Newest Minnesota Vikings GM candidate has complicated history, and the only one with NFL Draft experience
There are numerous external candidates for the Minnesota Vikings general manager job, and only one has been a decision-maker.
Now that the NFL Draft is behind us, the Minnesota Vikings have started lining up candidates to interview for their vacant general manager position. While interim general manager Rob Brzezinski and assistant general manager Ryan Grigson are candidates, going external might be the best option.
In a wild fleury, multiple candidates for the Vikings’ general manager job were announced across the board. There are some of the usual names you’ve seen across other job openings over the past two years, and just one of them has been a decision maker in his past.
Dave Ziegler is a fascinating candidate for Vikings GM
NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero reported that Tennessee Titans assistant general manager Dave Ziegler was requested by the Vikings to interview for their GM job. He’s been with the Titans for just under a year and a half after being hired in 2025.
Here’s where things get interesting. Ziegler was a general manager once already. He joined Josh McDaniels in 2022 as the general manager of the Las Vegas Raiders and was fired after two seasons on the job. Those two NFL Drafts were defined by trading the first and second-round picks in 2022 for wide receiver Davante Adams and picking Tyree Wilson at seventh overall the following year. Overall, they weren’t too bad, with two starting offensive linemen outside of the top 90 (Dylan Parham and Thayer Munford), and offensive contributors in Michael Mayer and Tre Tucker on day two.
It’s hard to parse out his two-year track record, especially since the Raiders aren’t exactly the best organization. They don’t exactly give people a long runway to build up a level of success.
Our Titans beat reporter, Easton Freeze, has spent time with Ziegler and feels it’s a fascinating option for the Vikings.
It’s not hard to peek at Dave Ziegler’s extremely brief first stint as a GM and dismiss him as a candidate. His two draft classes with the Raiders are really tough. So let me give some post-firing perspective on him that might paint him in a different light for you.
Titans beat reporter Easton Freeze
People seem to really, really like Dave. He joined Titans GM Mike Borgonzi’s staff in late January shortly after Borgonzi got the job. Ziegler’s title has been Vice President/Football Advisor as a part of a larger whole in this version of the Tennessee front office. He was brought in as a high-ranking lieutenant alongside another former Raiders GM, Reggie McKenzie, to be one-fifth of a senior executive five pack.
So for two years it was Borgonzi, McKenzie, Ziegler, President of Football Ops Chad Brinker, and VP of Player Personnel Dan Saganey rolling as a unit in the film room and through the draft process. Call it a dream team, call it more of an island of misfit toys; the bottom line is that it was a diverse collection of experienced football minds working together on rebuilding this roster.
I’ve been lucky to have had the chance to get to know Ziegler a bit in the past year. He’s done a couple of solo media availabilities with the beat, which is part of why I’m not surprised at all to see his name popping back up in this capacity. It’s always seemed to me that he has the ambition and the people skills to be the man in charge again someday.
My understanding is that he has real juice in the Titans building. Borgonzi trusts and relies on him for important things, and by all accounts, he’s been a real credit to the operation so far.
But you have to hope that his taste for roster building has changed and evolved. I see how things went with the Raiders, and it’s impossible to look past it. All I can say from my personal experience with the guy is that when I’ve heard him talk about team building philosophy, he sounds like somebody who looks back on his first stint as a collection of hard lessons learned.
Whether that means he’d be different in practice or not, I cannot say. And I also can’t say that any changes he’d make would yield better results. But at the very least, he’s not one of the many NFL minds who have failed and are stubborn about their way being the right way. To me, that counts for something.
The biggest factor with what Freeze has to say about Ziegler that the Vikings will focus on: hard lessons learned from his first stint. How much has he learned? That could end up being the major factor in the Vikings’ decision. In turn, that could also be why they turn the organization over to Grigson.
The next few weeks will be fascinating.