Kwesi Adofo-Mensah: Sometimes you have to take swings for great players
After the Vikings made a trade with the Texans to acquire a second first-round pick earlier this year, it wasn't hard to find predictions that they'd trade up in the first round.
Those predictions weren't wrong, but they wound up being a little inaccurate. Instead of packaging the picks to move up for a quarterback, the Vikings wound up making a pair of trades before Thursday night was over.
The first moved them from No. 11 to No. 10 to take quarterback J.J. McCarthy and the second took them from No. 23 to No. 17 to take edge rusher Dallas Turner. They gave up fourth- and fifth-round picks this year in the McCarthy deal and sent a fifth-rounder along with two 2025 picks to Jacksonville to get Turner. After the picks were in, General Manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah said the team didn't want to look back and feel they missed out on something because they weren't aggressive enough.
"You know, we're always talking about minimizing regret," Adofo-Mensah said, via Ben Goessling of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. "If you're sitting on your couch one day, and you're like, 'That extra fifth [-round pick] or whatever it was, and you could have had a chance at a guy you think could be special,' you're never going to care about that fifth-round pick. And there's ways of getting it back. Obviously, I'm a spreadsheet guy myself, but sometimes, you've got to step out from there, take your Clark Kent glasses off, have a championship mindset and swing for a great player."
The Vikings took a pair of swings on Thursday night and connections on both will give the Vikings a strong foundation to build on in the years to come.
