Before and After Sam Darnold: Vikings fire 'analytics GM' as Schneider rakes in awards

Sam Darnold is changing the lives of general managers everywhere

Being a general manager who tangles with Sam Darnold must be like eating a box of Harry Potter jelly beans, the ones that have some really good flavors mixed with pranks like “booger” and “gluten-free earwax”. Darnold’s GMs have gone through both the agony and the ecstasy in matter of a week:

In the same month that John Schneider is sweeping awards given to NFL executives, the Vikings fired general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah on Friday with the main impetus for both of those things being Darnold’s 2025 free agency experience.

The analytically-minded Adofo-Mensah was reportedly or allegedly the one person who got his way when Minnesota opted to let Darnold leave without so much as a franchise tag despite the importance placed on quarterbacks, the success that the Vikings had in 2024, and his successor being an inexperienced player who in every important way was a “rookie”.

This newsletter is not meant to be a “ha ha” that the Seahawks got Darnold because of Minnesota’s mistakes, or that Darnold solely led Seattle to the Super Bowl (because he certainly didn’t), or dancing on the grave of a person having a really bad day.

It MIGHT, however, be dancing on the grave of analytics twitter’s celebration that “they” finally got an NFL GM.

The “ANALYTICS” GM

When he was hired in 2022, Adofo-Mensah was lauded by analytics twitter as the validation they wanted that you didn’t need a background in football in order to run a football team. You just needed a master’s degree from Stanford and to be following Ben Baldwin on Twitter.

And you know what? I pretty much do agree that a background of playing or coaching football shouldn’t be a prerequisite to be a GM. None of us think of John Schneider as a football player. I also agree that analytics is useful and should always be incorporated into your plan.

But “analytics” should not BE the plan. Case in point, this firing is just the latest in a series of bad PR for analytics following a rash of playoff coaches getting criticized for not taking free points:

Do coaches go for it too often? (Seahawks ranked 32nd in fourth down attempts) Let me know what you think:

Why Adofo-Mensah lost the Darnold wars

Darnold’s free agency is interesting because it’s not analytics, so much as it is “capalytics”. The Vikings were so hard-wired to believe that “you win games more with a rookie contract quarterback” that Adofo-Mensah never actually stopped to question if it mattered that he was replacing one of last season’s BEST quarterbacks (who he won 14 games with) with someone who at least 10 teams passed on in the draft (traded up for McCarthy) and Lance Zierlein opened his pre-draft evaluation of with:

“Enigmatic quarterback lacking the measurables and splash throws associated with early round quarterbacks…”

Wow….how exciting?

It would be different if McCarthy, like Patrick Mahomes, had spent an entire season flashing that he was a draft diamond who was destined to replace the starter. However, he spent his entire rookie season on injured reserve.

Seahawks fans (for sure me included) have long awaited for the day when the team would also turn the reins over to a rookie-contract quarterback. But…

Darnold’s GM history:

-The Jets GM who drafted him: Fired a year later

-The Jets GM who traded him: Fired

-The Panthers GM who traded for him: Fired

-The 49ers GM who signed him in 2023: Lost biggest games of his season to Darnold 2x in 3 weeks

-Vikings GM who signed him/let him walk: Fired a year later

-Seahawks GM who signed him: Executive of the Year

In fact, Jalen Milroe might actually be the new trend worth exploring: A day two project quarterback who has tools but lacks refinement and coaching, similar to the four-year transformation of Malik Willis from a BAD college quarterback to at worst a great NFL backup.

If Milroe fails, the investment was low. If McCarthy fails, his contract was still worth almost $22 million guaranteed; Darnold’s contract with Seattle that Minnesota wouldn’t beat? $37.5 million guaranteed. Darnold’s 2025 cap hit was only $8 million higher than McCarthy’s and although that gap gets a lot wider in 2026, does that matter anymore? The Seahawks are going to the Super Bowl!

Before and After Darnold

The Vikings signed Darnold after a 7-10 season in which they averaged 20 points per game and threw 19 interceptions. Cousins missed half of the 2023 season with an Achilles tear, which caused most of Minnesota’s offensive issues, but compared to Darnold’s year as the starter the improvement was impossible to miss, even when compared to Cousins.

How the hell does an NFL team overlook this?

As you can see in this chart, the Vikings reverted back to the same points average they had before Darnold in 2023 and in many ways were significantly worse with McCarthy (10 starts)/Wentz (5)/Brosmer (2) than the offense that had Cousins, Josh Dobbs and Nick Mullens:

So an NFL front office and ownership group saw Sam Darnold do that ^^ behind one of the league’s worst offensive lines and thought “We oughta spend the money we have on Will Fries and Javon Hargrave”???

The combined average annual salary of any two of these players is as much or more than the AAV for Darnold: Bryon Murphy, Will Fries, Jonathan Allen, Javon Hargrave. Fries, Allen, and Hargrave COMBINED to play in 16 games the year before they came to Minnesota.

Common sense could imply that four NFL players are better than one, but the Vikings got significantly worse in 2025. The Seahawks got significantly better.

Darnold’s contributions for that should be appropriately measured — he didn’t have to do a lot during Seattle’s 9-game winning streak aside from both wins over the Rams (which is nevertheless a HUGE contribution) — and I am not going to overrated the quarterback like so many others have. But one comparison deserves another:

I’m even acknowledging that Seattle changed offensive coordinators. The difference with Darnold clearly isn’t as dramatic as it was in Minnesota, but Geno Smith also isn’t as bad as McCarthy or Mullens. The Seahawks also didn’t task Darnold with throwing 35 touchdowns because they had the third-most rushing attempts and the top-ranked defense in the league. When Seattle needs touchdowns or two-point conversions from Sam Darnold, he has typically delivered.

Aside from a couple of key moments during the season (Week 1 fumble vs 49ers; Week 5 interceptions vs Bucs; Week 16 red zone INT to Kobie Turner vs Rams) I can’t recall any times that Darnold didn’t deliver when the Seahawks needed him.

Stats and analytics aren’t necessary for all kinds of evaluations:

There is a feeling you should have about the Seahawks in big games and big moments this year that seemed to die in 2015’s playoff loss to the Panthers and hasn’t returned until Week 16’s Thursday night win over the Rams.

The Seahawks weren’t beating great teams before Darnold. The Seahawks are beating great teams now.

That’s SAM-alytics.

What was your favorite Sam Darnold play of the season?

When “long-term” is the wrong term

Less than three months after they let Darnold leave, the Vikings signed Adofo-Mensah to a contract extension with the Wilf owners citing his “forward-thinking approach” for “long-term success” as the reason for rewarding his three-year tenure with a longer commitment. The Vikings were subtly saying that they trusted the ANALYTICS process to replace Kirk Cousins with McCarthy by using and then discarding Darnold for a maximum of one season.

Adofo-Mensah is considered the first GM hire in history to have a background primarily in analytics. Adofo-Mensah downplayed the word on his resume, but “analytics twitter” was quick to crown him as the “nerd” who would lead them into the new age of NFL Moneyball; a future in which every GM hire would soon be “a guy in his mom’s basement” who was never on a team until the day he traded in his fantasy team for a real one.

During Adofo-Mensah’s 2022-2025 tenure as a GM, the Vikings were one of 11 teams that did not draft a single Pro Bowler; they have the second-worst cap situation in the NFL in 2026; their 2024 quarterback is starting the 2025 season’s Super Bowl for a different team.

Analytic’s Twitter’s response to today’s news:

How could analytics miss the forest for the trees?

Darnold’s “bridge” label was clearly going to stick for Adofo-Mensah despite everything that happened during the 2024 season that should have forced Minnesota to reassess and change the quarterback plans they made when they traded up for McCarthy in the draft. A move that Broncos head coach Sean Payton not-so-subtly laughed about in a post-draft press conference.

Letting Darnold leave over money that you then handed to guys like Byron Murphy (the cornerback) in order to hand the reins over to an untested quarterback because that was the plan nine months earlier was actually the least “forward-thinking” move of the 2025 NFL offseason. And the Vikings extended him for it. Then fired him for it.

In the press release for Adofo-Mensah’s extension last May, Darnold’s name was only mentioned by the Vikings once, as a throwaway inclusion among of group of 2024 free agents who helped Minnesota win their most games in a season since 1998. In the hour following Adofo-Mensah’s firing, Darnold’s name has been mentioned A LOT.

Seeing Darnold BEAT THE PRESSURE in the NFC Championship to throw 3 touchdowns against the same Rams team that the Vikings lost to in the playoffs last year was the final straw for ownership and they informed Adofo-Mensah of his dismissal in the same week that he’s at the Senior Bowl scouting players for a draft he’ll take no part in.

If you needed any evidence that Darnold is the reason that the Vikings fired their GM less than a year after his extension, the timing of it is the smoking gun.

Adofo-Mensah was asked this week about what went into the decision to part with Darnold last year and though he took some accountability for it, he said that it is “revisionist” history to now bring it up after the 2025 season. Is it though?

The Vikings went 14-3 and Darnold threw 35 touchdown passes with Minnesota. McCarthy was not a consensus top-10 pick by any stretch of the imagination (it would be REVISIONIST to now pretend that most people expected McCarthy to be a top-10 pick when in reality he got a lot of day 2 grades leading up to and during the draft) and he had not practiced since the beginning of 2024 training camp.

If the Vikings’ downfall was “unpredictable” a year ago, Adofo-Mensah would not have been fired on Friday. Maybe the only surprising thing about Darnold’s free agency was how easy it was for Seattle to sign him for $33 million per season without a fight. CBS just called Darnold’s contract “the most valuable addition” in the NFL last year.

Analytics wants you to believe that the data they provide is irrefutible proof that there’s a right way and a wrong way, like hardcoded universal math. Except that football is played, coached, and managed by humans, meaning that there are inherent flaws AND ADVANTAGES that can only be decided and created by humans, such as “forget what the analytics say about paying quarterbacks…just tell me do we want to pay THIS quarterback?”

In reality, analytics is oftentimes no different than a game of looking at a jar of candy and being asked, “How many jelly beans?”

Seaside Joe 2524