Did the Vikings not know that J.C. Tretter had reached out?

Yesterday, we mentioned the retirement of former Cleveland Browns center J.C. Tretter, a player that had been on the radar of a lot of Minnesota Vikings fans over the course of the offseason. The article from Sports Illustrated that we cited talking about the retirement said that the Vikings were one of several teams that Tretter’s camp had reached out to but did not get back to him because of medical concerns.

If Tretter’s camp did reach out to the Vikings, it didn’t apparently didn’t involve a couple of people that would likely be pretty integral to the process of bringing him in: Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell and GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah.

At his press conference yesterday, O’Connell made clear that nobody from Tretter’s camp talked to him or Adofo-Mensah about the idea of coming to play for Minnesota, going so far as to say that the revelations were “news to him.”

The Vikings were one of three teams specifically mentioned in the Sports Illustrated article about Tretter, along with the Carolina Panthers and the Dallas Cowboys. Neither of those teams, as far as I can tell, has commented about any contact from Tretter or anyone that represents him.

I’m not sure which members of the Vikings organization Tretter or his representatives may have reached out to, but you would have to think that if it didn’t involve O’Connell or Adofo-Mensah it couldn’t have been terribly serious. I would think that if they had involved those two guys there would have at least been a discussion between the two parties, but as of now Tretter has announced his retirement and the Vikings are still projected to start Garrett Bradbury at center going forward.

Maybe at some point down the track we’ll get the full story on all of this. For now, however, we’ll have to settle for the conflicting stories from the two sides.