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Kevin Seifert, ESPN Staff Writer
If you’ve listened carefully in recent weeks, two words in particular have flowed from the Minnesota Vikings’ top decision-makers as they attempt a dramatic quarterback transition from Kirk Cousins to a rookie they hope to draft this month.
“We need another team to be complicit,” coach Kevin O’Connell said last week at the annual NFL meeting.
“When we enter this draft,” general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah said, “we have the flexibility to go either way.”
The search for a complicit team willing to facilitate a trade up in the draft, and the need for flexibility to adjust if they can’t find one, is the middle ground the Vikings are operating in. No matter how much they might want to draft LSU’s Jayden Daniels, North Carolina’s Drake Maye, Michigan’s J.J. McCarthy or even USC’s Caleb Williams, they almost certainly can’t do it with the better of their two first-round picks at No. 11 overall.
Last week’s league meeting, moreover, helped demonstrate the competition they’ll face even if they do find willing trade partners. Denver Broncos coach Sean Payton, for one, said last week he believes it’s “realistic” to trade up from his team’s spot at No. 12 to find a replacement for Russell Wilson.
Interviews at the league meeting in Orlando, Florida, revealed the Vikings are working down parallel paths to cover for a pair of outcomes.
On the one hand, they’ve made deep plans to evaluate the top prospects via private workouts and/or visits, and they formed the outlines of a structure focused on developing a rookie quarterback. On the other, they’re preparing for the possibility of riding with offseason free agent addition Sam Darnold in 2024 and then regrouping with either a quarterback drafted with a lower pick or perhaps a look ahead to the 2025 class.
Naturally, there is a level of gamesmanship involved in their comments. No team in their position would sell out publicly toward one outcome. But the Vikings also know they can’t will themselves to draft a coveted quarterback prospect, even after acquiring additional draft capital — including the No. 23 overall pick from the Houston Texans — last month.
“There’s a lot of scenarios,” Adofo-Mensah told the Vikings’ website in Orlando. “I like the flexibility that those two picks give us. I don’t think they lock us into any one strategy. I know the mock draft season is here, so I think people are probably thinking they know with more certainty what we’re going to do than the Vikings do. But we’re excited about the flexibility we have and we’re going to approach our board with that mindset.”
In the meantime, Adofo-Mensah has mapped out an extensive plan to complete the team’s evaluations for the top prospects — mostly in private settings. Neither he nor O’Connell attended the initial pro days of several top prospects, but they are instead arranging individual workouts and visits that would take place either on campus, in the prospect’s home area or at the team’s practice facility in Minnesota.
O’Connell has plenty of experience in the performative aspects of pro days, having served as a quarterback draft consultant before entering the NFL coaching ranks in 2015.
“I was at the combine [this year],” O’Connell said, “so the guys that did throw, I was in the seventh row watching those guys throw. Obviously, the film, the tape is always going to be the true evaluator of where a guy’s at, where you see him getting to the growth they had from the beginning of their journey to the end of their college journey. I think pro days are great for a lot of reasons, having nothing to do with the script and nothing to do with what you actually get to see when you make the effort to go there. … But nothing compares to really completing that full process with a visit or them maybe coming to the Twin Cities.”
During private visits, O’Connell said, he hopes to “start the process of teaching” and then gauge immediate response.
“You can ask them questions in real time and see how fast they remember things,” O’Connell said, “and how fast they’re digesting the information or the question you’re asking. How clearly and articulately can they put that information into real tangible things that then I can use as a coach for feedback to help them in the future?
“And then I think the value of them learning basically a foreign language in a lot of ways, parts of our system. Then you can go on the grass and see if they understand how we want to set our feet and eyes on this drop. Or when we talk about pocket movement, what that looks like when we talk about on schedule versus off schedule, red zone, third down — how it fits within the framework of, not our system, but the system that we want to build for them.”
Finally, O’Connell said he will seek ways to evaluate quarterbacks in the community as well.
“You can get a real quick indication of the level of excitement we all have for a guy based upon spending a good chunk of time together on their home turf,” he said. “See how they interact with people around the athletic facility, maybe allow them to take us to lunch. We may pick up the tab, but I want to go to where, ‘Hey, where’s your favorite spot to go to lunch?’ And I want to see how they interact with folks, because building-changing quarterbacks, they don’t just change the facilities. Any room they ever walk into, they light it up, they change it, they impact it.”
O’Connell has already initiated a few structural changes on his coaching staff to give himself more time to develop the quarterback he hopes to draft. And if they can’t find a complicit team to trade with, they will still have the flexibility of the No. 23 overall pick to work with. That’s the world they’re living in, for at least the rest of this month.