Having serious doubts about KAM already?

Mark, what's your take on what's happening so far?

To me, it looks like the Wilfs killed moving Cousins. So Kwesi is trying to somehow keep the Team competitive but is also avoiding lots of restructuring of contracts he can get out of next year so he's not accruing too much dead money or kicking too many cans down the road.

So at best there will be another minor restructure and a Tier 3 CB or maybe a flyer on an Edge

I also think O'Connell really believes he can fix Bradbury. I look at the Bills kid Bates as competition for Davis.

My other take is Hunter had some lingering grievances with the organization and once he saw the DE Market he caught Kwesi off guard with a new contract demand coupled with a threat to meet it, trade him or he'll hold out.

I want to be fair but Kwesi is trying really hard to have his cake and eat it too. If the Wilfs are too involved and mandate staying competitive then he needs to kick some cans down the road and keep Hunter (if possible) and get Tretter or another Edge or a CB.

Even nailing the Draft won't plug all these holes. And as currently constructed I don't view this as a competitive Team that can earn a Wildcard spot. The Achilles Heel of the Offense remains. Sauce Gardener/Dantzler/Hand, while having upside, will be worse than last year's terrible trio. The Run D should improve but the pass rush will be equally as bad.

If Kwesi keeps this Team around .500 while somehow having tons of cap space next year that would be seriously worthy of applause. I hope he can pull it off but fear his eyes are bigger than his stomach.

We better get a lot more than the 22nd pick and some meaningless late round picks for Hunter.  Teams do not trade elite pass rushers in their prime very often, and when they do they get multiple 1sts.  Anything less than that and the Vikings should just keep him and try to make things work.  

Kwesi is almost in a spot where he has to worry about building for 2025.
2022 is the last year of the Spielman regime with a new coach. One last gasp with the old team.

2023 will be year 1 of transition, but still in cap hell.
2024 will be the year we should hopefully again scratch playoff level.
2025 is the year you hope to compete at a Super Bowl level.

It fits with Wilf's edict being a buncha

Not sure why this week went down the way it did, and we may never know. But the surface view looks like our new GM is way in over his head or handcuffed. Hindsight gives us fans the ability to see that restructuring other veterans before Kirk should have been the priority. Hinter's new demands should never have been a factor had things been done a week ago. Now we wait and see for 48 hours. I've always said the problem with number's guys is they under-estimate the human element.

Think about this, we could have potentially traded Cousins-Thielen-Bradbury for Mayfield-Landry-Tretter and both teams could have saved dead cap money. Sure, there would have been some draft volleying in the deal. As of today, we still have all three and a slightly better run defense with no CBs in a passing league. CLEV cut 2 players (I know we can still get Tretter, but do you think they will even try). They just landed the big fish in Watson and Baker is on the blocks.

And now for some fun thoughts, trade Hunter for Cam Jordan, NO. Then we could have 3 Cam's (Bynum, Dantzler, Jordan), 3 Harrisons (Smith, Phillips, Hand), 2 Lynch's (Blake, James), and a handful of Mr. Smith's on the team.

I have not been impressed with any of his moves so far, from his HC search to what he has done so far in free agency, but I wonder how much of this is his fault.

Kwesi obviously wanted Harbaugh as his HC, and would not have brought him in if he wasn't going to give him the job. The Wilfs had other ideas, likely because Harbaugh wanted to rebuild, while the Wilfs wanted to maintain their "competitiveness". So Kwesi had the best candidate who he wanted, he just got overridden. O'Connell isn't a bad second choice, but if he fails it will be on the Wilfs, not Kwesi.

The Cousins extension might not be the Wilfs or Kwesi. If no team came to the Vikings offering a trade higher than a 2nd round pick, and Kwesi felt there wasn't an option in the draft he could realistically draft this year that would end up being our QBOTF, extending Cousins might have been the only way the Vikings could go into the 2023 season not being desperate for a QB. I don't agree with that move, and think it hurts us more than helps us, but my job is not on the line if I win a combined 10 games over the next two seasons.

As for no significant moves in free agency so far, that was expected with our cap situation. We didn't have the cap to spend on a top free agent, so we are not going to get a top free agent. That is on Rick, not Kwesi, and it will be years before he is able to clean up the former GM's mess.

Hunter being traded is another matter, but again might be the result of the Vikings just not being able to afford him. I would not trade him, and don't think there is any way we will get enough value back in a trade to make up for what we would be losing, but Hunter has missed a lot of games the past two seasons, and there is pretty much no chance we compete for a title even with Hunter in the next couple of seasons with the mess the Vikings are dealing with. Some could argue we shouldn't have extended Cousins if that was the case, and they would be right, but I also think if the Vikings could give Hunter a similar deal to Cousins they probably would.

So while I started this thread to fire Kwesi, there is still some hope that if he can get through these next couple of seasons of dealing with Rick's mess, we might start to see an actual vision of what he wants to do with this team instead of the mixed mess so far.