Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - It's Nolan Teasley's show now, Vikings owner says (Part 1)

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

Matthew Coller talks with Minnesota Vikings fans about new general manager Nolan Teasley's introductory press Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Purple Insider presented by Fandul, Matthew Collar here. And I want your reactions. Nolan Teasley, the new general manager of the Minnesota Vikings, talk today along with Mark Wilf and Kevin O'Connell. And I'm assuming a lot of you out of there, if you are tuning into this, that you at least had a chance to see some of the quotes. And if not, then still, I want your reaction to Nolan Teasley, general manager of the Minnesota Vikings. After today, how would you grade the Vikings higher? We did this a little earlier on the show with myself and Dane Mizatani.

If you have a chance to go back and watch or listen to that episode, I want to hear from you guys. What did you think of today's comments? What do you think of what Mark Wilf, a little surprisingly revealed, or at least I was a little surprised that he just came out and said it, which we're going to talk about in just a second. What do you think? Jump in the comment section.

I will get to the comments very quickly here in tonight's show, but I have five things that were said today that I have pulled for the show that I want to break down and talk about. Two of them are my own questions. And twice I tried to make a little comment that I thought would get a smile or a teahy, a little chuckle, and did not. We are dealing with a little bit of a different personality than maybe in the past for Nolan Teasley,

who came across very seriously today at his introductory press conference. So why don't we dive into that? And then we'll jump into your reactions to Nolan Teasley's first press conference. But we got to start with this. He was asked, Mark Wilf was asked about the final say. It's been quite a discussion here about how they were going to structure things. Would they make Rob Brzezinski, the president of football operations, put somebody else below him and then have this leonelie?

gaze on to ownership at the very top who's supposed to oversee. While they didn't decide to do that, they decided to hire Nolan Tisley to run the whole show, according to Mark Wilf. So here's what Mark had to say. Hey there. Just following up on that in terms of the leadership and that, just really bluntly, like, who's in charge of football operations now moving forward? Nolan is as far as the gentleman.

He's the general manager of the organization. He has final say on the roster of the 53, but in the end he's going to lean heavily and he'll say it himself on our head coach, obviously, and people like Rob Brzynski in the building that have deep experience and skill sets that are complementary. So I think we have it all put together in a great way. And I'm confident that this is a great move for the organization, a great move for the Minnesota Vikings. So Mark Wilf, not shy about the fact that Nolan Teasley has control of the 53-man roster,

which means it is the Nolan Teasley show here going forward. Now, that doesn't mean that Brian Flores and Kevin O'Connell won't be involved or that Rob Brzezinski is just going to go sit in whatever office, a million miles away and do his little salary caps and then email it to Nolan Teasley and never talk to him or anything like that. The general manager position, of course, has to delegate a lot of things. It also has to work with a lot of different people, with a lot of different perspectives.

And basically Nolan Teasley said, if we couldn't figure out how to come to answers, then we wouldn't do moves in Seattle. If there was such a big disagreement between coaches, front office, people in the front office about something, then we probably weren't going to make a certain acquisition because we want to get on the same page,

which doesn't mean that you always have to have everyone on the same page, but we now know whose show this is and it belongs to Nolan Teasley. So if you have the defensive coordinator, if you have the head coach and they want certain things to happen that aren't a great move at a certain time, then Nolan Teasley is not going to do it. But at the same time, his job is to set them up

with enough of a roster through the draft, through professional acquisitions, you know, whether it's trades or free agents, that you're bringing in enough talent where you shouldn't have to, to have big arguments about which way you're going to go on this, that, or the other thing, but the fact that he has the say in the 53, when the quarterback conversation comes around again, we don't have to go, well, who was the one to make the JJ draft pick?

Who was the one that decided to let Sam Darnold go out of the building and et cetera and have this big old mystery? It is the general manager who is making the decisions. Who was it that cut Nashon Wright and let him go? well, the GM is going to be the one rather than having it kind of be mysterious and almost ambiguous at times who was calling the shots. And I think that what I was looking for from the Wulf ownership was to empower their next general manager. And I would guess if I'm in Nolan Teasley's seat and you've just won the Super Bowl and you worked with John Schneider, who is the premier general manager in the entire national football league and a lot of people are. out there talking about your name for GM spots, you could wait if you wanted to.

So I imagine that on Teasley's side, a major part of this was I have to have control of the 53 and not somebody else, not having to get to a consensus, not having to work to this or that or the other thing or the coaches are responsible for this or that. Nope, Nolan Teasley, he is the guy that's going to be doing this. and he comes from an organization that gives him the credibility to do this, right? If you come from a place where you've worked your way up, you've been the second man in charge for one of the best general managers of the last two decades, that comes along with the credibility to set the 53 and to make the moves

and to make the trades and to make the signings, obviously you want the coaching staff to be on your side. And there's something he talks about here in just the moment that is an indicator of that process and how you can sort of set yourself up for the coaches to be on your side. But that someone has, and I use this phrase over and over again, the buck stops with someone, well, we know who that is in this front office. And now we're going to see how the Vikings go about building out the rest of the front office.

Will he bring in people from Seattle? We don't know the answer to that yet. Normally, I can't say it's been too much over the time that I've been covering the team that I've made a lot out of who is the director of this or the AGM or whatever. But I will kind of be intriguing. Can he get some talent over from the Seattle Seahawks front office the same way that when George Payton left and it probably hurt the Vikings a little bit, he took a couple of their rising stars, the Vikings rising stars and one of them was a finalist in this GM search in

Reed Burckhart. So Seattle, you know, they might be in line to lose a couple of people with Nolan Teasley coming over to the Minnesota Vikings, and then he can have at least some of his folks. I don't expect them to fire the entire front office, but I would like to see him get his people at the top and do it Nolan Teasley's way, because they tried it a certain way,

and they did it a certain way under Spielman and had a good amount of success at times. They had a good amount of success under Quasiadavillmenta at times, but none of those routes were able to get them over the top and where they want to be, which is in the Super Bowl. So now doing it the way of an organization that's been a Super Bowl contender many, many times over the last 10 years since Nolan Teasley was there and then won the Super Bowl twice during his time, although he was an intern at first, but still he saw that entire process go about.

Yeah, I mean, this is somebody who knows how to get the job done, or at least has had a front row seat for watching somebody who knows how to get the job done and assisting, I should say, not he wasn't sitting in the corner, but, you know, being in charge of a lot of different things in Seattle that worked to end up with the Super Bowl championship there. So I had a chance to ask Nolan Teasley the question that I promised last night. Some of you were asking or two nights ago, what will you ask the new GM? Well, I asked him exactly what I said I would ask, which was the marrying of the scouting and the analytics. So here's what he had to say. Hi, Dylan. Welcome to Minnesota. Matthew Collar from Purple Insider. I'm curious just with your role under John Schneider. There was a lot of stuff that was written on the website about what you did in Seattle's front office. Part of it, though, obviously the scouting side, also working with the analytics department. I'm just curious about how you guys were able to marry those things together in Seattle and how that worked with your role overseeing those different departments.

specifically analytics and scouting yeah yeah yeah i look at it and i've said this multiple times the way that we look at it is that we're going to be guided by evaluation um we're going to be anchored by data and then the final piece kind of as we work through our three pillars of acquisition and in evaluation is that um what's really important is the the coach's vision for the player and that's just that's the in simplest terms how we're going to operate it's a short answer and he didn't smile mile or left when I made the joke about the website, but that's all right. But I thought it was a really good answer. I thought that it made a lot of sense to me to where your scouting department is where you

begin. And then when he talks about being anchored with the data, I think what it's doing is it's acting as a cross check, which is, if you read my book, football is a numbers game. There's a lot of talk about that in the book of, you know, teams are not sitting there using PFF grades blindly and not looking up the plays and watching them. But they are using the data to send, you know, warning flares up if you love a certain player in the draft, but he didn't have a whole lot of production, for example, or maybe, you know, certain production is acceptable or not as predictable when it comes to the NFL.

Studying those things matters a lot. So having some things to lean on, okay, our scouting department loves this player and his fit, but he's got some serious warning signs. Maybe we eliminate that idea. And yeah, if it hits, it's going to be a home run, but we'd rather get a player that we know is going to be a quality starter based on what the information tells us. I think you can use it in a lot of different ways to anchor yourself. But that's one of them.

And we talk about it a ton around draft time is there are certain players that I've been wrong on over the years from time to time where I'm like, I don't know. Some of the numbers are really, really concerning to me. But a lot more times, if there's concerning numbers, then you're going to, you know, take a bigger risk. And that goes for the consensus board stuff and all that sort of thing. So I like that answer. And then the biggest thing at the end of that was you're presenting your players that you have gone through, whether it's free agency or the draft and you've scouted them and you've looked at all the data.

And then you bring them to the coaching staff and say, this is what we think is going to work. these are the types of players that you guys should be looking at because coaches are coaching and they're doing schematic stuff and analyzing tape and everything else about how to win football games on Sundays. They are not watching 200 free agents on tape. Like they know other players in the league, but they're not watching 200 free agents on tape. They are not watching 300 players in the draft or whatever, right? So the scouting staff, that's what they're there for.

And that's what the general manager is there for is. to gather those players and to present them to the coaching staff, this is what we think fits. Now you guys look at it. And I think that's a really good way to use it. So he was also asked Nolan about the quarterback situation. And Kevin O'Connell also kind of went for a little bit of a, not Kevin Sefer,

also went for a little bit of a like a little friendly joke kind of thing. And while the quarterback room conversation didn't go very far. Kevin Seaford from ESPN. Curious what your assessment of the quarterbacks are here and how you'll manage them. Moving forward, I'm sure you've got a decent look at Kyler Murray over the years in NFC West and maybe JJ McCarthy in the draft process.

But just curious how you assess it and how you kind of will manage that position over time. Yeah, I mean, in terms of managing, we're going to rely on the coaching staff. But I think the goal from the outset of the off season was to build a deep and competitive quarterback room. I think that was executed. There you go.

A deep and competitive quarterback room. That right there, I thought, was so far of the opposite of what we have seen over the last two general managers because Rick Spielman was also quite wordy in his answers a lot of times. And Quasi Adolfo Menza would go into some very interesting places. And instead, it's just I'm not going to get into that with you right now. And I respect that. have to do that. And I think it shows a little bit of, you know, command of the information in the room. Like, it's not a good idea for Nolan Teasley to go up there and start making any sort of commitments saying, oh, I love Kyler Murray. Uh, he or even say anything that could possibly

indicate that you don't like Kyler Murray all that much. If he said, yeah, we had some good defenses against him, which they did in Seattle. Uh, but I thought it was the right approach to handling that question. So I, I, I live in two worlds because as a journal, We want more information. We want more commentary. We want longer answers. But at the same time, it's the right way to answer that question. You know, it's kind of like the other day with J.J. McCarthy where, sure, as journalists,

we will eat up J.J. McCarthy's press conference from the other day because it's very revealing. But was that really the right way to answer those questions? So I thought that, you know, Tisley navigated some of those situations pretty well of not making any sort of commitment to the quarterback situation. also is just a reminder that he steps in as a GM. And we all know this, that Nolan Teasley could be an awesome drafter. He can be an incredible evaluator. He can be a wonderful human being. He can be beloved from the person all the way in the kitchen to the top of the organization with the

Wilfs. But if you screw up the quarterback spot, it's not going to go that well for you. So that is the biggest thing that he will be assessing throughout this year. and I think it is favorable to Nolan Teasley that he has time to do that because he may have a certain notion about Kyla Murray that could change when he plays with Justin Jefferson and when he plays for Kevin O'Connell versus when he played for the Arizona Cardinals. All right, a couple more things that will get to your reactions. If you're just jumping in, get in the comment section, your reaction to Nolan Teasley, his comments today. And where you stand. Do you want to grade?

We did grades for the hire earlier. today. Do you want to grade? Go ahead and grade in the comments section. Jump right in. So I also asked Mr. Teasley about his relationship with Kevin O'Connell and what he has seen from him from afar. And I forgot that they played in 2025 because I had mentally blocked that out. But I still feel okay about this question referencing 2024 because the Vikings offense came back and won that game. So here's what he said about Kevin O'Connell. Nolan, you talked a little bit about Kevin O'Connell, obviously in 2024, you faced

this team, you saw his offense and how it operated. I'm just curious if you could go into more detail about what you see from him and how you plan on kind of making the synergy between you and Kevin right away. I mean, there's an element of there is

only so much football, but when I talked about Kevin being an elevator, an elevator, I meant just that. As a play caller, I've admired his career from afar. I think a really good example of that is when he was in Washington and there was a coaching change. He remained in Washington. So people have been seeing what he's capable of for a very long time.

Then he goes to L.A., had the opportunity to compete against him. And I think he's a premier head coach in this league. Yeah, and I think that that relationship is going to be very interesting to see the way it plays out. But it also suggests to me that they should be in on Kevin O'Connell and Nolan. Tisley for at least several seasons to watch this relationship play out because we always are talking about hot seats and who's under pressure. And there's no doubt that Kevin O'Connell is under pressure to win a playoff game. But if you're just hiring a new GM now and those guys are building a relationship throughout

a year, I don't think what you want to do is react to a small sample size to a single season. what if whatever X, Y, or Z happens and they miss the playoffs. I mean, that will clearly ramp up the pressure on Kevin O'Connell if they are to miss the playoffs or if they do get blown out in the first round of the postseason again. But I would prefer to see the relationship grow over a couple of years. Give them the 2027 off season together. The 2028, you know, potentially pick a new quarterback or make a decision on Kyler Murray. Do this together first and see how that goes.

you start making reactionary decisions. And I know that in football, what happens is in June, we all say very rational things. And then by week seven, we're screaming and not that I would ever rant or anything, but we're screaming at the top of our lungs to fire people and things like that. I think that the Wilf's and Nolan Teasley should be patient and let this play out. Because O'Connell has proven that he could take a team to a certain level. And it's Nolan Teasley's job not to reinstate. invent the entire wheel here, but to get it to that next level.

You've got the defensive coordinator who you know is good enough. You've got the offensive mind who you know can create a effective passing game. Can you do the rest? Can you create the depth on the roster? Can you figure out the quarterback position to get to the point where you can have success in the postseason and then make a decision? I know that that's not the NFL world. It's not how we live.

it's usually every year who cares about contract extensions it's a year to year type of league but i think in theory they should be thinking more long term about these two working together and see how it goes over a longer period of time rather than hey if kevin o'connell doesn't have success this year then get rid of them that doesn't make a lot of sense to me uh last comment that i wanted to play you from nolan tisley and uh want to say or i'm actually i'm sorry this one from uh kevin o'connell on his role in terms of what he wanted to know in the meetings with the GM candidates and with Nolan Teasley. Be a part of.

Two more for chaos. What were some of the most important questions you wanted to ask in that process? You know, some of which were detailed, you know, about transactions that were done. You know, maybe a late season acquisition for a kick returner that scores three touchdowns. You know, some of it, you know, some of it was more big picture. Some of it was more draft process. Some of it was more examples of a time, like you guys asked today in some ways, excuse me, where, hey, give me an example of when, you know, the collaboration helped maybe a disagreement become a great acquisition in the end that everybody was on board with and 100% you know, in alignment with. And he was able to articulate that in a way that I could envision, articulate that in a way that was, you know, a foundation of conviction.

to how his beliefs have come about. And most importantly, you could feel the experience of John Schneider giving him, you know, growing responsibilities from coming in as an intern to inevitably be in his right-hand man. So I think those are some of the types of things and getting to spend some one-on-one type as well, really getting to know each other,

but also having in-depth conversations of our roster, you know, how we got to this point, you know, in the short term and, you know, the long-term, term, but most importantly about how we hit the ground running together and what that looks like and how I can be of so there you go. Kevin O'Connell on Nolan Teasley and the different questions that they had. And the most interesting part of that was him saying that he wanted to know when they talked, how did you sort out disagreements? How did you come to conclusions when you had different

viewpoints, which is something that they're going to have to all figure out and learn together. I did want to quickly shout out the Vikings entertainment for the incredible video quality that they put out. So make sure you go over to vikings.com and listen and watch everything that Nolan Teasley had to say and Kevin O'Connell and his press conference because they did an amazing job at putting this thing on and producing it and everything else. So make sure that you go over there to vikings.com. So listen, what's your reaction?

What do you think? You've heard some of the comments that stuck out to me the most. You've heard me fumble a couple of questions to the new GM is my first impression. So what do you think? And how are you grading this higher? And when do we start to get a sense for Nolan Teasley? Because I've got a timeline on that for when we'll get our first little hint. And unfortunately, we're going to have to wait a little while.

So I'll jump into that. But I think it's not until the trade deadline that we're really. going to start to get a feeling of how Nolan Tisley operates, maybe it will be a little bit at the end of the summer. Maybe it will be a little bit throughout the summer in terms of, let's just say that they don't extend any of the players that we've been talking about for potential contract extensions. Like, let's just say that they leave, you know, Blake Cashman and leave Brian O'Neill hanging in the wind. I mean, I think that will say that Nolan is going to want as much freedom as he can possibly have going forward with the salary cap and with the 53-man

roster. If they do lock in some of these players and give some extensions over the summer, it might be an indicator that he thinks that the team is pretty good, which I think the team is pretty good overall, but it's really Nolan Teasley's job. And this is why it's a very favorable position to take over where you have flexibility. You can pick your own quarterback in the future. and you've got some salary cap space in the future, but you also don't have a roster that is just decrepit garbage.

Like, you have a roster that has a fair amount of talent on it, and it depends on which ones of those players you're going to evaluate that you want to keep on the roster. But even then, if you look at Justin Jefferson, there's options with Jordan Addison to stay on this team longer term. Donovan Jackson made a good first depression. If Christian Derasaw is back to 100% health, there is stuff here to work with.

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for details, restrictions, and important safety information. on to your questions and comments and thoughts. Joker will begin, says, I couldn't be more impressed with Tisley today. And I couldn't be happier with the structure that we have now. Realistically, I'd obviously rather have Howie Roesman, Kyle Shannon, and Josh Allen. Yeah, I think everyone would rather have that than pretty much anything in the NFL is the best

GM, the best coach and the best quarterback. but in terms of the structure and also his first impression. I mean, I think you hear it from those clips and I'm kind of joking about myself because I always have a little bit of a different way of asking questions sometimes and so forth. But a very serious approach from Nolan Teasley. He, I don't think, came out trying to present himself in any sort of way, any sort of sales pitch or any sort of act that was going on there. It was, this is a guy who's very serious about football being very serious about football.

But I also thought that in terms of the answers, well short, it's funny about this business, right? I mean, the best answers Mike Zimmer ever gave were short. Did you see the game, Mike Zimmer said for an explanation for why they cut a kicker? Or I see him every day in practice. I mean, our best answers that we've ever gotten in terms of most insight from certain people, including Mike Zimmer, have not been these long, super winding, detailed answers. Sometimes when you say, yeah, they built a deep and competitive quarterback room, which was Kevin O'Connell's company line from the very beginning of the offseason.

So you know that that one, he was ready to give that answer as a total blowoff to the quarterback situation. But what it did say to me is I'm not going to show my hand about the quarterback situation. and I'm not going to commit to anything. And he did not come out and say, boy, I can't wait to see Kyler Murray in Purple or I was a huge fan in the draft of J.J. McCarthy that would give us any sort of indication and it leaves total flexibility for where they want to go.

And I think that that's telling. It's a very short answer, but it's very telling. There is no commitment there whatsoever. It was not going to come out on day one and make a commitment. So to those quarterbacks, here's the football, go make a commitment happen, right? Because the general manager is brand new. He doesn't have any skin in the game with either one of you guys. So if somebody's going to be the longer term quarterback, you better prove it.

We could take a lot from answers that are not the longest at all. And I also thought that it was extremely telling the answer that he had to my question, which was about the tying of the analytics and, the scouting because there were certain people that were presenting Nolan Teasley is this is just the football football guy of the footballiest guy. And then you find out that that's actually more of John Schneider, who is the old school evaluator who came from the lowest level of the Green Bay Packers and worked his way up and was in Washington and all the way up to being one of the best

in the entire NFL. But Nolan Teasley, part of his job in Seattle, was to implement. that element of it to be ahead of the game when it comes to the data part of it and implement it in a smart and effective way that combines with the scouting. So you always begin with the scouting and then layer in the data, which is the right way to go. And I think that if you have data as a part of your process for every single element of what you do, and it's just part of how your decision making gets made, that's, sort of smarter than where it could feel,

I'm not referencing anything in the past, but maybe willy-nilly. Like today we're using analytics and tomorrow we're throwing them out the window. Like, that's how it felt for the last couple of years. And if it's always going to be one of the things that they're cross-referencing, then that's going to be effective. And I've said this before, but you look at Seattle, you can see the data in their decision-making a lot better than you could with Minnesota.

Ron gives him an A plus. Mama says it seems like a good hire, as good of a hire as we could ask for, not sure what else you'd want, just a matter of executing the plan, something that Quasi really couldn't do. Sort of yes and sort of no on Quasi doing that. I mean, couldn't get the plan across the finish line.

It's funny how the narrative changes in a year because last year we were sitting here talking about what a good job Quasi Adafel Mensa did executing the plan from 2023, tearing it down, building it back up through free agency in 2024, and then setting up J.J. McCarthy with a really good football team. They executed it and it didn't work is really what, I mean, a lot of it,

but getting people on the same page in the front office, having everyone believe in the plan, getting to decisions without seemingly having headbutting and disagreement on certain things. that all, I think, went into this, that the leadership element is extremely, extremely important. We should always keep in mind that if J.J. McCarthy had been a top 12 quarterback last year, we would be sitting here talking about Quasi Adafelmenta and probably not Nolan Teasley. So that's how important that quarterback decision is.

But they were looking for someone that's going to be able to manage them through some rocky waters here, that they are going to have to revamp on the fly. they're going to have to make huge quarterback decisions, and they just believed in Nolan Teasley better than they did in Quasi Adafo Mensa to lead them. But I also want to say that we can't completely rewrite history. Like this team had a winning record three of the four years that Quasi Adafel Menta was the general manager, and the only year it didn't, the quarterback tore as Achilles. It wasn't like everything that happened was bad and everything that's going to happen now is good.

It really needs to be a different philosophy because Quasi fell behind the eight ball with the draft and then scrambled and scrambled and scrambled and scrambled and scrambled and then it clicked and it worked. And then they made the catastrophic decision to move on from Sam Darnold. But even if they had kept Sam Darnold, I believe they would have been a really, really good team last year. I think they would be looking at 11 wins or more. I think they would have been scary in the postseason because even if you had not spent the money on Jonathan Allen and Jvon Hargrave, they weren't the biggest impact players on defense. You could have found cheaper players to give you the same production or even if they had

signed a different running back instead of bringing Aaron Jones back at a very expensive price. I think they would have been a very good team had they brought back Sam Darnold. So it is not that far away, I think is important. And maybe one of the reasons that Nolan Teasley took this job is that it doesn't feel like it's a million miles away from being really good. But things did not work out at the quarterback position. And when that didn't happen, you're left looking around going, well, now what? Because you have to build through the draft now.

They started that process this year. But that's really what Nolan Teasley is here to do is to build through the draft. And then when you get to certain points of, we need a free agent here or there, we need a big trade here or there. and Kevin O'Connell referenced getting Rashid Shahee, that's a great trade for them. Those are the types of things that Nolan Teasley needs to be a couple percent better than Quasi Adafo Menta was.

And then when it comes to the draft, a lot of percent better than they were under Quasi Adolfo Mensa, and that includes stockpiling draft capital, which Seattle did incredibly, incredibly well. Kit, very happy with the news about the structure and Teasley's answers overall. I'll appreciate that he is not the most polished public speaker yet still knows how to avoid putting his foot in his mouth. Yeah, I mean, I thought that in terms of a public speaking, it did not come across like he had gone to broadcast school and was flawless.

But I also thought that it was with conviction. It felt serious. It felt straightforward. It certainly didn't feel like condescending or anything else like that. I thought he just frankly answered the question in a way that was. the right way to do it. So it wasn't like I'm trying to hide something. So I'm going to talk a million words around it.

It was, so what are you going to do with the quarterback position? Well, they've got a competitive quarterback room and we're going to find out. And I think that's for that particular type of question is really the right way to answer that. And even with, you know, Kevin O'Connell, the people that I talk to around the league, regardless of the Sam Darnold debacle, still have a ton of respect. for Kevin O'Connell, and I know that, you know, Brian Flores, of course, is not just revered, but feared around the NFL for other teams. And if you're Seattle, too, I mean, think about that game.

As horrible as it was on the offensive side, starting an undrafted free agent, the Vikings defense was actually awesome against Sam Darnold and Seattle. They caused a ton of problems for him. They sacked him. They caused turnovers. It was not a good game for Sam Darnold against that defense. So I think that Tisley in general, knows that he's taking over a very good coaching staff, which is what he indicated when he was

talking there. So I never felt like despite the answer is not being long, I never felt like I was left with confused or like, I don't know what the heck he's talking. I never had that feeling at all. I just thought it was very direct from him. And, you know, it'll probably increase in comfort as we go along as it does for everybody as they have to do a lot more interviews and so forth. But I'm, perfectly good from my seat because all I want is to understand what's happening and relay it to you and talk about it with you. That's what I want. And I understood all of the answers. I was never left at any point going, I don't know what this guy's up there talking about. Uh, snack says, it seems like Tisley has the mandate of ownership and I really like that. Um, in terms of, you mean like has the

support of ownership that you are the person who is now, running the ship. Here are the keys. The car is yours. Drive it as you see fit. I totally agree. And the thing about Rob Bersinski is Rob is so respected in the front office. They want Rob, and this is from everybody. They want Rob to be a major part of this process. They do not want Rob, as I mentioned earlier, stuck in a closet, just doing his little Excel sheets on the salary cap. That's not what they want. Rob is an incredibly valuable resource to someone like Nolan Teasley because it is a very overwhelming part of the job is the salary cap and, uh, you know, all the things that go into who works for who, who's under who. What is the structure? Like all that stuff. Imagine walking

into if you worked at, you know, one target and then you go across the country and you go to another one. It's completely new people. Here's the person who has been there for a long time that's going to tell you, here's the landscape of this situation, right? And I think Rob's very good at that. And also, this is a team that needs to find a way to get as many freaking draft picks as they can. And that might be trades. That might be comp picks. It might, whatever it might be, right? But they also have an ownership that is willing to give them a lot of money, which has been a detriment at times. It has been both one of the best and worst things. You never lose your favorite player on the Minnesota Vikings, unless he demands a trade like Stefan Diggs, you never lose.

I mean, if you buy a jersey of a good Vikings player, it is very likely that that player is going to be there for a long time because the ownership always spends. But it's not always the right economics decision, right? And I think having Rob there to work through the economics of how you win in the NFL is very, very good. but I also appreciate that the Wilfs came out and made it clear to everyone. Yes, Rob is super respected. He's a big part of this.

But he's going back to the role that he had before. There isn't really a triangle of leadership. It's not going to be any question in any room of, well, wait a minute, I have the call on this. No, wait, that's the coach's got. No, no, it's the general manager's call. And it feels more in order where the front office after all of us, including myself, a lot of reporting on what happened Quasi Adafel Mensa. It felt like it was just out of order.

It felt like it was just a little bit jumbled of, well, who's making the calls? Who is the person that is the respected or pushing the buttons or whatever? And I think it just aligns everybody in the right way. Now, you're still going to have a lot of influence from the coaches and you should. Brian Flores is really freaking good at this. I mean, he's just nailed it with these free agents. Rogers and Van Ginkle and Cashman and Grenard and like, geez, man, he's been really good at this. Even Fabian Moreau.

But at the same time, like you want the general manager to be able to say, look, I appreciate that you really want Jonathan Allen, but it's not going to happen. That's just not going to, you're going to figure something else out. That that is what the Wilf's today publicly gave him. I think that's really important to because everyone was interested. in that question. I know you guys were. We certainly were. Is how is this going to be structured? How is it going to work? Right. And it was, I think, smart and important for Mark Wilf, even though I'm sure he didn't love coming out and telling us what's

really going on there, whatever. But for him to give a boost right off of the bat, like, you, sir, who is sitting here to my right, you are in command. And that's a, that would be a confidence booster for me. I would feel really good about that if I was no. ones easily. Joker says, Defeated is too strong of a war, but Keo seemed a bit defeated today. There will be, oh, today, you mean in his comments today?

Interesting. There will be no doomed to fail head coach acting as GM shenanigans. Maybe he wanted that. It's two jobs for a reason. Well, one thing I'll say is that if you're judging O'Connell's tone, there was a lot of stuff going on behind us. Like, Randall McDaniel was there, which is really cool. He has giant hands, and he's,

he's still, I mean, he's huge and it's, I mean, it's Randall freaking McDaniel. So a lot of people were saying hi to him. A lot of people in the organization were coming down, introducing themselves to Nolan and I think his wife was there. So there was a lot of talking and stuff going on behind us as we were talking to Kevin O'Connell. So he was not trying to give this big, loud, over the top press conference about Nolan Tisley.

So I think that maybe you're judging a little bit of that. When you listen to his words, though, if I was Kevin O'Connell, I would feel relieved, I think, because one of the biggest issues it seemed like was the trust between everybody when it came to decision making of, well, who's really making the calls and did it feel a little bit like for Kevin O'Connell that he was playing two roles, that he was playing GM and head coach, and to have somebody who they believe in as an evaluator and has such a strong track record, I mean, if you hire somebody from, I don't know, the Jaguars, I'm sure there's hits and misses, but with Seattle, it's hits and hits and hits and hits.

And that's not the first time. It's not a GM who got one draft and got really lucky and then everyone called a genius. It's a really good building plan. And even though they didn't win the Super Bowl every year, they did it once, they were constantly churning in the right direction toward building this great team. they didn't hit on every draft pick. You go back a few years, they missed on some. They missed on a linebacker.

They missed on a running back. They've had those things happen. But they're, and this is why process is like the most overused word, but it's also right. Like their process was to keep churning out a lot of draft picks every year of certain types of players. Highly productive, highly athletic. They've got freaks. They believe in freaks in Seattle. It's time to believe in freaks.

Now, Kayla Banks, yeah, would be a start. as a freak athlete. The production will see what happens, but there's been very few players on the Vikings who we can look at and go, man, just look at that guy. Like, this is crazy. He was on Bruce Feldman's Freaks list or whatever.

Seattle, the half their team was. So, you know, I think that if you're Kevin O'Connell and you're believing in the players that they're bringing to you and you're believing in how they got there and you're finding out things that Seattle did, I would just guess that, you know, everybody wants more power. Everyone wants more decision making. But when those players are brought to you, because you can't scout them all yourself as a head coach,

you want to believe in what happened to get to that point where they're presenting you with those players. So, Dan says, glad we brought someone in from another organization. We don't need to blow things up, but it's healthy to have outside influence to stay sharp. it was refreshing to see direct and on point answers. And, you know, I think that last part is also with Quasi Adolfo Mensa, and it's hard not to just compare the last guy. And I don't ever want this to seem like we're just hammering down on somebody who, again, winning records in three out of four years, one season is 13 wins.

Another season is 14 wins. It was not a trash run for him as the general manager. but I also felt like at the press conferences, sometimes you could feel the uncertainty within Kwezi Adaflmenza. And it is a very uncertain universe, the NFL. And he would acknowledge that. And I respected him for acknowledging that. But it had this feeling of, like, do you know what you guys are doing sometimes?

Like, do you know the direction that you're, because early it was like the competitive rebuild. It was pretty clear. and then it became, I'm not really fully sure if you know what way you want to go with certain things or is this how the conversations go behind the scenes and stuff like that. So when you're talking about direct and on point, I also think from the perspective of Vikings fans and us that, yeah, sometimes a two word answer or a two sentence answer can say a lot and I thought it did today.

So, but your point about the outside influence is really where I stand. end as well. And somebody asked right before the announcement, I think it was maybe Friday night or Thursday night when we did a live show, like who my favorite pick was. And I went with Teasley. And I know that I probably said there's a lot of good things of all these candidates, which there were. But I went with Teasley for exactly what you said. Like I wanted somebody else here that had a completely fresh view on this to the point where the guy is basically almost never left the state of Washington. So he's been with the Seattle Seahawks organization for his entire football career

there in the pros behind the scenes. And he has been a football player at a D2 school in Washington. And this is a very different perspective on this front office. He has no idea how it's happening here. And that's what he's doing over these next coming weeks is figuring out how does it work here. And I never got the sense from Tisley that he's, He wants to just blow it all up and change everything because it's not like the Vikings organization has been a bus fire.

It's been a good organization that has a lot of respect around the NFL, but it's been missing something for many years. Finding that something, how can you combine some things that have worked for the Vikings? It isn't like the pro side has worked for the Vikings. They have gotten good free agents a lot of the time. You miss on a couple last year, but man, they nailed it on a. Isaiah Rogers and they nailed it on Cashman and they nailed it on Van Ginkle. Like you don't want to throw out everything when it comes to that. But you do want to say, why haven't we been able to run the football?

Like, let's figure that out. Is it something that's been happening for the reason we haven't been able to do that? Why is it that we are among the top five most sacked teams since Kevin O'Connell took over, right? Like things like that that you're trying to figure out. Why is it that all the draft capital went out the window, right? I mean, all those things I think are really important to find out if you're Nolan Teasley. So getting an outside perspective was really good, in my opinion.

Joker says this sounds like a great change for the Vikings, hubiristic attitude. Huberistic, great word uses, Joker. We understand the data, but we're smarter than the data. I think that Teasley would have pointed to the data to keep Darnold. I don't know. I mean, his franchise did acquire Sam Darnold and win the Super Bowl with him, so you're probably right that they might have. It also, I don't know. Like, we can't say this new guy definitely wouldn't have done the most catastrophic thing because, you know, if he was involved in, I mean, just for example, if he was involved in the drafting of J.J. McCarthy and if the coach and so forth were telling him that J.J. McCarthy was the guy that they were ready to turn things.

over to. And if the coach was telling him that, no, Sam Darnel is not really actually worth it, we just made him look better than he was or whatever conversations might have gone behind the scenes. He might have made the same mistake too. But I do remember talking about how historically speaking, the quarterbacks that get to a 4,300 yard 35 touchdown threshold never turn out to be bad. It's never happened. I couldn't find a single one who reached that threshold. and then became quickly awful. That had, that never happened. So there was that.

But that, to me, is you can't really project Nolan Tisley onto that. And I also think when you're talking about like the data and everything else, if you have your certain beliefs about what data says that can point you toward mistakes and stop you from making mistakes and use it that way, I think that's the best possible way. I don't think you could call up PFF and look at, you know, whatever, 10 different PFF stats and say, all right, I know every free agent we should get or I know every player we can draft. JJ Artega, Whiteside, do you guys remember him? He was like an analytics darling, had such great PFF numbers in the draft.

And Philly drafted him, unsurprisingly, probably based on the data on analytics. And he couldn't play at all in the NFL. He was atrocious. it didn't translate and it doesn't always. But what does often translate is red flags where it's it doesn't give you the right answers, but it might give you what the wrong answers are if that makes a lot of sense. And that's what I was hearing in that two sentence answer about like how they're anchoring. That's what I think anchoring means is like we're we have certain things we believe in

when it comes to the data that point us toward the best way to look at a player or the best way to look at team building and so forth. And we're going to abide by those things because those are just the facts. When we say analytics, sometimes it's like, oh, the mysterious whatever. It's like, no, any one of us could look at analytics. Any one of us, it's just research. That's what it really is. When you're making decisions, you should research.

We do that all the time here on the show. I do it all the time on the purple insider dot football by newsletter. I mean, all the time where you're just looking at a subject and saying, how can we gather as much about this subject to come to a conclusion? It's like doing a dissertation, right? So I don't know that they've had an attitude necessarily consistently of that, but, you know, to your point, there were decisions that were like that. And I don't ever want to disparage Aaron Jones ever because of the person he is and the player

he's been over his career. But if you just took Aaron Jones and all of his intelligence and heart and all those things out of it and you made it a black and white decision based on injury history, performance, and age, you would say you're not giving that guy $10 million last year. It's just not happening. And you need somebody who's going to be anchored in data to do that and not say, well, yeah, but we really like them. So I don't know if it's humoristic, but I also think that it was a little bit of like

the defensive tackles. We knew last year that Hargrave and Allen were down and had a lot of. injury issues. And we talked about those warning signs and said, well, if there's 75% of what they used to be, then maybe it'll work out. And it would have overall at the end of the day, they still turned out to be a top five defense. But the money that they spent, the cap penalty that they're still incurring right now because of those guys, you could have seen that coming.

If you had stuck to this is not the right way to go about this, there's too many warning signs. So that's, I think that that makes sense. Michael, when will we get to talk with him again? I don't know, probably cut down. I think. I mean, I'm not sure. If they make some big signing, maybe we'll talk to him again. But I would guess it's probably, we usually talk to the GM.

The GM doesn't talk like a million times a year. I mean, we will see them around. But usually the GM will talk after they do their cut down. Well, no, actually, it's at the beginning of training camp. and then at the end when they do the cutdowns are usually the two times the GM will talk. And then sometimes in the past during the season once, usually Rick Spielman would do that. Quasi Adafo Menta didn't do that as much. And then NFL Combine, season ending press conference.

So you're not going to get a million of these from Nolan Teasley. But if they make some big moves, then probably we'll see more of him. Mama says, can't wait to see what we do at the trade deadline. We'll have to see where they are at the trade deadline because the extremes are a lot. How about that? I haven't given you a Fanduil question of the day yet. The line did not move with a GM higher, believe it or not.

So the Vikings over under is eight and a half for this year. We've gone back and forth a lot on would you go Fandul over or under like with the Vikings. Most of us, I think, are on the side that they should hit the over with this team. But here's the Fandul question of the day. At the trade deadline, what will the Vikings record be? and what types of decisions will Nolan Teasley be making? Like, look into your crystal ball for the Fandual question of the day and tell me, what are we going to be thinking about Nolan Teasley at the trade deadline?

Because I think that will be our first real window into how his wheels spin. Because as I've said many times before, in the press conferences, we can learn a lot. We can really get a window into, regardless of the length of the answers, what the general manager thinks, but we will never really know until we actually see the moves. That's when we really get the sense for what's going on.