Minnesota Vikings Must Find Defender Who Can Dominate Schedule In 2023

The general manager of an NFL team has to be a master architect. He must assess the material he has at his disposal. He has to come up with a plan that is logical and realistic. He has to execute that plan and be willing to make changes along the way.

Kwesi Adofo-Mensah had to do all of that on the fly last year since it was his first with the Minnesota Vikings. There was no learning curve; he just had to do it.

The results were pretty good – if you look at the regular season. The Vikings wrested control of the NFC North from the Green Bay Packers and they won the division title going away. By the end of the regular season there were serious warning signs that the Vikings had a major weakness on defense and that was confirmed in the Wild Card loss to the mediocre New York Giants.

Adofo-Mensah has a much clearer picture of the team he runs. He has to come up with a plan that will get the Vikings on the road to championship-level football.

Cap problems and a dearth of draft picks don’t matter at all. This is the time he must have the vision to determine what that will take. Once that happens, it’s about being smart enough to execute that plan in spite of any problems or limitations the team may face.

There is no reason to be critical about what happened in 2022. Adofo-Mensah came into an organization that had no leadership. Mike Zimmer had just been fired, and the team was in tatters after two non-playoff seasons.

He needed to find the right head coach and he did in Kevin O’Connell. While he may be a nice guy who may not want to put the hammer down, he is smart, creative and demonstrated that he can build camaraderie in what had been a morose locker room.

That was a huge step and many general managers never get that far. While the Vikings were unable to do anything about their defensive problems that have been in effect since the start of the 2020 season – and maybe even before that – they have built the foundation of a winning culture.

It gets harder from here because there is so much work to do on the defense. Ed Donatell has already lost his job, but an honest look at the situation reveals that the poor play of the Minnesota defense – 31^st in yardage allowed and 30^th in points allowed – reveals that schematics were just a part of the problem.

The real issue is that the Vikings don’t have enough talent on the defensive side of the ball to stop competent NFL offenses. They don’t have a single defensive player who can assert himself and take over a game by sheer force of will. That includes Danielle Hunter, Za’Darius Smith, Eric Kendricks and Harrison Smith.

They need a nasty, hard-hitting, tone-setting leader who is on the field because he wants to punish the opposition on an every-play basis.

The best examples of these players in the current NFL include Aaron Donald of the Los Angeles Rams and Von Miller of the Buffalo Bills. Both ended their season on the injured list, but when both men were healthy, they were unstoppable.

The Rams won the Super Bowl a year ago largely because the combination of Donald and Miller left the Cincinnati Bengals with no answers. Both men had 2.0 sacks in that game, and Joe Burrow was not allowed to get comfortable against them.

Miller was at his peak with the Denver Broncos, and he led them to a Super Bowl 50 win over the Carolina Panthers with 2.5 sacks of Cam Newton. The Carolina quarterback came into the game as Superman but he was a physical wreck by the end of it.

Adofo-Mensah must find a way to build up his defense, and finding one or two players who can take over a game and wreck an offense is the best way.

Once he identifies a way to do that, then attention is turned to the particulars of cap space and acquiring draft picks.

But first things first. Find the player who can take over and take over a game for 60 minutes. Here’s some free advice: That player is not currently on the Vikings roster.