At the time that Kwesi Adofo-Mensah called the Minnesota Vikings’ offseason plan a “competitive rebuild,” they had not done a single thing that could have been considered rebuild-y.
The Vikings extended their 34-year-old quarterback, kept expensive veterans Adam Thielen, Harrison Smith and Danielle Hunter on contracts that are not favorable toward the future and signed veteran players in Jordan Hicks and Za’Darius Smith. Shortly after Adofo-Mensah’s Competitive Rebuild press conference, they brought back Patrick Peterson.
Normally when a team is trying to toe the line between battling for a division banner and hitting the reset button, they focus on getting the long-term salary cap right and try to accumulate draft assets without tearing it all down to the screws. For the Vikings, last weekend’s NFL Draft represented the final opportunity to do something rebuild-y with this offseason.
Rebuilding through the draft can take on a bunch of forms. It could mean accumulating as many picks as possible and trying to throw dart after dart. The Vikings did that in 2020 when they selected 15 players. It could mean moving up in search of a future franchise player. The Detroit Lions did that amidst their rebuild to acquire the 12th overall pick and use it on receiver Jameson Williams.
The Vikings did a little of this and a little of that.
They moved back in the first round to acquire an additional pick and move up in the second and then selected safety Lewis Cine. You could argue that safety is a position of now and later. The Vikings need versatile, explosive players on defense to turn around a group that gave up the sixth most points in the NFL over the last two years. If defensive coordinator Ed Donatell is going to add a new layer of creativity to the Vikings’ defense, he’s needs Jimmys and Joes for his X’s and O’s. If you want the defense to be mean, draft Lewis Cine.
Long term it fits too. Harrison Smith’s age and contract put a possible target date of 2024 that he will not be on the team anymore. In the ideal situation, Cine would be a fully developed difference maker ready to take over the Hitman role.
Safety does veer off the rebuilding plan when we consider positional value. Per PFF’s analysis of surplus value, safety ranks only ahead of running back, tight end and center. So the difference between having a safety on a rookie contract and getting a top-notch player at the position in free agency is not huge. The surplus value really sinks if Cine is an average player. An average veteran safety only costs $4.6 million, which is above only linebacker and running back for surplus value.
Is there any better evidence recently than the safeties the Vikings have had next to Smith? Aside from one year on the franchise tag of Anthony Harris, the team has easily been able to fill safety jobs with average players like Andrew Sendejo, Harris and Xavier Woods. All of them played well. Yes, that may have been impacted by Smith but the bottom line is: The league is not paying safeties like it believes they are driving defensive success.
Maybe we nudge the Cine pick into the “competitive” side of this thing, especially since it pushes Cam Bynum, a promising fourth-round pick from 2021, out of that starting job.
Here is a look at how much estimated value each team added to their roster during the draft (y axis) against what they were expected to gain based on draft position (x axis). pic.twitter.com/TS9vD1nav2
— Jason_OTC (@Jason_OTC) May 2, 2022
Andrew Booth Jr.’s selection has a case for helping the team compete right now and rebuild. The fact that the Vikings moved up in the second round (after moving back) told us that they wanted to go get their cornerback of the future. Giving up draft capital to move up isn’t a rebuild-y thing to do in the second round but Booth Jr. does play a premium position with good surplus value. He’s also young and the Vikings believe he can be better than he was in college following surgery on an injury that he played through while at Clemson.
If we combine Cine and Booth Jr.’s picks, it gets a little more rebuild-ish because teams need complete secondary units to be an elite defense.
“Cornerback depth is important,” Adofo-Mensah said on Saturday. “You need four good ones, at least. You need depth year-in and year-out. That position will get challenged. We’re excited to add to the competition we had in that room.”
Neither a rebuild or a win-now mindset fits taking a guard with the Vikings’ other second-round pick. It’s every bit as low on the surplus chart as safety and Ed Ingram isn’t likely to play right away with Ezra Cleveland at left tackle and veterans Chris Reed and Jesse Davis fighting for the starting right guard job. Reed and Davis may be short-term solutions but guards are not considered foundational pieces to a roster, in part because they are readily available every year in free agency (ahem, so long as you spend more than the minimum).
Let’s just slide that one somewhere where we don’t have to look at it anymore and talk about the third round. Linebacker Brian Asamoah was called a “modern” player by Adofo-Mensah on Friday night.
“When you see his skillset and what he can do, even athletically, watching him move around at his pro day where he was asked to drop and move around and do some things that you might not be able to see on tape, kind of checked off every box in what we were looking for in bringing a linebacker in to compete,” director of college scouting Mike Sholiton said.
Asamoah fits a very Eric Kendricks-like mold. High motor, high character, good instincts, fast, tough-as-nails, rangy. As great as Kendricks is, he’s like Smith with his age and contract inevitably set to catch up with him. If the Vikings got a third-round eventual replacement for Kendricks, that’s pretty good. But again we run into the surplus monster. Elite linebackers have a huge impact on games and get paid like it but average linebackers are literally everywhere. Look in your back yard, Eric Wilson is probably hanging out ready to step into your Thanksgiving Day game. Unless Asamoah is great, he won’t have an above average impact. If he’s great, it’s a heck of a pick.
Still, that one goes under the rebuild category because neither Chazz Surratt (third rounder, 2021) or Troy Dye (fourth rounder 2020) has shown flashes of someday taking Kendricks’ spot.
Beyond that, it’s all swings for the fences but the Vikings did trade up for Akayleb Evans, a cornerback that Adofo-Mensah personally felt had a higher ceiling than the consensus. Taking shots on middle-round corners is a good rebuilding play. Taking a lanky D-lineman, high-character tackle who might play guard in the sixth, and receiver with a bunch of big plays in college in the sixth are all fine long-term decisions. But every Day 3 pick is just that.
Failing to select a wide receiver or defensive end before the end of Day 2 makes a strong case that the Vikings were picking for today and not tomorrow. Otherwise they might look at Adam Thielen’s age/contract or Za’Darius Smith and Danielle Hunter’s future situations and say that it was necessary to land eventual replacements. And if you’re wondering where all the surplus value has been hiding, you got it, receiver and defensive end are the top two behind quarterback.
Hey, remember quarterback? At least one guy went in the first round and the Vikings could have taken a wild swing at Malik Willis if they were really thinking about only the rebuild. They passed. Not that anybody thinks that was crazy after seeing the QBs free fall but a truly rebuilding team would grab one just for kicks. Though Tennessee’s long-term QB uncertainty may have inspired them to eventually pick Willis. Hm.
The reality of the NFL is that winning a championship takes a lot of good players and several gold jacket-level players. The Vikings entered the draft without enough of either. They dropped out of a slot at No. 12 that would have given them a higher chance to grab greatness and then didn’t load up on the highest surplus positions that would bring the most value if they got good players. So on the day after the draft, it doesn’t fit into either box of massively upgrading the team right away or setting them up with a bunch of chances to hit the jackpot later.
That doesn’t mean the draft will be a failure. We never know on the day after it’s over. Ask the Seahawks, who got Fs and Ds for picking Russell Wilson. But there wasn’t an easy theme to peg and it will take the best possible results for some of the picks to be long-term difference makers.
