The Minnesota Vikings made one of the stranger moves of the young NFL offseason last week when they fired general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah nearly a month after their last game.<\/p>\n
Reporters raced to explain why Minnesota would let go of its highly regarded GM for four years. While Adofo-Mensah oversaw two 13-plus win seasons, he also bears the blame for letting go of quarterback Sam Darnold, who is about to start Super Bowl LX for Seattle<\/a>, in favor of an underperforming first-round pick in J.J. McCarthy.<\/p>\n As more information trickled out, it became clear that Adofo-Mensah had been in the hot seat for a while. The analytics-driven former Wall Street trader clearly had detractors within the Vikings and around the NFL.<\/p>\n However, one smaller rumor circulated online, leading some to wonder whether Adofo-Mensah\u2019s commitment to his family ultimately came at the expense of his professional future in Minnesota.<\/p>\n Now, longtime NFL insider Dianna Russini is writing<\/a> that while rare, Adofo-Mensah\u2019s decision to take paternity leave during the 2023 offseason was not in fact a driving reason the Vikings fired him.<\/p>\n Apparently, the GM missed \u201cabout two weeks\u201d of training camp that summer while working remotely, according to Russini and The Athletic\u2019s Vikings beat reporter, Alec Lewis. The decision \u201coffered more evidence that Adofo-Mensah approached the work-life component of the role differently from many of his NFL peers,\u201d Russini wrote.<\/p>\n There\u2019s been a lot of conversation around Kwesi Adofo-Mensah taking paternity leave, largely because it\u2019s still rare in the NFL.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s important to note that the Minnesota Vikings supported him through the entire process and did not hold it against him in any way.<\/p>\n This was a\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/b5D6V8svBI<\/a><\/p>\n