CLEVELAND, Ohio (92.3 The Fan) – Kwesi Adofo-Mensah would love to claim he discovered George Kittle, but he didn’t.
He didn’t pull off the trade for Jimmy Garoppolo or draft Nick Bosa either.
His time with the 49ers was educational, and it’s the knowledge that he’s gained that the former commodities trader turned NFL executive brings with him to Cleveland as vice president of football operations after spending seven years in San Francisco’s front office.
“My job is not necessarily going to be to say that this guy is a necessarily more talented player. We have other people to do that in this building,” Adofo-Mensah said. “My job is going to be another person who knows enough about everybody’s point of view to come together and make a good decision. That is where I see my role, and that is where I see a lot of my value. I have my perspective and I will bring that to the table, but I also have an appreciation for everybody else’s perspective, not only from my time in San Francisco but also my time as a trader to be honest.
“There are a lot of people who win a lot of different ways, and you come to appreciate that. At the end of the day, you are just trying to make better decisions. That is kind of the basis of where I will approach this job from.”
Adofo-Mensah, who will work under executive vice president of football operations and general manager Andrew Berry, earned a degree in economics from Princeton and a master’s in economics from Stanford.
Berry and chief strategy officer Paul DePodesta are Harvard grads and head coach Kevin Stefanski went to Penn. The four Ivy Leaguers are united in their approach to the game – blending traditional football scouting and strategy with data to create an added advantage.
While football traditionalists bristle at the notion of analytics, Adofo-Mensah astutely points out, what the Browns and many teams around the league have begun doing is hardly revolutionary.
“At the end of the day, we are trying to make good decisions. These are uncertain things that we are trying to figure out so we try to be evidence based,” Adofo-Mensah said. “Look, coaches and scouts have been evidence based in the NFL for a long time. Every quality control coach is evidence based. They come up with a probability. I do not necessarily think that this is some new thing. I think we are just applying it, using different methods and also using it across football operations.
“We are trying to win on the margins and so we are trying extricate every little winning possible advantage we can find across football operations and use the evidence to support that. I think we just believe that it is an important facet and something that can help us, and we are going to use whatever [we can] to help us.”
Adofo-Mensah began his professional career in the business world working for Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase and Taylor Woods Capital before joining the 49ers in 2013 as the manager of football research and development.
He was promoted by the 49ers to director of football research and development in 2018.
“I have been really passionate about decision making under uncertainty. I think Wall Street and my commodity trading background is a reflection of that. I think my graduate school in economics is a reflection that. I think playing basketball is a reflection of that,” Adofo-Mensah said. “What draws people to sports from an academic environment is that you get a chance to apply some of these academic principles and the things that happen kind of subconsciously on the court or on the field. In a sense, some people see that as very different, but I do not see it as very different in my ability to kind of pool information to make a bet on the direction of the market versus pooling information to making a bet on the direction of an NFL player. I think those are similar processes.”
During his seven years with the 49ers, Adofo-Mesah was a sponge, absorbing any bit of information he could from scouts and talent evaluators.
“I tried to find the intuition behind it,” Adofo-Mesah said. “I ask ‘why’ a lot. You will find that out about me. I wanted to know even the most simple question. You might think it is simple, but I am building the complex bridge that will get me somewhere complex.
“There have been some incredible evaluators I have been around and I have asked them how they saw the game. It has shaped how I see the game. I have friends in the league who are talented. Again, I will pick every person’s brain. You find some amazing knowledge from everywhere in this league. I would say that is where my evaluation base comes from.”
The 49ers, winners of five Super Bowls, are coming off an NFL championship in 2019. Adofo-Mensah had a front row seat to the 49ers’ most recent build, and he brings that experience to a franchise with the longest playoff drought in the league and hasn’t won a division in 30 years.
“This sport has tons of ups and downs every day. It is not going to be perfect. It is not going to be clean,” Adofo-Mensah said. “You have to have people in the building who are not going to blink, know what that looks like and have a shared vision. All of that stuff sounds good when you read it, but then living that experience over these last three years – 2017 was not easy and 2018 was not easy – I saw [49ers general manager] John [Lynch] and [head coach] Kyle [Shanahan] never blink. Nobody else beneath them blinked. We always knew we were building toward something. Seeing that up close, I just know that is what it takes to win and I will never back down from that.
“It takes talent to win in this league. It takes great coaching. It takes great development. It takes a lot of great things,” Adofo-Mensah said. “Seeing that up close and knowing that you need an aggressive mindset to win on the margins in every aspect of football operations is an invaluable experience I will never be able to replicate. I think that is what I will bring to the Cleveland Browns.”
