Vikings General Manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah comes from an analytics background in which data is a key driver of decision-making.
A way to measure how Adofo-Mensah is doing at his job, interestingly, can lead us to a broader discussion of the sorts of problems he encounters every day.
The example at hand: NFL draft grades.
These snap judgments are extremely subjective, particularly as one-offs. What one person, even someone with knowledge, thinks of another team's draft class can be woefully inadequate. It's a sample size problem to rely on one grade.
But gather up enough grades, as Rene Bugner has done, and you at least get a more meaningful consensus of what people think. In this case, the combined total of 29 different grades from 29 different graders put the Vikings' 2023 draft at No. 23 out of 32 teams.
The Vikings' cumulative grade point average was 2.66, reflective of a grade slate that had a few A's but a lot more B's and C's along with a couple of D's.
Bugner did this a year ago as well, with 18 graders. The Vikings finished 20th, and a lot of the players from that class figure to be key pieces on Brian Flores' defense this year — something I talked about with Andrew Krammer on Thursday's Daily Delivery podcast.
But just because there is a seeming sufficient amount of data to reach at least a loose consensus about each team's draft class doesn't mean the quality of the data is good.