Vikings' Week 1 Preview: A Referendum on the Tenures of Ryan Poles and Kwesi Adofo-Mensah
The Week 1 matchup between the Minnesota Vikings and Chicago Bears carries dozens of obvious storylines. But the one that excites Matt Fries the most is the emerging rivalry between the two GMs.
The NFL schedule makers know what they’re doing. They started off the season with perfect First Take fodder, Eagles-Cowboys, put the Chiefs in a standalone Friday game broadcast on YouTube just after Travis Kelce got engaged to Taylor Swift, and gave us a heavyweight Ravens-Bills matchup as dessert after our first full slate of Sunday football in eight months. The late-night snack is a matchup designed for immediate overreactions: Minnesota Vikings at Chicago Bears, under the lights at Soldier Field on Monday Night Football.
There are so many interesting angles to approach this game from. First overall pick Caleb Williams vs. tenth overall pick J.J. McCarthy. Hyped Bears Head Coach Ben Johnson vs. reigning NFL Coach of the Year Kevin O’Connell. Offensive mastermind Ben Johnson vs. defensive mad scientist Brian Flores. J.J. McCarthy in his first NFL start vs. veteran defensive play caller Dennis Allen. Revamped interior offensive lines on both sides. Big money additions to both defensive lines.
Can Ben Johnson help Caleb Williams turn from a player with blinding flashes in a bad situation to superstar quarterback? Can J.J. McCarthy step into the Ferrari that is the Vikings’ offensive supporting cast and at least look competent, if not even better than what Sam Darnold showed last year?
All of these make for a fascinating matchup. Countless digital ink and sound waves have been spent hyping, cautioning, and wondering about the above questions. We can’t predict the future and know the answers. Even tonight’s game – one single, solitary game – won’t be able to answer those questions for good.
But amidst this excitement, there’s an undercard to this matchup that fascinates me perhaps more than all of the unknowns above. In addition to the questions that dominate the discourse, this game will be another line of evidence to compare Vikings’ GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah to Bears’ GM Ryan Poles.
You can trace this intrigue back to before both even got their jobs in 2022. During that GM hiring cycle, both the Bears and Vikings cast wide nets in their GM searches. Both teams came up with a list of finalists. The Bears narrowed it down to Poles, Eliot Wolf, and Monti Ossenfort. The Vikings had just two: Adofo-Mensah and Poles.
The Bears struck first, and hired Poles on January 25, 2022, the day before Poles was supposed to interview in person with the Vikings. The next day, the Vikings hired Adofo-Mensah. That doesn’t mean the Vikings lost out on their preferred candidate, but the sequence of events did raise the profile of an already important decision between two division rivals.
More interesting to me than the hiring process are the diverging paths Poles and Adofo-Mensah took with the rosters once they gained control of them. Poles, you could argue, tanked, stripping the roster for parts and ending up in possession of the first overall pick in consecutive years. Adofo-Mensah coined the term “competitive rebuild” which critics mocked as an oxymoron.
Now, both teams are meeting at the beginning of the season. Both teams opened with a win total of 8.5, but the Vikings have crept up to a 9.5 total. It reminds me of the Vikings Week 1 matchup against the New York Giants last year, where both teams entered the season with a win total of 6.5.
The juxtaposition of the Vikings’ and Giants’ QB decisions after their 2022 Wild Card matchup created an interesting dynamic just like the tank/competitive rebuild choices the Vikings and Bears made. The Vikings were proven to be the winners in last year’s matchup, not only by a score of 28-6 in the game, but also when Daniel Jones was eventually cut by the Giants (and will now provide the Vikings with a compensatory pick in 2026, thanks Giants!) and Kirk Cousins, who the Vikings let walk, floundered down the stretch and was benched by the Atlanta Falcons for Michael Penix Jr.
Will Vikings-Bears end in a similar blowout for Minnesota? We can’t know the results of the game, but I went move-by-move through the tenures of Adofo-Mensah and Poles to compare the job each has done so far.
We Begin at the Beginning
The two men did not take over teams that were in the same place. While both previous regimes had been fired, Adofo-Mensah inherited a roster that had many players from the Vikings teams that made the playoffs in 2019 and the NFC Championship Game in 2017. Poles inherited a team with less talent, ripe for a rebuild.
Rick Spielman and Mike Zimmer had loaded up on veterans to remain competitive, but that strategy floundered when injuries mounted and young players failed to live up to the standards set by the players the team had lost. Ryan Pace and Matt Nagy traded up for Justin Fields in a last-ditch effort to save their jobs, and while the team had a couple of solid pieces, it was stocked with underperforming veterans past their prime.
Because the Vikings paid up big for veteran talent, the team was very short on cap space when Adofo-Mensah took over, a hole it took two years to dig out of. Poles had a different short-term challenge, as the Bears had decent cap room in 2022 and beyond, but they were missing the 7th overall pick in 2022, as it was sent away in the Fields trade.
To take a look at each squad’s starting point, I developed the following scale to color-code each roster, listing each player’s current status in 2025:
The Vikings Reload
Let’s start with the Vikings first:
As you can see, the Vikings had a pretty talented group. Justin Jefferson, Brian O’Neill, and Harrison Smith were already high-level players, and all three are still on the team. Adam Thielen obviously had a stint with the Panthers, but he’s back and while he’s not the player he used to be, he’s still a quality receiver. C.J. Ham and Andrew DePaola, while role players, are nice pieces to have.
Then we get to the players that the new Vikings’ staff, put together by Adofo-Mensah and head coach Kevin O’Connell, were able to develop. Christian Darrisaw had a decent first season, but rounded into his true, Top-5 left tackle form during Adofo-Menah’s tenure. Josh Metellus went from special teamer to bona fide starter. Cam Bynum developed into a starter too, before leaving for the Colts this past offseason. Blake Brandel went from bottom of the roster depth to a starter last year, and is now excellent depth for the Vikings.
Even if they’re out of the league or elsewhere, many of the players also made an impact on the 2022 Vikings team that went 13-4. Kirk Cousins, Alexander Mattison, KJ Osborn, Ezra Cleveland, Garrett Bradbury, Dalvin Tomlinson, Danielle Hunter, Eric Kendricks, Patrick Peterson and Cameron Dantzler made a significant impact on the 2022 team.
Still, the Vikings aren’t missing the impact from most of the players who have departed. We’ll get into the specifics later, but I would argue they’ve improved on all of Tyler Conklin, Ezra Cleveland, Garrett Bradbury, DJ Wonnum, Pat Jones, and Xavier Woods at their positions.
Similarly, they made a conscious decision to replace Danielle Hunter with Jonathan Greenard, a move that appears to have paid off. You could argue they could have used Dalvin Tomlinson in 2023 and 2024, but he got a large contract in a year the team was tight up against the cap, and the Vikings now have Jonathan Allen and Javon Hargrave. Losing Cam Bynum stings, but the team seems really excited about what they have in Theo Jackson.
The Bears Rebuild
Let's flip it over to look at roster Ryan Poles was left with:
You can see the talent difference at a glance. Of the Bears’ remaining players, only Cole Kmet had proven himself in the league, along with Cairo Santos as a specialist. Exacerbating the problem, the Bears have been unable to develop talent. Only Jaylon Johnson grew into a starter during Poles’ tenure.
The Bears had a plethora of aging talent that is now out of the league. Allen Robinson, Jimmy Graham, Jason Peters, Cody Whitehair, Akiem Hicks, Robert Quinn, Alec Ogletree, Tashaun Gipson and Eddie Jackson all made very little impact in their post-Bears careers.
That doesn’t mean there was no talent to work with. Darnell Mooney had a resurgent year with the Falcons last year after languishing for a few years in Chicago. James Daniels left Chicago and played well enough in Pittsburgh to earn a significant deal with the Dolphins. Mario Edwards and Eddie Goldman are still playing. Khyiris Tonga has ascended from a practice squad player to a rotational nose tackle, and Elijah Wilkinson is expected to play for the Falcons.
Justin Fields, for whatever it’s worth, is the starting quarterback for the Jets.
The two losses that hurt the most are probably Khalil Mack and Roquan Smith. The Bears have failed to put together a quality edge rush room under Poles. The draft capital they acquired helped fill another position, and trading for Montez Sweat in 2023 helped, but the team is still searching for the second fiddle.
The Bears were able to use the money they didn’t use on Roquan Smith to sign Tremaine Edmunds, but unlike the Vikings Hunter-Greenard swap, Smith is still clearly the better player, making AP First-Team All-Pro the last two seasons.
When you look at the rosters, it’s clear that the Vikings were in a better spot, but they also made the most of the talent they had. The Vikings developed multiple players who became starters for them or signed significant contracts elsewhere. That’s led to value that the team has generated through the compensatory formula, including two 6th round picks in 2023, a 3rd round pick in 2025, and a projected 3rd and two 5th round picks in 2026.
The Bears over that time frame are projected to earn just one compensatory pick, a 7th in 2026 (they received a 7th round compensatory pick in 2023 because the league earned fewer than 32 compensatory picks, and in that case, picks are given out in waiver order, where the Bears were first).
Now that we have a snapshot of where the Vikings and Bears were when Adofo-Mensah and Poles took over the team, let’s look into the talent each team has added, starting with the free agent classes.
Head-to-Head: Free Agency Results
We’ll begin by looking at the cap situation each team has had over the years, including projected cap space for 2026:
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