Analysis: Super Bowl GMs show just how off-target Vikings were in hiring Kwesi Adofo-Mensah

Looking for reasons other than Sam Darnold to explain why Seahawks General Manager John Schneider is in San Francisco after building another Super Bowl team and why the Vikings missed the playoffs and finally admitted their radical hire of Kwesi Adofo-Mensah as GM was a monumental flop?

Here are 571.

That’s how many starts Seattle has gotten from the 38 players Schneider drafted in the past four years. Thirty of those players (79%) are still on the team that will play the Patriots in Super Bowl LX on Sunday, Feb. 8.

Here’s another number: 172.

That’s how many starts the Vikings have gotten from the 28 players Adofo-Mensah drafted in the past four years. Only 14 of those players are still on the team.

Here’s a final number: 368.

According to Kevin Seifert, ESPN’s astute football mind, that was the NFL average for starts per team by players drafted in the past four years. That puts the Vikings 31st among 32 teams — 196 below the league average and 399 short of the NFC champs — and should all but guarantee the Vikings’ next general manager won’t be another extreme experiment in analytics.

Looking at the two Super Bowl general managers also makes you want to talk to Ron Wolf, the Hall of Fame GM who resurrected the Packers in the 1990s.

Wolf is the father of Eliot Wolf, the Patriots’ executive vice president of player personnel and de facto general manager since 2024. Ron’s also the guy who gave Schneider a foot in the door back in 1992 when Schneider, a native of De Pere, Wis., was in his junior year as a history and secondary education major at the University of St. Thomas.

“John was persistent,” Wolf said this week. “He wrote letters. He called. He’s got a bulldog tenacity about him. He caught me in the office one Sunday. I agreed to bring him in as an intern and the rest, as you say, is history.”

Schneider, now 54, met Eliot, 43, when Eliot was just hanging around Lambeau Field as a kid in the ‘90s. The two hit it off in part because they’re kindred football-loving spirits.

“What’s impressed me most about Eliot was his stick-to-itiveness,” Wolf said. “I can’t take credit for Eliot. I was out of football by the time the Packers hired him [as a pro personnel assistant in 2004]. He learned from guys with quality football instincts like Ted Thompson, John Dorsey, Reggie McKenzie and, of course, John Schneider.”

In other words, they were everything Adofo-Mensah wasn’t when he stepped to the top of the Vikings’ front office in 2022. To some of us old-school outside observers, the hire seemed suspect at best, doomed at worst. Similar feelings existed inside the Vikings organization as well.

Wolf was asked about analytics vs. football instincts.

“I started out as a scout in 1963 with Al Davis, and it was always, ‘Height, weight, speed’ at each position, which is analytics, I think,” he said. “I’m not a big proponent of today’s analytics but that’s because I’m not familiar with whatever they’re talking about. I’m sure there are advantages to it, but the thing I would always come back to, which was taught to me long ago, was, ‘CHP.’”

CHP?

“CHP is, ‘Can He Play?’” Wolf said. “You can’t make this job a science. How can you make what’s inside a guy science? A guy like Kurt Warner comes in, a street free agent who becomes a Hall of Fame quarterback. Analytics didn’t do that.

Schneider was working on that football instinct the moment he reached out to Wolf as a college student in the Twin Cities.

“I wrote that letter asking Ron Wolf to take a chance on me,” Schneider told the school newspaper years ago. “Then I went to the St. Thomas chapel and prayed as hard as I could.”

At 22, Schneider was a full-time Packers scout. At 26, he was a director of pro personnel with the Chiefs. At 29, he was Seattle’s player personnel director. At 31, he was assistant GM with the Packers.

And, before his 40th birthday in 2010, Schneider became the Seahawks’ GM. Today, he’s the czar who built one Super Bowl champion around Russell Wilson in the 2010s and is gunning for another title with an entirely new roster on Sunday.

Eliot Wolf, meanwhile, was a Packers pro personnel assistant at age 22. At 26, he was an assistant director of pro personnel. He was a director of pro personnel at 30, an assistant GM in Cleveland at 36 and the Patriots’ top dog at 42.

Adofo-Mensah’s 2025 draft produced five players. One (linebacker Kobe King) was gone midseason and one (tight end Gavin Bartholomew) didn’t play because of an injury. Left guard Donovan Jackson started 14 games, while defensive lineman Tyrion Ingram-Dawkins had one start and wide receiver Tai Felton had none.