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Vikings Links: Let’s Play Tag!

The East West Shrine Bowl practices are underway.

2025 NFL Draft: 10 players who stood out in East-West Shrine Bowl practices

Tahj Brooks, RB, Texas Tech (5-foot-9 1/4, 229 pounds)

You wouldn’t think the 5-9 Brooks weighs almost 230 pounds based on the quickness he showed on the practice field (and during his career at Texas Tech). His plus elusiveness and balance for his size were on full display, whether receiving a handoff or grabbing a pass out of the backfield. Brooks somehow manages to be patient and decisive at the same time, picking out a hole after seeing his blocking unfold but also attacking a crease with utter abandon and lowering his pads to shrink his strike zone. With his combination of agility and power through contact, Brooks stands out, even in a very deep group of running backs poised to go in the third through fifth rounds of the upcoming draft.

Cobee Bryant, CB, Kansas (5-11, 171)

CB Renardo Green showed his ultra-competitive and physical nature at last year’s Shrine Bowl practices, ultimately helping to make him a second-round pick of the San Francisco 49ers. Bryant’s making a similar case for a top-64 selection this time around. He’s been a nagging presence in man coverage, knocking away passes and forcing turnovers. Like Green a year ago, Bryant has drawn a number of flags from the referees on hand at practice, but NFL teams know aggressive play is a must in today’s league. Bryant doesn’t present the most fluid hips in transition, weighs just 171 pounds and has small hands (8 7/8”). That said, he offers solid length (31 7/8-inch arms) and off-the-charts confidence — two key ingredients for a starting corner.

Jordan Phillips, DT, Maryland (6-1 1/4, 318)

Phillips isn’t as tall or long (32 1/4-inch arms) as many nose tackles, but the 318-pounder carries a large share of his weight between his belt and ankles. That low center of gravity made him tough to move by one or two blockers on run plays this past weekend and allowed him to bull-rush strong linemen like N.C. State’s Tim McKay into the backfield in pass-protection drills. Phillips surprised Boston College C Drew Kendall with a spin move to rush the passer during team work on Monday, but his bread and butter on Sundays will be to maintain the line of scrimmage and disengage to stop run plays.

Gareth Warren, OL, Lindenwood (6-5 1/8, 330)

Over the past two seasons, Warren started at left tackle for the Division II Lindenwood Lions. He was a two-time all-conference pick at guard in 2021 and ‘22, however, and looked at home inside during Shrine practices. The native of Hawai’i possesses the length to play outside (33 5/8-inch arms), which was helpful to hold off all comers in pass-protection drills and live play. His anchor is as strong as you’d expect at 6-5, 330 pounds, and the mobility is also there to pull and trap. Warren showed no fear facing opponents from Power Four programs, showing teams he’s a worthy selection in the top half of Day 3.

Ten Winners from Day Two of East-West Shrine Bowl Practice led by small-school offensive lineman

Georgia Tech DL Zeke Biggers

This is two straight days of great practices for the ACC defensive tackle, and numerous scouts I spoke to kept complimenting him on the sideline. His frame at a jaw-dropping 6’5, 320 pounds with 35-inch arms stands out, but the athleticism he plays with routinely stood out in this defensive tackle group.

Oregon State IOL Joshua Gray

A multi-year starter at left tackle and guard, Gray has mainly played at center throughout practices and has handled the transition well. The athleticism has stood out moving through drills, and he had a fantastic one-on-one against Clemson’s Payton Page.

In a weaker center class, Gray handling a move inside to center helps his draft stock out and might make him one of the earliest-drafted centers in this class.

…

Ten Winners from Day Three of East-West Shrine Bowl led by elite group of pass catchers

Arkansas DT Eric Gregory

It’s hard to stand out sharing a room dominated by Jordan Phillips and C.J. West at the Shrine Bowl, but Eric Gregory flashed routinely throughout the day.

He had a rep that drew whistles with a nice arm-over in drills, generating an instant win that had scouts buzzing.

South Carolina DT Tonka Hemingway

Tonka is a fitting name for a defensive tackle who plays with the power that Hemingway does. He had quite a few reps just running through opposing offensive linemen in drills on the day.

Minnesota Vikings News and Links

Vikings’ Daronte Jones gets another interview; Grant Udinski update

Vikings defensive backs coach and pass game coordinator Daronte Jones is interviewing with a second team for a possible promotion to defensive coordinator. After interviewing with the Chicago Bears this weekend, Jones spoke with the Jacksonville Jaguars on Monday morning, according to NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero.

The Bears filled their vacancy, hiring former Saints and Raiders head coach Dennis Allen on Sunday. But the Vikings aren’t out of the woods yet when it comes to potentially losing Jones. This interview is particularly notable because Jones is the first reported candidate to interview for the Jaguars’ DC opening under new offensive-minded head coach Liam Coen.

The other notable coach the Vikings could still potentially lose is Grant Udinski, their 28-year-old wunderkind whose title is assistant quarterbacks coach/assistant offensive coordinator. He’s viewed as a rising star in the industry and has received real interest from multiple teams in need of an OC.

Udinski had two interviews with the Seattle Seahawks and was a finalist for that job, but it ended up going to former Vikings and Saints OC Klint Kubiak. He also interviewed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who are looking to replace Coen after losing him to the Jaguars in dramatic fashion. And there’s buzz that Udinski could perhaps be considered as an OC candidate for Coen in Jacksonville, according to Alec Lewis.

7 cornerbacks the Minnesota Vikings could target in free agency

D.J. Reed, Jets

Reed has sometimes been overshadowed by teammate Sauce Gardner, but he’s a bona fide No. 1 corner (or elite No. 2) in his own right. The 28-year-old has been outstanding since becoming a full-time starter in 2020, first with Seattle for a couple years and then for the last three in New York. That’s included a few impressive performances against Justin Jefferson and the Vikings. Reed is undersized for a boundary corner at 5’9”, but he makes up for it with physicality, technique, and ball skills. He’s a great player who would fit nicely in Brian Flores’ defense.

Carlton Davis, Lions

Mike Hilton, Bengals

Asante Samuel Jr., Chargers

Kristian Fulton, Chargers

Byron Murphy Jr., Vikings

Charvarius Ward, 49ers

Ward was a Pro Bowler and second team All-Pro in 2023 after racking up five interceptions and a league-high 23 total passes defended. His 2024 wasn’t nearly as good, and included five missed games due to injury, but his track record suggests he should bounce back next season. The former Chiefs UDFA turns 29 in May. He’s another big outside corner at 6’1”.

Vikings named landing spot for $13 million RB with 4 consecutive 1,000-yard seasons

Veteran Aaron Jones had a strong debut season with the Vikings, but he was slowed by various injuries late in the season and just turned 30 in December. Minnesota could certainly run it back with Jones, and that’s likely the preferred outcome for both sides, but this offseason presents an opportunity for the Vikings to get younger at the RB position, either in free agency or the 2025 NFL Draft.

Knox recently named Minnesota as a top landing spot for Najee Harris, a 26-year-old former first-round pick who just posted his fourth consecutive 1,000-yard rushing season. Here was Knox’s take on the potential fit:

A fresh start and a foray into unrestricted free agency could be best for Harris. He’s a capable dual-threat back, will turn 27 in March and should receive starter-level contract offers from running-back needy teams. … Harris would be a sensible target for the Vikings if they don’t retain Aaron Jones. Minnesota is expected to turn the offense over to J.J. McCarthy in 2025, and the young signal-caller would benefit from having a high-volume back in the fold.

18 Million QB Floated as ‘Special’ Option for Vikings in Free Agency

The Minnesota Vikings can go in several directions with their quarterback room this offseason. Sam Darnold, J.J. McCarthy, and/or Daniel Jones could return in 2025. But Bleacher Report’s Brad Gagnon floated the idea of Justin Fields to the Vikings.

“Maybe Fields will never be a classically elite quarterback, but in the right environment he could absolutely work as a game-changing offensive weapon on a consistent basis,” Gagnon wrote on January 22. “Imagine him in a special role with the Vikings, for example?”

Fields completed 65.8% of his passes for 1,106 yards, 5 touchdowns, and 1 interception in 2024, adding 289 yards and another 5 TDs on 62 carries.

He set career highs in completion percentage, passer rating, and air yards per attempt.

Fields is heading to free agency after a four-year, $18.8 million contract. Over The Cap projects a $6.4 million valuation for Fields. That would be a bargain comparable to Darnold’s one-year, $10 million pact signed in 2024.

Matthew Coller: Future of the Vikings, Part 5: What’s next on the D-line?

Dallas Turner

After struggling to get onto the field early in the season, Turner worked his way into the regular rotation over the final six weeks. After averaging just 15 snaps per game through the first 12 weeks and picking up just 1.0 sack and seven QB pressures on 79 pass rush snaps, he was given 25 snaps per game from Week 13 through the end of the year. PFF graded him a 68.8 during that stretch, which was 32nd out of 127 either starters or part-timers.

Turner’s grade was not so much based on a consistent impact but several spectacular plays, including a eye-popping sack against the Bears and an excellent interception versus Seattle. He only picked up five pressures on 65 rushes and ranked 107th of 116 in pass-rush win rate in those six games where he saw the field more often.

There is good news and bad news about Turner’s rookie season. The good news is that he did show those flashes and that he’s one of the youngest players in the league. There is plenty of time to develop along the same path as other young, raw edge players like Baltimore’s Odafe Oweh (who had just 8.0 sacks in his first two seasons but got 10.0 this year) or Green Bay’s Rashan Gary (2.0 sacks as a rookie) but the bad news is that the Vikings expected more from Turner when they traded up in the first round and now there will be a lot of pressure for Turner to take an enormous step forward.

Harrison Phillips

Because the Vikings rotated their defensive tackles more in 2024 than they did in 2023, Phillips played a more reasonable amount of snaps with 672 in the regular season rather than the 838 that he played last year.

The thing about evaluating Phillips statistically is that defensive tackles that do the dirty work in Brian Flores’s system rarely get big PFF scores. The number of splash plays created for other players like Ivan Pace Jr., Josh Metellus and Blake Cashman that involved Phillips doing his job is enormous but his job doesn’t often land TFLs, QB pressures and sacks. What we can say statistically was that he played a vital role in the No. 2 rushing defense in the NFL and graded by PFF as a top-10 tackler. Phillips had the ninth best missed-tackle rate among starting DTs

Jonathan Bullard

Similar to Phillips, the veteran DT scored high marks in the areas involved with stopping the run. He was the fifth best tackler by PFF and cracked the top 25 in run defense (out of 67). That’s a lot of bang for buck when you consider Bullard only took up $2.2 million on the cap and played 571 snaps.

As a pass rusher, Bullard was much more involved in moving blockers for blitzes to get home than he was going straight up field. He had just six pressures on the season.

Jalen Redmond

Jalen….Redmond? It isn’t often that a player from a spring league like the XFL or UFL becomes a difference maker in the NFL but that was the case for Redmond in a small sample in 2024. Early in the season he was bumped up to the active roster and played a handful of impressive snaps against Houston in Week 3.

He didn’t see significant playing time again until Week 8 against Los Angeles but graded as one of the best defensive players on the field that night. And then he had a breakout game against Arizona in which he chased Kyler Murray all over US Bank Stadium, earning a 91.1 PFF grade for the game. After that, he was a regular, playing between 21 and 38 snaps every game down the stretch.

Redmond finished with 14 defensive stops (forced negative plays for the offense) in just 208 snaps, which is more than Tillery had in nearly 300 more snaps. Among players with at least 200 snaps, the ex-Oklahoma Sooner had the 13th best PFF grade.

A dozen other replacement-level guys — Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: Former Vikings Jaylin Holmes, James Lynch and Sheldon Day all saw a fair amount of playing time in 2024. There are a large number of DT free agents who will come at a low cost with limited ceiling that the Vikings could pick up to fill the spots if they think players like Redmond and Rodriguez are ready to step in. That strategy has not been particularly effective in the past.

That said, the Vikings need a big upgrade there next season if they are going to take another step as a defense. Too often they were forced to rush Pace Jr., Cashman or Metellus and vacate the middle of the field because they could not get interior pressure by rushing four defensive linemen. The three starting DTs totaled 38 QB pressures between them. There were 25 DTs who had more than that alone in 2024.

Why Vikings’ QB questions begin with McCarthy, not Darnold

Many NFL fans were surprised on the night of Jan. 5, when the Minnesota Vikings’ quarterback of the future got considerable air time during NBC’s broadcast of the team’s 31-9 loss to the Detroit Lions. J.J. McCarthy, who missed his rookie season because of a torn meniscus in his right knee, appeared thinner than usual as he watched the game from the sideline in a T-shirt and shorts.

Listed at 219 pounds at the start of training camp, McCarthy dropped more than 20 pounds this fall, following a pattern familiar for many football players who put strength workouts on hold during the rehabilitation process. McCarthy has plenty of time to regain the weight before OTA practices this spring. But his appearance was a visual symbol of the neutral terms Vikings general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and coach Kevin O’Connell used last week in discussing his immediate future.

National discussion has framed the Vikings’ looming quarterback decision as whether they should re-sign veteran Sam Darnold, who is set to become an unrestricted free agent. But their first priority is to assess McCarthy’s capacity for a quick ascension.

“He is … right where we hoped he would be at this point,” O’Connell said, “to have the type of offseason to be able to answer that question.”

Said Adofo-Mensah: “We’re really confident in him, his work ethic and his preparation. But I can’t sit here and tell you I know anything for certain.”

There isn’t much precedent for projecting McCarthy’s next step. He was the first quarterback in the NFL’s modern draft era (since 1967) to miss his entire rookie season because of injury after being selected in the first round.

Assessing Darnold for a possible 2025 starting role carries its own challenges. He earned his first Pro Bowl honors in 2024 after throwing for 4,135 yards and 35 touchdowns in the Vikings’ first 16 games, at which point he ranked No. 12 in the NFL with a 63.8 QBR. But his performance then cratered in the Vikings’ two most important games — losses in the regular-season finale to the Lions and wild-card round to the Los Angeles Rams — as he threw a combined 23 off-target passes, according to NFL Next Gen Stats, and took 11 sacks. His QBR (14.8) ranked 31st out of 32 qualified quarterbacks during that period.

In the immediate aftermath, O’Connell said it will be “very important” to consider Darnold’s full “body of work” rather than focusing on the Lions and Rams games. And according to Adofo-Mensah, the Vikings discussed the possibility of Darnold upending their timeline for McCarthy even before the season began.

“I always ask Kevin [O’Connell] before the season starts, ‘Hey, what information would you need to kind of change your mind?’” Adofo-Mensah said. “And to say it beforehand so that you’re not kind of whipped around with what potentially could happen. And we had those conversations beforehand. We thought there was a chance Sam Darnold could play at a high level. Just seeing what he had done at previous stops and what Kevin’s infrastructure and our infrastructure here has done for other quarterbacks that have played here, we thought there was a chance for a high level.

“Did I know it was going to be a Pro Bowl? I’m not going to sit here and tell you that. But I think that there was some part of us that all believed that Sam was going to have a really good season, and so when we made the move, that was part of the calculus.”

If nothing else, this season provided a clear glimpse at Darnold’s ceiling. The Vikings know how well he can play in their system, but they saw his limitations as well. They’ll pair that information with their best projection of McCarthy’s progress and, in the next six to eight weeks, their plan at the position will be clear.

An Off Season Plan before the mock

Starting Cap Space

2025: $57,942,543

2026: $101,508,844

Cut Ed Ingram : saves 3.325M in 2025 cap space

Cut CJ Ham : saves 2.65M in 2025 cap space

Franchise tag Sam Darnold 1 yr 40M

Extend/Redo : Andrew Van Ginkel 3 yr 40.5M : saves 5M in 2025 cap space

Extend/Redo : Josh Oliver 3 yr 16.5M : saves 4.78M in 2025 cap space

Extend Byron Muphy 3 yr 52.5M

Extend Aaron Jones 2 yr 12M

Extend Dalton Risner 3 yr 12M

Sign LG Teven Jenkins 3 yr 45M

Sign DT Levi Onwuzurike 3 yr 36M

Sign DT Teair Tart 2 yr 10M

Sign S Julian Blackmon – 3 yr 24M

Ending Cap Space

2025: $19,727,543

2026: $6,772,844

The 2026 cap number is very low but if they cut O’Neill, Phillips, and Brandel they would save 30.5M in cap space and have 37.3M to play with before any restructures.

This shows that the team could tag and play Darnold for one more season if push came to shove. I believe they will tag him if they cannot find a suitable trade. They can always trade him later.

One note about guards. Risner graded very well as a pass blocker and so so as a run blocker. If you look at the grades of most guards they are either good in run blocking or pass blocking but rarely both.

And, of course, the team could keep Ham and do nothing with his salary as he is in the last year of his deal.

Partial depth chart before draft

QB: Sam Darnold, JJ McCarthy, Brett Rypien

RB: Aaron Jones, Ty Chandler

TE: TJ Hockenson, Josh Oliver

WR: Jets, Jordan Addison, Jalen Nailor

RT: Brian O’Neill

RG: Dalton Risner

OC: Garrett Bradbury, Michael Jurgens

LG: Teven Jenkins

LT: Christian Darrisaw, Walter Rouse

DT: Harrison Phillips, Teair Tart, Taki Taimani

DE: Levi Onvuzurike, Jalen Redmond, Levi Drake Rodriguez

WLB: Jonathan Greenard, Dallas Turner, Bo Rithcer

SLB: Andrew Van Ginkel, Gabriel Murphy

LILB: Ivan Pace Jr

RILB: Blake Cashman, Brian Asamoah

LCB: Byron Murphy

RCB: Mekhi Blackmon, Dwight McGlothern

NB: Josh Metellus, Najee Thompson

SS: Julian Blackmon, Jay Ward

FS: Theo Jackson, Hitman?

Yore Mock

Trades

Trade Partner: Las Vegas Raiders

Sent: Round 1 Pick 24

Received: Round 2 Pick 5, Round 3 Pick 4

…

Trade Partner: New Orleans Saints

Sent: Round 2 Pick 5

Received: Round 2 Pick 8, Round 4 Pick 29

…

Trade Partner: Dallas Cowboys

Sent: Round 2 Pick 8

Received: Round 2 Pick 12, Round 5 Pick 11, Round 6 Pick 12

…

Trade Partner: New York Giants

Sent: Round 3 Pick 4, Round 5 Pick 11

Received: Round 3 Pick 1, Round 5 Pick 16

…

44: R2 P12 G Armand Membou – Missouri 6’3” 314

65: R3 P1 RB Omarion Hampton – North Carolina 6’1” 220

97: R3 P33 S Andrew Mukuba – Texas 6’0” 190

130: R4 P29 DL J.J. Pegues – Ole Miss 6’2” 325

138: R5 P1 CB O’Donnell Fortune – South Carolina 6’1” 185

153: R5 P16 CB Nohl Williams – California 6’1” 200

159: R5 P22 C Seth McLaughlin – Ohio State 6’4” 305

187: R6 P12 WR Nick Nash – San Jose State 6’2” 195

236: R7 P21 LB Cody Simon – Ohio State 6’2” 235

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