Why have the Vikings missed on so many defensive draft picks?
The NFL Draft is a mid-offseason shot in the arm for football fans. With each passing pick comes more dreams of the potential superstars the club has just acquired. Analysts on TV fire off scouting reports that make everyone sound like the next Aaron Donald and social media accounts blast out highlight reels and stories of the prospects’ greatness. Fun times are had by all.
Of course, no fan base’s draft excitement has ever been fully justified. Usually by the end of the second training camp half of the group is gone. But in recent years Minnesota Vikings’ fans have particularly had a lot of cold water poured on them when it comes to draft picks on the defensive side of the ball.
Between 2016 and 2021, the Vikings selected 30 defenders and only three of them are presently on the roster with Cam Bynum as the lone starter.
It should not come as a shock that the Vikings’ defense has allowed the fourth most points since 2020 when they saw a large portion of Mike Zimmer’s elite group from 2015-2019 leave in free agency or get cut due to salary cap constraints.
So as the Vikings approach another draft with hopes of finding building blocks to turn around the struggling defense, what can they learn from the missed picks of the past? Let’s have a look at a few trends that may have tilted the odds against the Vikings…
Lack of high picks
The higher the pick, the better the odds that a player becomes a franchise cornerstone. It’s certainly possible to take a bunch of lottery tickets on middle and late-round players and land a few stars as the Vikings did with Everson Griffen and Danielle Hunter but they couldn’t have built an elite defense without the first and second round stars Harrison Smith, Xavier Rhodes, Anthony Barr and Eric Kendricks either.
Since 2016 the Vikings have spent exactly three picks in the first or second rounds on defense and none of those have been in the top 25. Mike Hughes is the highest selected player by Minnesota in the last eight drafts and he went 30th.
That is mostly a product of being a competitive team for many years but they also spent a good number of picks at the top trying to hold together the offense. From ‘16-’21 they took four offensive linemen, two receivers, a running back and a tight end in the first or second rounds.
Would their fate have been different if they picked on the defensive side instead? It’s hard to say. We can always go back in time and find the players that coulda/woulda/shoulda been picked but in the case of the Vikings it’s actually not that easy to find a bunch of stars following their picks. Kenny Clark and Chris Jones are the most notable having been picked after Laquon Treadwell.
Not having high picks in general appears to be the most obvious explanation for the lack of success finding key defensive players even if the offensive picks made sense both at the time and in hindsight.
Low impact positions
Out of the 30 defensive players the Vikings selected from ‘16-’21, 16 of them played inside linebacker, safety or nose tackle.
The fact that none of them became impact starters is surprising based on the odds of landing at least a somewhat significant player here or there but even if they had thrived it’s hard to say how much of an impact it would have made. If one of the athletic linebackers worked out maybe the Vikings could have let Anthony Barr or Eric Kendricks go earlier or they could have locked in a partner for Harrison Smith. But those aren’t exactly the positions that shape a defense’s performance.
The potential value of some of the picks was dragged down even more by picking run-stuffing linebackers like Kentrell Brothers, Ben Gedeon and Cam Smith.
Ironically the Vikings let go two players who found niches elsewhere in Marcus Epps and Jayron Kearse.
In 2021, PFF released a chart of all teams’ draft success when weighing by round and positional value and the Vikings did quite poorly.
The next Danielle
When the Vikings weren’t taking linebackers and safeties with their mid/late picks, they aimed for a repeat of one of their best picks: Danielle Hunter.
The problem is that Hunter was an outlier. He was overlooked because of his lack of production at LSU despite putting on one of the all-time great NFL Combine performances. By Relative Athletic Score, Hunter ranked in the 99th percentile of athleticism based on his Combine scores. The subsequent lanky picks were all good athletes but did not match up to that standard. Jalyn Holmes (68th), Ade Aruna (86th), DJ Wonnum (80th) and Janarius Robinson (93rd).
Stephen Weatherly, Ifeadi Odenigbo were both much more productive players in college and turned out to be relative success stories as situational rushers.
The mid-round pass rushing star in general has been difficult to find in the NFL. Only nine defensive end/outside linebackers picked between the third and fifth rounds since 2016 have more than 20-plus career sacks. If the Vikings are looking for a pass rusher to follow their current elite edges, they will likely have to select them high.
Changing positions
Within the list of recently-drafted players who haven’t made a difference on the Vikings’ defense, we find a subset who the team struggled to find their true fit. They moved Mackensie Alexander from an outside corner to nickel — a decision he resisted. They switched Jack Tocho from corner to safety, Jalyn Holmes from defensive end to defensive tackle to defensive end again, James Lynch from defensive tackle to three-technique to nose tackle and Cam Bynum got instantly shuffled from corner to safety.
That isn’t to say that it’s impossible to find a player who is a better fit at another position than they played in college but it’s not easy to find many examples of it working.
Bad luck?
The all-time battle in the NFL Draft is Process vs. Luck. The New England Patriots got lucky when they drafted Tom Brady in the sixth round. It wasn’t some genius wizardry. The same thing goes for the Vikings’ 2015 draft when they nabbed Hunter in the third and Stefon Diggs in the fifth. We can certainly point to some of the processes the Vikings used over the years as being questionable but finding almost no starters out of 30 defensive picks defies the odds.
A few years ago the website Arrowhead Pride tried to figure out the exact percentage chance at success for each position. Most defensive jobs hit somewhere between 25% and 40% in the third through fifth rounds. Even if those numbers are a rough estimate, it suggests that the Vikings should have been able to nab a handful of notable players along the way and probably ran into a rough patch in the luck department. When that turns around, nobody knows.
What it means for the Vikings’ current brass
It seems that if the Vikings want to turn around the defense under Brian Flores, they can’t do it by taking guesses in the middle rounds, especially on non-premium positions. They have to use high picks and shore up the coverage and pass rush issues that have plagued them during this stretch of poor defensive play. And they have to hope and pray that whoever they pick maximizes their talent the way players like Harrison Smith, Xavier Rhodes and Eric Kendricks once did because they won’t have many darts to throw at the board this year.