RandBall: Vikings get awful NFL Draft grades, but context is needed

Being in charge of a pro sports team historically has meant sticking to your plan instead of the whims of outside voices, and that is more true now than ever before.

The sheer volume of external voices evaluating things like the NFL Draft, which concluded Saturday, is staggering. Someone is bound to have a negative opinion of a team’s direction, which is why organizations have become so intentional about their pride in shutting out those voices and sticking to their plans.

All of this seems particularly pertinent as we unpack the Vikings’ light draft work, which included just five picks this year.

GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah says those five picks, and most importantly No. 24 overall pick Donovan Jackson, embody part of a strategy to get bigger and more physical in order to be able to win in more ways.

But several respected draft analysts look at the haul and see deficiencies in quantity, quality or both.

Patrick Reusse and I talked on Monday’s Daily Delivery podcast about how it is hard to find negative draft grades in general, but it actually wasn’t so difficult with the Vikings specifically.

Let’s unpack a few of them here along with some necessary context.

Pro Football Focus: The modern secular football grading bible put the Vikings and 49ers at the bottom of their list, giving the Vikings a C-minus and writing of the two teams that “questionable decisions in value and roster fit leave both NFC teams with the lowest draft grades from the weekend.”

The Athletic: Graded the Vikings last of 32 teams. Though it was noted that because of the small quantity of picks the Vikings “were destined to appear low on this list,” it was noted that they had Jackson pegged as a second-rounder. It’s definitely fair to wonder, as I did Friday, if the Vikings could have traded down into the early second round, scooped up more picks, and still drafted their guy.

USA Today and NY Post: Gave the Vikings a C and a D+, respectively, with each having the Vikings in the bottom three of all teams.

The context: The majority of the critiques of the Vikings’ draft, and therefore the low grades, came from the fact that they just didn’t have that many picks. This is a condition of their own making, of course, since they didn’t have a lot of picks largely because of trades they made leading up to and during the 2024 draft.

Namely, they gave Houston their 2025 second-round pick as part of a move to add a second first-round pick (No. 23 overall) a month before last year’s draft. They wanted more capital in case they needed it to trade up for a QB. While they didn’t end up needing that pick to move up one spot to No. 10 for J.J. McCarthy, they sent their 2025 third- and fourth-round picks along with No. 23 to move up to No. 17 to get Dallas Turner.

McCarthy didn’t play at all after a preseason injury, while Turner played less than many of us expected as a rookie. If those two have significant impacts in 2025 and beyond, nobody will remember how much it took to get them, nor how much the moves to get them impacted the Vikings’ draft grades in 2025.

But if McCarthy, Turner AND this year’s limited class don’t produce? Well, it probably won’t be too long after that until someone new is in charge of making the plan for the Vikings.