Gross Football Lunch – 2025-26 Postseason Wrap-Up

Hey, that game wasn’t so bad after all. Super Bowl LX wasn’t a classic by any stretch of the imagination, but I went in expecting a dull, chaotic waste of everyone’s time that somehow ended in an improbable but spiritually desiccating Patriots victory. Instead, I got to experience the comfort of a game of football that proceeded more or less how you’d expect. The Seahawks took some time to get going offensively, but their defense utterly annihilated the Patriots offense, rendering those struggles moot. The Patriots briefly entertained the notion of making things interesting before thinking better of it. There were some nifty punts. All in all, it was hardly the worst Super Bowl I’ve seen, and proved to be just the thing to have on the background while I sanded down my heel callouses.

This game was also a good opportunity for reflection. I’ve frequently described this football season as a season of chaos, but as I watched Seattle grind Drake Maye’s bones into dust, it occurred to me that for all of the unexpected results this season gave us, the finale was both straightforward on its own merits and entirely forseeable. In case you haven’t heard, this year’s Seahawks were one of the most dominant teams ever by DVOA. I spent all season fretting and fussing about how there weren’t any trustworthy teams in the Confidence Pool that I ignored the all-time great team hiding in plain sight, camouflaged only with an excellent but largely anonymous roster and a quarterback nobody really trusted.

This was a tough year for me as a football prognosticator. I held onto my priors (read: the big 3 AFC teams with their 3 big quarterbacks) for too long, I struggled to make sense of the week-to-week results, and I struggled even more to do my homework and learn whatever lessons may have been lurking in each week’s results. My preseason predictions were bad, my playoff predictions were even worse, and my weekly confidence pools usually collapsed in the single-digit assignments. I am humbled to have the limits of my ignorance shown this publicly, and I look forward to an off-season of clearing my head so I can try again next fall.

The 2025-26 Minnesota Vikings Postmortem

Well, shit.

As you, one of my loyal readers, are aware, the Vikings postmortem is an annual Gross Football Lunch tradition and, historically, I write and publish it to coincide with whatever postseason column is nearest to the Vikings inevitable elimination from postseason play. Since they were out of the playoffs a full month before the regular season even finished, and had been spiritually eliminated well before then, this means that had I stuck to this formula, my Vikings obituary would have been included in the Playoffs MegaColumn. But by that point, I was sick of writing about these assholes, and I was sick of thinking about these assholes, and I saw no reason to think any of my readers would want to read about these assholes. Furthermore, my writing schedule this season was an even more brazen experiment in redlining through procrastination than it normally is.

In other words, there was no time for a Vikings postmortem, and if I didn’t even care, who else would? There was nothing left to say about this team. J.J. McCarthy was so shitty he couldn’t complete passes to Justin Jefferson, the offensive line was an injury-plagued mess, and the defense wasn’t good enough to win entirely by themselves (not that they were supposed to be). Any hope for a future return to contention was contingent on the team finding a quarterback, and there is no clear path for them to do so. I had said all of this in some form or another over the course of the season, and I saw no point in rehashing any of it.

And then the Vikings fired General Manager Kwesi-Adofo Mensah. Well, shit indeed.

I have neither the qualifications nor the connections necessary to explain how Kwesi lost his job, and even if I did, I would be a couple of weeks late to the autopsy table. If you are interested in reading about how this happened, please check out the reporting of long-time Vikings beat reporter Kevin Seifert at ESPN or Alec Lewis and Dianna Russini at The Athletic($). I am still processing these pieces myself, but the picture they paint is bleak.

Everything about Adofo-Mensah’s firing sucks and is bad. Functional football franchises don’t go straight to decapitating their front office without making other changes beforehand. Functional football franchises don’t wait a month to fire their GM while he’s at the goddamn Senior Bowl, then declare that they won’t look for a replacement until after(!!!) the draft and free agency. I’m hardly the first person to say this, but it doesn’t take a lot of work to synthesize this reporting into a clear enough picture of what happened. The Wilfs hired Kwesi Adofo-Mensah in order to install a modern, forward-thinking football operation, and as soon as the vibes took a turn for the worse, all the football guys threw him under the bus.

Everyone looks bad here. Kevin O’Connell and the remaining front office brass look like scheming weasels, the Wilfs look like clueless suckers who aren’t even paying attention to their own football operation, and Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, well…suffice to say, this is an object lesson as to why designating fall guys and playing office politics with team ownership is part of a general manager’s job, whether you want it to be or not. He will also be forever associated with the decision to let Sam Darnold walk in favor of keeping McCarthy, and the fact that no one in their right mind thought keeping Darnold was a prudent decision this time will not prevent sports radio callers, Tuesday afternoon barflies, and other titans of intellect from dunking on him for it for the rest of time.

But, for what it’s worth, Kwesi’s drafts were the stuff of nightmares. By my count, his four draft classes yielded a maximum of three usable players, and even this count is optimistic. Jordan Addison has all the talent in the world, but is the dumbest man in football not named Carson Wentz. Rookie left guard Donovan Jackson might be serviceable, but the line was such a mess that I can hardly be certain of his competence. Edge rusher Dallas Turner showed plenty of improvement this season after an anonymous rookie year, but still doesn’t seem like a future superstar worth trading back up into the first round for. And, in depressing fairness, it’s not Kwesi’s fault that Khyree Jackson died in a car accident.

In conclusion, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah’s firing underscores the Vikings’ grim near-term prospects. They have no quarterback and no way to acquire one with any potential upside or cause for excitement. They are currently over the salary cap for the 2026 season, because that’s what happens when you need to spend big in free agency to compensate for terrible draft (although hitting it big in free agency was one of Kwesi’s two great successes, along with cleaning up the books after Slick Rick Spielman’s cavalcade of imprudent extensions and restructures). Kevin O’Connell has consolidated power but will be coaching for his job this coming season while suffering from a severe brain worm infestation. This roster is a long way from contention but too talented on paper to merit tearing down, just as it was five years ago heading into Mike Zimmer’s final season. In the time since, the Vikings have made lots changes but no progress. I look forward to another year of distressingly chaotic mediocrity and the inevitable hard reset to come after. It’s all the success this stupid team deserves.

ICE Out, Abolish DHS, bring all the abductees home. And Skol Vikings.

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As always, Gross Football Lunch is going away until it’s time for the preseason previews. Unlike last year, however, I managed to keep enough juice in the writing tank to promise that I will keep this blog active during the offseason. I have at least one big project that I’ve been working on for a couple of years that I will finish and publish, and I might try and warm up the seats in CRPG Corner, too.

Thank you for supporting me, thank you for supporting this blog, and thank you for supporting Gross Football Lunch. See you soon!