Through two days of the 2020 NFL Draft, the Minnesota Vikings have made four picks and acquired five more, giving them a league-high 17 total selections and 13 in Rounds 4-7 on Saturday.
Despite his efforts to move up, Rick Spielman stood pat on Day 2 with picks 58 and 89, selecting OT Ezra Cleveland and CB Cameron Dantzler. The GM then traded the Vikings’ compensatory third-round pick to the New Orleans Saints, who gave up a fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh-round pick for the right to select Dayton tight end Adam Trautman 105th overall.
The Saints gutted their remaining picks. They have zero remaining. The Vikings have 13, nearly 10 percent of the 149 remaining selections in the draft.
“It would be hard for us to trade back, to be honest with you,” Spielman joked late Friday night. “I think everybody is going to be exhausted, but tomorrow is a big day because that’s our college scout day. I’ve got to see a lot of those guys and just get to know them, but this is where our college scouts are excellent, led by Jamaal Stephenson, our college director, and all the work they put in during the year. So I know it’s going to be a big day to us tomorrow.”
The Vikings have three fourth-round picks, three fifths, three sixths and four sevenths. Spielman now has the capital to trade up liberally, and rarely having to trade far. Minnesota has two stretches of 24 picks between their selections but never longer. The general manager may also start trading back to acquire 2021 draft capital if teams are willing.
“You don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, if we’ll keep all those picks,” Spielman said from his in-home draft room. “We could move up. We could turn some of those picks to picks next year, as well, and flip over to 2021 picks. … We can even, I don’t want to say overpay, but be even more aggressive if we hone in on some guys, especially in that fourth-round area. With three picks, if you can potentially move in there and get more picks in that fourth round, you’re getting the best of the third day and hopefully that will be what we try to do, but we’ll just have to see how it all goes.”
Defensive line may be the Vikings’ largest remaining need, having addressed receiver, corner and tackle. With Everson Griffen out of the picture, Minnesota may target an edge rusher like Utah’s Bradlee Anae, Boise State’s Curtis Weaver or Notre Dame’s Khalid Kareem. Defensive tackle, guard and safety also need reinforcements.
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This may not, however, be the best year to amass the team’s largest class of the modern seven-round draft. When the Vikings pieced together their offseason plan, they probably assumed they’d bring a large class of rookies to TCO Performance Center that would suit up at rookie mini-camp the first week of May. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown a wrench in that plan and made it appreciably harder to onboard a large number of first-year players, especially if 13 of them are Day 3 picks who require development. It’s possible the Vikings don’t see their rookies in pads until training camp, whenever that occurs, which only lengthens their learning curve.
“When I started thinking about how this off-season was going to work, I started thinking back on the days where they didn’t have OTAs,” head coach Mike Zimmer said. “They had one mini-camp and they had a longer training camp, but they didn’t have OTAs and all this other stuff. To me, it’s going to be how we adjust better without having OTAs and getting ready for training camp, and when we do get into training camp, understanding what is important with our guys, what’s important with what we have to teach them and what we have to do to get ready.”
This is the reality for the Vikings. With 30 roster spots available to fill and little money to devote to remaining free agents, the Vikings will likely round off their 90-man roster primarily with rookies.
“I know coming into this draft, I think we only had 60 players under contract,” Spielman said. “We had to get 30 more to get to 90, and we know we have to add a lot of depth, and it’s going to be a lot of young depth, so as much competition as we can create, we’re going to definitely do that.”
Minnesota is typically hyper-aggressive in undrafted free agency, but there is less data on lesser-known prospects than ever before due to restricted travel and canceled pro days. The Vikings may be, in effect, using the draft to compensate for a weaker UDFA crop that Spielman usually relies upon.
“Having this amount of picks, it alleviates some of that stress in college free agency just because of the situation that we’re dealing with right now,” Spielman said. “So having a lot of those picks in the third day, especially, I don’t know if we have four in the seventh round and three in the sixth round. A lot of those guys that we like, if they did get to free agency, you’d have to be battling with [other teams]. We have an opportunity to probably select those guys.”
The hoopla over the league’s most-watched draft may soon fizzle when fans aren’t able to show up at meet-and-greets with new rookies or hear about their progress throughout the summer. While the virtual draft has presented unique challenges, it didn’t necessarily upset the essence of teams’ offseason plans. Going forward, teams will be operating in a world where football that was supposed to be played — or practiced — will not be until further notice.
“There’s nothing we can do about that,” said Spielman. “All we can do is know we tried to take the cleanest players that we possibly could.”
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