EAGAN — Since Justin Jefferson has yet to attend an OTA practice and Jordan Addison has spent OTAs standing on the sidelines banged up with an injury from rookie minicamp, the rest of the Minnesota Vikings’ pass catchers have had opportunities to get in with the first team.
On Tuesday, the depth receivers made it clear that the training camp battle for spots behind Jefferson, Addison and KJ Osborn is going to bring plenty of intrigue. At different times during the practice Jalen Nailor, Jalen Reagor, Trishton Jackson and Brandon Powell all made impressive catches, particularly in situational drills.
Nailor and Reagor sparingly saw the field last year with the rookie from Michigan State grabbing nine passes for 179 yards and a touchdown and the former first-rounder of the Eagles making eight catches for 104 yards and a touchdown. Both players are taking advantage of the additional reps as they each look to make more of an impact in 2023 than they did last year.
Offensive coordinator Wes Phillips has been particularly impressed with Nailor, noting that he stuck out on tape last season.
“Jalen [Nailor] is a really good player, every opportunity he gets to show out, he shows up,” Phillips said. “We put together a lot of install tapes to teach the concepts as we go and a lot of the things — whether it’s opportunities against Chicago or Green Bay that he got to play or whether it’s from practice clips from last year — he shows up where he’s supposed to be and then having the athletic ability to make the play. Really pleased with where he’s at.”
If there is a role to be carved out for Nailor, it’s as a deep threat. In his final two years in college he only caught 63 passes in total but averaged nearly 20 yards per reception. Of his nine receptions as a rookie, four of them went for 15-plus yards, including a 47-yard touchdown against the Packers.
Reagor’s role would need to expand for him to beat out some of the younger players on the depth chart. He only played double-digit snaps on offense in four games and three were blowouts. Having been acquired right before the season from the Eagles, the former Philly top pick was largely relegated to a punt returning role. Phillips says that having a full offseason should be a big help.
“It’s been great to see Jalen Reagor with with a full install from ground zero to come out here and have a little better chance to get the details and just in general the details of the whole pass game have been greatly improved because now we’re going into Year 2 and we’re reinstalling things and detailing things as opposed to trying to teach the whole scheme,” Phillips said.
But Reagor’s spot isn’t set in stone. When training camp comes around, he will have others pushing from behind him. The ex-Rams Jackson and Powell could compete for spots as well. Jackson won a practice squad job over Ihmir Smith-Marsette out of camp last season and Powell became a semi-regular part of the L.A. offense last year with 24 receptions.
The decisions are likely to come down to which receivers master the Vikings’ playbook best. When Kevin O’Connell took over as head coach in 2022, Jefferson and veteran Adam Thielen commented on several occasions about the difficulty level of the scheme for receivers. Receivers have to master a lot of information and multiple positions in order to be able to see the field.
“It’s challenging,” Phillips said. “But the one thing we’re not going to do though is sugar coat it and make it vanilla. We’re going to push these guys, we’re going to move them around in different spots because we have a belief that once you know the formations you’re going to learn conceptually once you’re put in these spots. You’re not going to always be in this spot and run this route on this concept, we’re going to keep mixing it up. Because that’s what we do when we gameplan.”
The Vikings would have preferred that Jefferson and Addison were able to get in the mix in OTAs but the silver lining was laying the groundwork for a depth battle that is going to play out during July and August.
