Matthew Coller: Andrew Van Ginkel can do anything

Vikings star outside linebacker learned how to be versatile in high school and it has stuck with him in the pros

Andrew Van Ginkel returning an interception back for a touchdown in Week 1 win over Giants / Image courtesy of the Minnesota Vikings

If you played against the Boyden-Hull/Rock Valley Nighthawks when Andrew Van Ginkel was on the team, you never forgot it.

The first memory of Van Ginkel that comes to mind for Cory Brandt, who coached BHRV for 24 years, was his freakishly athletic quarterback pulling off a Lamar Jackson-like move on an All-State defender.

“Andrew was pinned on the sideline and he made one step forward and one step back and that guy went flying out of bounds,” Brandt told Purple Insider over the phone. “He just started beating his hands on the ground right in front of me and he said ‘I can’t get him! I just can’t get him!’”

Van Ginkel’s hometown football program didn’t look much like the Texas high schools with 20,000-seat stadiums or the IMG-Academy types with rosters full of hand-picked rising star athletes. It’s a regular school that serves a town of around 4,000 people — one that you would never expect would produce one of the best defensive players in the National Football League.

There were downsides to Van Ginkel mauling the other football squads in his area, like the fact that he didn’t get any attention from big college programs and didn’t often play against anyone with his size, speed or skill. But the upside to being the big fish in a small pond was that Van Ginkel was not specialized in his role. In fact, his role could be defined as: Never, ever leave the field.

“We put him at quarterback, he punted, he returned punts and kicks — he was an incredible punter — he blocked punts and he would return them for touchdowns, he played linebacker for us as well and made 90% of the tackles,” Brandt said.

In particular Van Ginkel playing quarterback was a sight to see. Brandt described it as him running around for 15 seconds in the backfield and then either scrambling for a big gain or launching the ball 50 yards down the field.

“He could have been an incredible quarterback. He could throw it a mile. He had a huge arm,” Brandt said. “Every time he touched the ball everybody held their breath.”

Van Ginkel’s path to becoming a multi-faceted outside linebacker for Brian Flores and the Minnesota Vikings started with learning how defenses worked through the quarterback position.

“Being able to play quarterback and moving around on defense made me versatile and made me understand the game,” Van Ginkel said on Thursday. “Playing quarterback, you read defenses, especially in zone-read you get an idea of what the defensive end is supposed to do, whether he’s crashing. It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed playing quarterback.”

“He’s instinctive, that’s God-given, but he also takes all the coaching that’s given to make him better,” Brandt said. “He eats it up. He’s smart, he can play anywhere. You put him anywhere and he’ll figure it out.”

Andrew Van Ginkel at Vikings practice / Image courtesy of the Minnesota Vikings

Another reason that Van Ginkel didn’t get as much shine as a prospect was that he wasn’t able to attend football camps to get the attention of top universities.

“He didn’t have money to do some of those things, he didn’t have time to do those things,” Brandt said. “He had to work…. He would work construction all day and still never miss a lift.”

Maybe if Van Ginkel had been a high school senior in 2024, the internet would have blown up his crazy highlights and he would have been much easier to find but back then players from smaller schools who didn’t attend camps didn’t end up on the radar. So he attended the University of South Dakota to start his college career and had 9.0 sacks as a freshman.

After a year there, he met with Brandt to talk about his future.

“He came to my office and we started talking and he goes, ‘I want to try to play up,’ but he had to do something to get there,” Brandt said.

Van Ginkel went to Iowa Western Community College and by the end of his lone season there he had 13 Division-I offers. He chose Wisconsin because it was fairly close to home and they played a style on defense that fit his game.

It turned out that he was drafted by a team in Miami that was also a great fit for his versatile skill set. Brian Flores had just been hired as the Dolphins’ head coach and was looking for players in the late rounds that he could develop on a defense that was in need of rebuilding.

Flores talked this week about what he saw in Van Ginkel back in 2019.

“He had a kind of of a play style that we just really liked, he was a [junior college player], and then he goes to Wisconsin, so he's a little bit underdeveloped,” Flores said this week. “He can play, he's fast, he's tough, he makes plays, if we can develop him then he's got the traits and intangibles to develop…it's been cool to watch him grow the entire way [in Miami] and then be away for a couple of years and then get them back and see that there's even more growth.”

In his second year with the Dolphins, Van Ginkel emerged as a starter, picking up 5.5 sacks and returning a memorable 78-yard touchdown on a fumble against the Rams.

Brandt got to see his former student-athlete play in person in 2022 when the Dolphins faced off with the Chicago Bears. Unsurprisingly to his former coach, Van Ginkel scored a touchdown.

“I’m screaming at the Bears stadium and jumping up and going crazy and the people around us are like, ‘what is this guy so excited about?’ And I just said, ‘I coached him in high school,’” Brandt said. “They were like, ‘really? That’s cool.’”

This offseason the Vikings knew they were going into 2024 free agency with some cap space to spend. Head coach Kevin O’Connell made his wish list and took it to Flores. They both had the same player toward the top: Andrew Van Ginkel.

“As we identified some potential targets in free agency, he was one of the first names that I had identified even before talking to Flo [Brian Flores],” O’Connell said. “Then the first chance that Flo and I got together to really talk through some of our options, that was one of the first names he mentioned to me. On my end of it, it was really just playing against the guy watching crossover tape where you just see a bunch of plays get made by the same guy, and they're not always the same play….He's dropping into coverage. He's matching players in coverage. He’s making plays on the ball. He's punching the ball out when he arrives to tackle. Just does so many things. And then just being an extension of Flo out there.”

Back in Rock Valley, Iowa, news that the Vikings had signed Van Ginkel lit up the school.

“You have never seen phones blow up like that in a school,” Brandt said. “We’re in Vikings territory and I’m telling you, this is a Viking town. When that news came out that Andrew was a Viking, I think the whole town knew it in 10 minutes.”

When Van Ginkel intercepted Daniel Jones’ pass and walked into the end zone for a touchdown last Sunday, you could hear Rock Valley cheering all the way in Minnesota.

“Gink always knows really the intent behind his job on the play, and then that allows them to take a look at what formation we're getting, what are the tendencies, what are the things we may get, and then react, like picking off a screen like that,” O’Connell said.

Of course, Brandt wasn’t surprised that Van Ginkel made the high-difficulty catch. He recalls him being a pretty good wide receiver during his junior year.

“I’ve always said, ‘Let him play and he’ll make plays,’” Brandt said.

O’Connell wasn’t surprised either. He revealed after the game that he had told Van Ginkel that he expected him to score a touchdown this year — he just didn’t know it would come that fast.

Because he is understated and isn’t flashy (except when he scores touchdowns), Van Ginkel might never become a true household name outside of Minnesota and Rock Valley, where he returned this offseason to help in flood recovery efforts to provide free meals to his town. But he has established himself as a key piece of the Vikings’ defense, which dominated Week 1 against New York and has a chance to be the driver of their success this year.

And his former coach, along with all of Rock Valley, will be following every snap no matter where he lines up.

“We’re living the dream with Andrew,” Brandt said.