On Thursday night, the Minnesota Vikings stood pat at pick No. 24 and selected guard Donovan Jackson from Ohio State, completing the offseason overhaul of their offensive line.
Jackson is an exciting piece who profiles as the team’s LG, but also offers intrigue because he played LT for the Buckeyes last year when fellow first-round pick Josh Simmons went out due to injury. The Vikings may plan to play Jackson at LT temporarily if Christian Darrisaw isn’t fully ready by the start of the season. Or they could move Blake Brandel back out to his original position at tackle to fill the gap while Jackson starts at LG.
I’m prefacing this piece to say that it’s not about Jackson specifically as a player, but rather my thoughts on general draft pick value and the opportunity cost the Vikings gave up in choosing to stick and pick at 24. I’ll be watching the tape on Jackson and will have a piece on how I view him as a player later. Here, I want to examine the competing priorities and the logic behind why the Vikings ultimately landed on the decision they did.
I would have preferred a trade-back. The reason I was cautious in rooting for a trade-back before the draft is that it was theory — you had to have a team with the motivation to move up. I went through likely trade-back options in a piece and got one of them, the New York Giants, correct. In practice, it was clear that the motivation to trade up existed because the Houston Texans and the Los Angeles Rams traded down at picks 25 and 26, respectively.
The value of a trade down
The Texans and Rams got good value on their trade downs. Houston traded pick No. 25 to the Giants for picks 34, 99, and their 2026 third-round pick. That could have given the Vikings ammo to move back up into the late second or early third with picks No. 97 and 99 in their pocket, and could have given them extra ammo for 2026. Based on historical trades, it would have been a sound move, with excellent value, according to analytics-based trade charts.
Alternatively, if you had traded back with the Atlanta Falcons, you could have had an extra first-round pick (!!!) next year, for a team that I don’t think will be all that good. The Falcons missed the playoffs last year and are starting an unknown at QB in Michael Penix. There’s certainly a chance they’re a playoff team, but they still need to beat out the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Even if they make the playoffs, I don’t think they match up with the best teams in the conference. I think you should expect the pick to be somewhere in the teens or early 20s.
Trying to recreate the trade, the Vikings would send picks 24 and 97 for picks 46 and 242, plus Atlanta’s 2026 first. The downside is that Minnesota would have even less draft capital in 2025, but that’s a conscious decision they made trading up for Dallas Turner last year, and I don’t think it should impact current decision-making.
There’s also a confounding factor of the reference Kwesi Adofo-Mensah made in his presser that the Falcons only reached out to the Rams as a part of their trade up, so this option may not have been on the table. Regardless, it would have been a coup had the Vikings taken the deal, with a rare agreement between the market and analytics value of the trade.
The justification for staying put
In talking about the pick, Adofo-Mensah justified staying put to pick Jackson instead of trading back, making the analogy to taking a safe shot in golf to get back on the fairway, instead of going for the green in a tough spot.
That echoes a point Adofo-Mensah has made in the past regarding what he learned from the 2022 draft, when he thought he was trying to be too perfect by trading back and taking Lewis Cine and Andrew Booth rather than staying and taking Kyle Hamilton, a move that obviously blew up in his face.
Despite the disastrous 2022 draft, Kwesi’s analogy doesn’t stand up to rigorous analysis. Generally, trading down in the draft is hitting the ball back into the fairway. Or maybe it’s increasing the par you have for the hole. Either way, it looks like Adofo-Mensah was spooked by the catastrophic failure that was the 2022 draft, but I think there’s a chance he is taking the lesson he learned past the logical extreme.
The importance of consensus
In 2022, the Vikings traded down from pick No. 12, passing up on Hamilton, who ranked as the fourth player on Arif Hasan’s consensus board. Last year, when the Vikings traded up for Dallas Turner, they took the consensus ninth player at 17. In both cases, the player in question was considered a blue-chip prospect, one of the best players in the draft.
When they took Jordan Addison at 23 in 2023, he was the 24th-ranked player by consensus, which is roughly even value. In sticking to pick Donovan Jackson, the Vikings took the 36th-ranked player by consensus at 24. Jackson looks like a reach from that perspective.
You can make a couple of arguments that the consensus board undervalued Jackson. It’s clear that the league valued iOL more highly than the board did, with 31st-ranked Tyler Booker going 12th, 33rd-ranked Grey Zabel going 18th, and 36th-ranked Jackson going 24th. It would be fair to argue that the talent gap between the 20th or so ranked player and Jackson wasn’t that large, so “reaching” for Jackson isn’t a big deal. You could argue that a scheme preference or positional need could drive Jackson up the board for the Vikings. All those are reasonable claims.
However, reaching compared to consensus is still a risk. When you do it, you’re basically saying you’re smarter than the wisdom of the crowds, and that usually doesn’t work out. Arif’s research shows pretty clearly that, generally, reaching on a player compared to consensus is a bad idea, even if “steals” don’t typically provide much value.
The consensus board is a useful tool because it helps you protect yourself against overconfidence. If your evaluation of a player is way out of line with consensus, then it should raise some red flags, and you should at least reconsider how you value that player. The same logic applies to trade outcomes, where teams that trade up are overconfident, and analyzing the results of picks at each slot shows that trading down is the surplus value move.
The Vikings’ options on a trade back
Look at Jackson specifically, the consensus had him as an early second-round pick. Taking him at 24 is not a terrible reach, but the Vikings also had the opportunity to trade back into that range with the Giants, and they chose not to. Clearly, the Vikings valued Jackson to the point where they feared losing out on him if they traded back. That would mean they were higher on Jackson than the consensus. I’m not trying to suggest that they were wrong, but if I were in Minnesota’s FO, I would go through the process and ask myself why I was higher on Jackson to affirm my belief.
If you’re concerned about missing out on the specific player, I would say there was a somewhat realistic chance he was still there (the two offensive linemen to go after Jackson were true OTs). Also, there were other players with the potential to provide similar value like Will Johnson, Shavon Revel, Trey Amos, Nick Emmanwori, and Azareye’h Thomas (granted, Johnson and Revel have major injury concerns). Lance Zierlein, a draft analyst for NFL Network who is plugged in with Houston, mentioned that the Vikings stole Jackson from the Texans, so it’s probably unlikely Jackson would have been there.
I think the players I just listed help provide the argument for sticking and picking Jackson because they were all DBs. If you view OL as the strongest need and you see a clear value cliff at iOL after Jackson, then staying to take Jackson is the right call. And I feel there was a cliff after Jackson, with Jonah Savaiinaea, Marcus Mbow, or Tate Ratledge being the next best players at iOL.
However, I don’t agree that iOL was the clear top need. I would have put it down as CB, the position where I mentioned four players with a similar value to Jackson by consensus. Even though a wealth of CBs is still available, right now, none of them will be there at 97. Even if one is, that’s a red flag because of potential injury concerns.
If the Vikings had traded back, they may have missed out on Jackson, but been able to draft a valuable CB like Amos, or take the injury risk on Johnson or Revel. They could have used picks 97 and 99 to move up to get an interior offensive lineman like Mbow, Ratledge, or someone similar. Now, they must wait until pick No. 97, where they’re unlikely to find a player who can contribute immediately at any position. That’s what they gave up by staying put.
conclusion
If you view it through a narrow lens, you can argue that the Vikings made the smart move because they took a player they had evaluated as a “safe” pick — eschewing the risks of injured CBs that were falling. They took a player they were confident in being good, rather than moving back and potentially having to take someone else.
However, if you look at the broader picture, the consensus didn’t match the team’s valuation of Jackson. The Vikings also had a clear opportunity to gain surplus value in a trade back. Trading back and taking a player like Amos, ranked 38th on the consensus board, while picking up additional draft capital is really the “safe” move without a blue-chip player on the board.
When you look at it through the wide lens, looking at a broad range of opinions rather than Minnesota’s specific opinion on Donovan Jackson, the Vikings picking him looks more like Rory McIlroy trying to thread the ball through the trees on the seventh at the Masters, and trading back looks like the safe chip onto the fairway. It could work out brilliantly, like it did for Rory, but the team certainly took a risk.
