Today the Minnesota Vikings announced that they hired Cleveland’s vice president of football operations, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, as their new General Manager.
The 40-year-old majored in economics at Princeton before entering Wall Street as an energy and commodities trader. In 2013, he got his masters in economics from Stanford and started his career in sports with the San Francisco 49ers in research and development. After seven years in the Bay Area, he headed to Cleveland as the Browns’ vice president of football operations.
The New Jersey native replaces Rick Spielman, who had been with the organization for 16 years, the last 10 as GM.
Adofo-Mensah inherits a team with stars in Justin Jefferson and Dalvin Cook, but questions at quarterback and some defensive holes that need to be plugged. But with the job that he did in Cleveland, where he helped construct the team that made the playoffs a year ago after being absent since 1995, things look promising for Minnesota.
This gives the NFL seven Black general managers: Chris Grier (Miami), Brad Holmes (Detroit), Martin Mayhew (Washington), Terry Fontenot (Atlanta), Andrew Berry (Cleveland), Ryan Poles (who was hired by the Bears yesterday) and Adofo-Mensah.
Now that they have their GM in place, the team can focus on landing a new head coach to replace Mike Zimmer, who, along with Spielman, was fired two weeks ago.
The Browns are not left empty-handed. They will receive compensatory third-round selections in each of the next two drafts due to the NFL’s 2020 rule instituted to encourage minority hires.
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