision today?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: We did some work on him. I like that word, "did some work," because coming in from my background, a lot of it was the film work, and it was the evaluation of statistics and different things like that.
And as we talked a lot about it at length, drafting a quarterback is a marriage. That level of commitment, relationship building, relationship understanding, you've got to meet the friends, you've got to meet the family, you've got to do all that, that sort of courtship.
We didn't think in that first year together, when Kevin and I got together, that was the right time in our journey to make such an investment. We say a lot that organizations fill quarterbacks long before quarterbacks fill organizations. And we didn't want those to be one of the reasons why somebody didn't because we weren't ready, we weren't in the right place to do that type of thing. We didn't think it was the right time.
But on talent and all the other things we talk about he was high up on our board, but just didn't think it was the right time and place. Sometimes it happens in life; the person you're dating is not the right time and place, but later on in life it happens at a better time.
Q. You guys obviously didn't take a cornerback or a safety. How much do you feel that says about your confidence right now and where you're at in the secondary?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: You know, I think the draft is always about opportunity. So we are extremely confident in our group as we are confident about the other groups where we might have addressed positions.
But just the way the board felt, there wasn't anybody opportunity-wise, like you mentioned. If you draft somebody it's because you think they're competitive or they'll be able to take the place of somebody else. We didn't really see it.
You talk about our safety room, really excited to bring back Josh Metellus and Harrison Smith. Those are known commodities. Theo Jackson is somebody we've been excited about for a long time, since we brought him over here from Tennessee, somebody that, in the limited time he's played, has shown what we think of him.
Jay Ward is somebody with a incredibly versatile skill set that we still see. When he plays safety it looks natural to him. Football makes a lot of sense to him out there. He's got some really good range. And we're excited to see what that competition looks like.
And this organization, my staff will always be looking for opportunities, but the draft didn't seem like an opportunity for that.
And the cornerback room we love Murph, excited to bring him back. And Isaiah and Okudah and Mekhi Blackmon. A lot of times in this league, when you come back from injury you get forgotten. But we haven't forgotten him. And we're excited to how he resumes.
And Dwight McGlothern, who is somebody who showed in limited time in the preseason and in special teams play, that he could be something for us.
We're excited about that group. Always football is connected, though, so when you're excited about your secondary it probably means you're excited about your front. We are, and we're ready to get going.
Q. When it comes to Ingram-Dawkins, kind of a small sample size of him playing just really this year, and before didn't get as many opportunities. How did you weigh that with his potential upside and what you saw at the combine and how good he could get with, not only training, but also time behind players like Hargrave and Jonathan Allen?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: I think you said it perfectly, in my experience at this point, I'm a data guy. Data guys like seeing things more often, frequency or things like that. These are always the hardest ones for me, to where you're seeing the ability. You see the traits, as scouts will say, or upside or potential without necessarily the opportunity necessary to have this certain production.
But you can look at production adjusted for time and for different things like that. And when you get to meet the person that's when you close the loop and see that he's incredibly intelligent and he's very self-aware. He knows the things he needs to work on. He's pointed to the things that he can get better at.
So when it comes to that, when you see the combine, when he shows up at the combine and those things match the potential trait you see in him, there's a certain way you can kind of calculate the odds of that happening versus somebody who might have been more productive but maybe less capacity in their body. We weigh those decisions like we weighed everything else.
The final piece of it is having a coaching staff that's involved in our evaluation process and that's fired up to coach him. I don't know that I have any specific studies that show that the odds that make it better. But I think common sense would tell you that a teacher wants to pour into a student, that's a good outcome.
Q. When did you all identify Kobe in the predraft process as someone you wanted to target?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: Again, our scouts do an incredible job. They've known who Kobe was for a long time. So they helped set our board, set our process. And then our coaches get involved. That's a position where you have to have heavy coach involvement because of the football learning, the fit in our defense, communication, all those things aren't necessarily something that I might be able to watch or a scout might be able to watch and determine.
Once the coaches got involved and saw that they thought he could start or potential, that really just becomes an exercise of going through your scenarios and seeing, hey, we have really intelligent people who calculate the odds of people being available in certain places in the draft.
Through some of our simulation exercises we saw that he potentially would be available -- we didn't think where we got him but in other places -- so that I and Kevin can kind of allocate our time accordingly. We try and focus on the people that are kind of higher probability to be there where we would be expected to pick.
And one of our exercises, I remember, that he came up, and whenever a name comes up that we haven't deep dived, we make sure we deep dive into it. And we did it. Honestly, I watched him. I said, there's no way he'll be there when this projection says he will be.
Sometimes you get lucky. But you pick up the phone and you talk to somebody and you hear it in their voice that they also don't think they should have been there. That gets you pretty fired up to bring them over to Minnesota.
Q. I know we talked about the compensatory formula related to quarterback depth. Beyond that, do you imagine once that deadline passes you might dip back into some things after that point?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: Yeah, we'll take a look. Obviously there's always that consideration. But again I think we're pretty excited about our options, just a couple spots here and there we'll monitor.
But CFA process is happening right now. We try to be a glass-half-full organization, and we think there's some people in there that would compete for a roster spot. If we get them, that could be just something where we decide to go in that direction.
Q. You talked about impact in this draft class. How do you measure that in year one with a guy that in some cases might be a multiyear development prospect, how do you figure that out?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: A lot of times we have kind of ways of, even if you didn't have some complicated way, you could just look at average play time for a player that draft round, and a lot of that is not necessarily incorporated in talent. Some of that is just an opportunity, if there's somebody behind him or, I'm sorry, in front of him. So we're going to look at each player kind of on their own standing, and the opportunity that they have in front of them, how they work in your practice, are they working to get better. I think that's how we evaluate players.
If there's an opportunity, how do they play, all the while knowing that players don't come in ready-made. That's not how it works in the NFL. Year one, that's not how their career is written. That's not how we study them. That's not how anybody's career really particularly goes. And obviously we prefer year one roles when they happen. It's always better to play earlier if possible, but we'll judge them kind of on a curve based on the opportunity in front of them, but again there's some players here that we think should see the field in year one and we're excited for it.
Q. With Sam Howell, what kind of conversations did you and Kevin have that spurred you guys to want to acquire him specifically?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: Kevin talks a lot about -- he probably doesn't use the term QB portfolio -- but just kind of the makeup of the room, and specifically what skill sets you want in the room, what experience set you want in the room.
And we kind of really just try and talk through a game and a season in a sense, if he had to come off the bench and play for this game, what type of skill set would you want, if you needed him for three games, and that's also in relation to the type of team you have around him. Are we going to be able to run the football? Are we going to play defense, rush the passer? All those different kinds of things.
We had that conversation and said, hey, if he needed to come in and play this period, this late in the season or this early in the season, what would that be like? Would you want a player with -- I don't want to get too specific with skill sets, but different things they can do on a field to help you.
And that's really just how we have it. And just making sure that -- also the rep thing is a good thing. That's something I've had to learn from Kevin and the dedication of reps to develop a player like J.J., it's not necessarily going to lend itself to a ton of reps elsewhere.
So just really thinking through the portfolio in that regards. We try and be very mindful of that. Those are some of my fondest conversations because there's no right or wrong answer and we're malleable, open minded in the way we talk about it. Sam was just somebody that really filled a lot of those needs.
Q. From a bigger picture, I know you just finished up the draft. So maybe you haven't thought too much about this, but when you set out for the offseason, I guess how does this look now that the draft is over, the free agency is mostly over, kind of in comparison to the goals that you set out to accomplish this offseason with this roster?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: I've got to be honest with you, my family probably just got here. I've got to make sure that little Nerf hoop is put together for my son in my office.
I have a lot of people to thank and hug for the work they do here. I haven't thought about all the things we've done, but I will always go back to the incredible hard work that everybody in this group does. We set a vision to start this offseason.
So before I actually sit back and talk about what we've accomplished, I can appreciate for all the work they've put in to the vision we set, always just go back to that, just how grateful I am for all the people around us, from the personnel staff, coaching staff, operations staff, just incredibly minded.
But I'll get there. I'm not there yet. I'm just trying to be in the moment right now and go see my family and just thank a lot of people.
Q. We saw picks announced from all around the world today. And it's great to have that international fan recognition. We know how invested the club is with the UK and this side of the pond. I wanted to ask you how important is it to you to recognize Vikings fans all around the world on a day like today?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: I think I got the question. You were breaking up a little bit. Can I confirm that it was just how important was it to see the Vikings fans represented all over the world were a part of the picks we made?
Look, this game that we play is an incredibly beautiful sport that we all wake up and work long hours for. It's just an incredible thing to see the global outreach that this game can have and Vikings fans.
When I got this job, I think I've told the story about my mom's neighbor who ended up being a lifelong Vikings fan that I never knew, took me to his Vikings shrine in a bedroom.
It never goes unnoticed to me how broad this fan base is and how passionate it is. It doesn't surprise me the fans all over the world just enjoying this game what it brings and the celebration of the game. That's one of my favorite things about the UK game. When I'm not working in football anymore, I think that's the game I probably want to attend as a fan. I think it's just a celebration of football. I want to sing Sweet Caroline in the stands with everybody else and do all the fun things you guys do when you're not sweating out a fourth quarter game in the NFL.
But I think it's just incredible what this league's been able to do spreading the game internationally and will continue to do so in Africa. I'm fortunate enough to be involved in the gunny (phonetic) and flag football team effort.
If anybody would like to go support that effort, we're happy to have you. But it's just incredible, the outreach of the game, what it's been able to do.
Q. You mentioned this has been part of a vision you set through the offseason. How would you articulate that vision in a nutshell? How did the draft get into that?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: I don't know if you want the 22-page manifesto that just comes. But it's hard to put it, encapsulate it, I would say, into a sentence. But I think, in a sense you can see the type of team you want it to be on the football field and you can see them play.
Kevin and I talk our words. You're just picturing the type of team, situations and how they play, and you set forth, put together a vision and that type of team to win four games or how many games you need to win to win the ultimate prize. You can get into different types of fights. You don't know what type of fight it's going to be when you enter it. You want to be able to have the type of roster and the type of schemes that allow you to win any type of game. So we've tried to do that.
I would say that encapsulates a lot of what we try to do and the types of players and people we want to bring in encapsulates that. So it's hard to really put that into -- it's a lot of like discrete thoughts that come together to how it looks in your head and how it looks in KO's head and we're excited where we ended up.
Q. Was it really a 22-page manifesto?
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH: It's long. It's long. A lot of -- probably my favorite part of the job, when you wake up and you think about different things, you learn from other sports, other teams in the league, and just different dynamics. It's great because the game always changes. When you think you've got one thing figured out, you see a team doing something different. You try and see where the game is going in that regard. But a lot of playing, '26, '27, where can we be?
I think a lot of times people think we make an action, there's a series of events that led to that action. Even if you think of our draft day trades today, it's 102 but we ended up getting 139 and 142, which was a plan to take those next steps.
So all those connected things are musings that I think through and I wake up and I tell them to Kevin and I tell them to my staff. They say, you're right. Then there's new ones in there.
It comes out in a vision. It's cool. We're almost like a band, where we come up with a song and everybody's got ideas and you guys get to see the final product. Hopefully it's a beautiful song like "Bicycle" by Queen or something like that and not something on the worst hits track.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports