Since the transformative workshop by the American Institute of Mathematics on the minimum rank of a graph, two longstanding open problems have captivated the community interested in the minimum rank of graphs: the graph complement conjecture and the $δ$-conjecture. In this paper, we use a classical result of Mader (1972) to establish a weak version of the graph complement conjecture for all key minimum rank parameters. In addition, again using the same result of Mader, we present some extremal resolutions of the $δ$-conjecture. Furthermore, we incorporate the assumption of the $δ$-conjecture and extensive work on graph degeneracy to improve the bound in the weak version of the graph complement conjecture. We conclude with a list of conjectured bounds on the positive semidefinite variant of the Colin de Verdière number.