On-Schedule QB Play as Vital as Off-Schedule…

Adofo-Mensah rose through the ranks with his prowess in football research and development in San Francisco and Cleveland. He’s capable of creating metrics that will provide evaluations unclouded by emotions. He said he doesn’t know if people evaluate quarterbacks “the right way.”

“Yards, things like that, it’s not always the best way to judge a quarterback,” Adofo-Mensah said. “They start a play with, there’s a certain probabilistic outcome that could happen based on your protection. … You start a play versus a certain look and maybe a certain pressure’s coming and your best play might be an incompletion. And people don’t realize that, so how do you start at it from a play level and take that to a macro level and really evaluate his position?”

O’Connell and Adofo-Mensah said they like multiple things they’ve seen from Cousins, who had O’Connell as his position coach in Washington in 2017.

“I think the starting point is I’m excited about Kirk being our quarterback,” O’Connell said. “With that comes the opportunity to build an offensive system around things that he does well, which are a lot of things.

“He’s got the ability to use the experience he has going back to our time together, to obviously all the really good things he’s done over the years to play at a really high level,” O’Connell continued. “Now we can kind of step back together and look at those things and have him be a part of the process, as well, where we figure out what’s the best way to play offense for the Vikings this year. How can we take advantage of our personnel we have around him, which is really, really important.

“Then ultimately he feels good about what we’re doing offensively, everything else works around the quarterback for a reason because it’s the hardest position out there,” O’Connell added. “They’re hard to find. So when you get a guy comfortable in his role within your offense, everybody else can really take off from there around him.”