EAGAN, Minn. -- Kwesi Adofo-Mensah had been an NFL general manager for 92 days when he conducted his first draft with the Minnesota Vikings. He had the No. 12 overall pick, giving him a chance to add an impact player to his roster right away. Instead, he viewed that spot as an opportunity to fill multiple roster needs at once.
The results, which became clear this week, were disastrous. A series of trades landed Adofo-Mensah four of the top 66 picks. The first two -- safety Lewis Cine (No. 32) and cornerback Andrew Booth Jr. (No. 42) -- are no longer on the roster. Ed Ingram (No. 59) continues as the starting right guard, although the Vikings signed competition for this summer, while linebacker Brian Asamoah II (No. 66) appears set for a third season of mostly special teams work.
An introspective Adofo-Mensah said Thursday he wouldn't talk about the individual players specifically but has "thought a lot about those days," a frenzied time after being hired to conduct what he termed a "competitive rebuild."
Offering rare transparency into the kind of mistakes that general managers often try to downplay, he compared his 2022 approach to teams that try to make up a big on-field deficit in one play. In explaining how he recognized his error, Adofo-Mensah said he talked to coach Kevin O'Connell about how the Vikings came back from a 33-0 deficit in Week 15 of the 2022 season -- an eventual 39-36 victory for the biggest comeback in NFL history -- to help mold his approach moving forward. After making a league-high six draft trades in 2022, he made three apiece in 2023 and 2024.
"When I entered the building trying to compete [with an] aging roster, salary cap stuff, I think there was times where I felt down 33-nothing," he said. "And as we all know, that game, it starts with one play, one drive and you build. And I think at times I might've been guilty of trying to maybe have a 33-point play all at once.
"And I think once I identified that, if you've seen it since then, it's been really foundationally just taking good steps, building to a certain critical point where I think we compete over the long term."
The Vikings are now in Year 3 of Adofo-Mensah's tenure, and external expectations of a sub-.500 season might be different if they could count on major contributions from players selected at the top of the draft two years ago.
To be fair, some of the other draft picks from 2022 -- most notably cornerback Akayleb Evans (No. 118), running back Ty Chandler (No. 169) and receiver Jalen Nailor (No. 191) -- should be key backups in 2024. Meanwhile, their top pick in 2023, receiver Jordan Addison, and one of their 2024 first-round picks (linebacker Dallas Turner) are slotted to be Week 1 starters.
But it's rare for a draft to crash as spectacularly as the Vikings' did in 2022, and NFL owners don't typically give mulligans for inexperience, overambition or other missteps. Cine got on the field for only two defensive snaps as a rookie before he suffered a compound fracture of his left leg in his third game. He returned in the spring of 2023 to a new defensive coordinator in Brian Flores and never gained traction in his scheme. Cine appeared in a total of 10 games over two seasons, seeing action for 10 defensive snaps, and a lower body injury this summer in training camp ended any opportunity he might have had to displace the players stacked above him.
Booth played in only six games as a rookie before knee surgery ended his season, and like Cine, he was buried on the depth chart in 2023. The Vikings traded him to the Dallas Cowboys earlier this month for cornerback Nahshon Wright, who was waived this week and re-signed to the Vikings' practice squad.
In all, Cine is one of three first-round picks in Vikings history never to start a game. He and Booth are two of six Vikings players selected among the top 42 picks to depart after two or fewer seasons.
"What you don't want to do is try and solve all of the issues at once," Adofo-Mensah said. "So I think you still want to have long- and short-term horizons when you make decisions. You just don't want to be in a rush to get to that end goal. You just really want to be deliberate in your process. And we've done a really good job doing that [since then].
"And I'm not saying that that was the sole [explanation] in the 2022 draft, but that's something that I've kind of just been self-scouting and reporting in my own reflections about just my want and eagerness to bring to this team what they all want to see in the city."
O'Connell this week noted an additional set of factors in that 2022 draft. He and his coaching staff had even less time -- 71 days -- to prepare for it than Adofo-Mensah did. It is no secret around the Vikings' practice facility that O'Connell, Flores and other members of the coaching staff have been more involved in draft evaluation and decision-making than the original staff was in 2022.
"You are trying to get to know your roster," O'Connell said of the 2022 draft, "but at the same time, time is not going to be on your side for having a perfect draft process. ... I look back on that and just say to myself, 'What could I have done better in the moment to help communicate what I thought was the best possible outcome out of that?'
"And it's helped moving forward ... all of those conversations have to have a layer of realism on the past to help you have the type of future that you want to have. Otherwise, you can be in a scenario where you can make similar decisions that don't work out multiple times, and then it becomes something that is hard to overcome."
In their conversation about the 2022 comeback against the Colts, O'Connell offered Adofo-Mensah an additional bit of insight. Even after recognizing the misstep, O'Connell said, "The adversity isn't over."
Indeed, the Vikings were thrilled about their 2024 draft after securing not only Turner -- perhaps the best pass rusher available -- but also their quarterback of the future in J.J. McCarthy. Cornerback Khyree Jackson, drafted at No. 108 overall, appeared a perfect fit for Flores' scheme. However, Jackson was killed in a July 6 car accident and a knee injury will sideline McCarthy for his entire rookie season. Mekhi Blackmon, a cornerback selected No. 102 overall in 2023, will also miss the season because of a knee injury suffered on the first day of training camp.
Those losses prompted not only a summer-long overhaul of the cornerback position, leading to five veteran acquisitions, but also a quarterback shuffle that continued into this week with the decision to sign veteran Brett Rypien as depth behind starter Sam Darnold and backup Nick Mullens. It was the kind of adversity the Vikings faced during the 2022 game against the Colts, even after they began shortening the deficit.
"If you think at any point in time you're going to be able to eliminate adversity, you're fooling yourself," O'Connell said. "And I think at any point in time, if you make it anything other than about each individual play or process, draft pick, free agency, undrafted free agency, having a great training camp. ...
"If we think about anything too 'big picture' to not laser focus where our feet are planted, I think you're going to really give yourself a hard road to overcome that adversity. And how that applies from 33-0 in an NFL football game to building a roster, that's probably as close as it is."