Vikings Hire Nolan Teasley As GM; Rob Brzezinski Staying On As EVP

The Vikings have landed on their next general manager. Seahawks assistant GM Nolan Teasley will be taking over the front office in Minnesota, per NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero. The news is now official.

Teasley is coming off Seattle’s Super Bowl victory, its second during his tenure. He first joined the Seahawks in 2013 as a scouting intern shortly before they won their first Lombardi Trophy. Now, 13 years later, he is headed for the GM job in Minnesota, where the Vikings are hoping he can bring two-time Super Bowl-winning GM John Schneider‘s roster-building expertise and put them on a championship path of their own.

Because Teasley is a minority candidate, the Seahawks will receive two third-round picks as compensation for his exit, Jonathan Jones of CBS Sports reports.

A few weeks after the end of a disappointing 9-8 season, the Vikings fired GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah in late January. The team opted against launching an immediate search and decided to wait until after the draft. Executive vice president of football operations Rob Brzezinski, who has worked for the Vikings since 1999, took over for Adofo-Mensah on an interim basis.

Brzezinski guided the Vikings through the most important parts of the offseason and emerged as a candidate for the full-time GM job. He joined Teasley and three outside assistant GMs — Reed Burckhardt (Broncos), Terrance Gray (Bills), John McKay (Rams) — as finalists for the position. They all received second interviews. As Kevin Seifert of ESPN notes, Brzezinski was the only contender without a scouting background — something ownership (Zygi and Mark Wilf) valued in this search.

Like Brzezinski, each of Burckhardt, Gray and McKay entered the process with notable Vikings ties. Before joining the Broncos’ front office in 2022, Burckhardt was a 13-year Vikings employee who worked in various scouting and personnel roles. Gray was a Vikings scout from 2006-16. While McKay has no past experience in Minnesota, he has worked with head coach Kevin O’Connell. He was part of the Rams’ front office when O’Connell was their offensive coordinator from 2020-21.

Teasley will now be the one teaming with O’Connell, though Brzezinski is not leaving the organization (keeping in line with what Seifert predicted shortly before today’s news). Brzezinski will remain the Vikings’ EVP of football operations, Jones reports. He has served as a contract negotiator and salary cap analyst in that role. 

Rumblings about the Vikings going with a two-pronged front office setup surfaced before this hire, and the team allowing Brzezinski to lead its draft effort proved telling. The interim GM working alongside an outside hire will certainly be an interesting setup, but the Vikings considering Buckhardt and Gray pointed to interest in having some familiarity atop their front office.

The Panthers and Lions have similar setups, with Brandt Tilis and Mike Disner working closely with GMs Dan Morgan and Brad Holmes. Though, Brzezinski’s stint as interim GM and having run a draft for the team does separate this instance from the other NFC teams’ plans. The Seahawks have now lost their offensive coordinator (Klint Kubiak) and AGM from the Super Bowl LX-winning team.

While Kubiak’s exit will generate more attention, it is unsurprising to see a Schneider right-hand man be hired. The Schneider-era Seahawks winning Super Bowls with two entirely different nuclei brought a historic NFL achievement, and the 17th-year GM will need a new second-in-command as a result.

Connor Byrne contributed to this post.