Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - Danielle Hunter is in the building and full reaction from Vikings Day 1 press conferences

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Matthew Coller and Will Ragatz of Sports Illustrated dive deep into Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and Kevin O'Connell's opening press conferences, starting with Danielle Hunter arriving at TCO Performance Center Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

🎵 🎵 Hello, welcome to another episode of Purple Insider. Matthew Collar here inside at TCO Performance Center with Will Regetts. Will, we are back. We got training camp credentials in our pockets. We got new little things to put around our necks to get in the building. We had press conferences i mean all sorts of footbally things happening no actual practice until tomorrow but lots of news to discuss for today what's going on it's it's good to be back

it's kind of like you know being a kid the first day of school you had your summer break now you come back and you see all your friends and you show up and the teachers are talking to you, but in this case it's the PR people telling us about our new credentials and how we're going to get in the building and what we're going to do when practice starts on Wednesday and things like that. So yeah, it's good to be back. We got to hear from Kevin O'Connell, Kweisi Adolfo-Mensa, Harrison Smith, Kirk Cousins, cover a wide variety of topics and, you know, no like groundbreaking news, but there's a lot of kind of subtle things that were discussed and updates

that we can we can run over here. Absolutely. Yeah. When it was being explained to us where to park, where to go in everything else, you know, again, for the number of time that we've been here, I think 2018 was the first year so this is five years now at tco performance center but still be six uh oh is that six wow um but i i feel like 2020 never happened um with that training camp because we had to stand on the other side of the universe all like huddled together weirdly trying to avoid the sun. But anyway, so them explaining all those things, like, yeah, we're very much back at school. But the place to begin is the obvious, is Kevin O'Connell comes out and none of us knew whether Daniil Hunter was going to be here or not

and said, Daniil Hunter is in the building, but dot, dot, dot, when he was asked about, is he actually going to practice? Then it was, well, we're going to have a plan and we're going to discuss that. And we haven't seen him in a while, so we don't really know what shape he's like. I got a good guess at what shape he's like. It's probably Adonis like. But it seems to me, Will, that this is the new age hold in, not the hold out where he doesn't come here. He comes here so he doesn't get fined, but does not participate. That seems like our starting point for Daniil Hunter.

Yeah, it sort of seemed right away like, oh, Daniil Hunter is here. This is big news. You know, this is a big thing. And Kevin O'Connell kind of beat around the bush a little bit and said, you know, we're going to have a plan that hopefully he feels good about coming to work every day as a Viking. And I don't expect him to be a full participant in practice right away. We haven't seen him since the end of last year and things like that. But you're like, OK, so he's going to practice a little bit. And then, you know, the reports come out that like, all right, don't don't expect Daniel Hunter to be actually practicing until this gets resolved. So really, we're not a lot further along than we were coming into today.

We know that Daniel Hunter is here, which is notable in and of itself. He's talking to coaches and his teammates and things like that. But there still has to be a resolution to this situation because he has to be either extended and stick around here and feel good about his contract with that or he's got to be traded somewhere and until that happens it's going to be a weird thing where he's here maybe he'll be on the sidelines at practice I don't even know if you have to maybe he'll be chilling in the outside linebacker room or doing whatever but I do not expect to really see him at all on the practice maybe go maybe go through warm-ups or something but I don't expect to see him playing until we finally kind of

get some sort of resolution and there's no indication that we're any closer to that than we were a month or two months ago it seems very much like a Marshawn Lynch I'm just here so I don't get fine I mean that it doesn't appear that he's going to do anything. Now, he could participate maybe in warm-up drills or something like that and just not get out there for the 11-on-11s. But if you're Daniil Hunter and once upon a time not so long ago you were injured in the first day of training camp and then were not able to play the entire season,

I think you're going to be pretty wary of doing just about anything even warm-ups I mean maybe it's just the stretching drills or something to be out there with the team everybody knows the deal my thing would be he doesn't for a guy like him probably have to ramp up very much to be ready for game day I think we know based on just what his body looks like how he played deep into the season last year, how he recovered from the neck injury and the torn pec, that this is a guy who is very diligent about his body. Unlike you and I, much more diligent than you and I about his body, but just always

seems like he's ready to go. So if this took months and we were just about to start the season and he finally started practicing, I would still expect him to be very effective. I don't think that he really needs to go through practice after practice after practice. So there was a little bit with Kweisi Adafomensa of, we just got back to the building. We're going to start working these things out. I think he said that in regards to Justin Jefferson's contract extension.

But I think the same thing goes for Daniil Hunter. The same thing goes for TJ Hawkinson. It's just that there's more urgency with Hunter. If you don't extend Jefferson and Hawkinson, these guys are still on the team and you can franchise tag, you know, Hawkinson and Jefferson's on the fifth year option. So it's not total panic mode. But with Hunter, you cannot let this get to the beginning of the season and still have him doing this bizarre holdout, hold in type of thing.

So I don't feel like it has to happen tomorrow, uh, or, but I also don't really feel like him showing up changes the odds of it happening either way. It's just seems to be something. So he doesn't get fined whatever number of dollars it is per day for not being here and that they're okay with that that they've basically said yeah it's okay come here don't take those fines and then we'll keep working at it but give me your opinion do you think him arriving here changes the odds of him signing an extension I I just I wouldn't say it does one way or another I think you're right the hold-in is

kind of this new thing where you get around the fines from the CBA that you would get if you didn't report at all and you can just kind of be here and I I just don't think it changes the odds one way or another I think it's I don't think it can hurt I think you can have little conversations with Kevin O'Connell and you can kind of I I mean, O'Connell's going to leave the contractual stuff to Kweisi and to Daniil's agent and all those people. But I don't think it can hurt. I think you have to have some urgency. Like this, you just don't want, no team wants kind of a messy situation like a Stefan Diggs in 2019. Or you don't want one of your star players.

This guy's the best player on your defense. He is one of the best when healthy, one of the 10 best edge rushers in the league. And I think he sometimes deserves to be considered even better than that when he is kind of fully functioning. Like you don't want that guy to not want to be there and to have this become a messy situation. So at the same time, I agree with you that, you know, he doesn't really need to practice a ton,

like maybe a new quarterback in the system would or a wide receiver or a safety or something. His job is kind of just beat his guy and go get to the quarterback, and he's been doing that at a high level for a long time. He can kind of observe things and be talking to Brian Flores and doing things like that. He's not going to play a single preseason snap. He's obviously one of those guys. So I think there's some urgency because you don't want it to kind of carry over into the season.

It doesn't have to happen immediately, but you'd love to extend him and get him out there and get him some practice reps and getting accustomed to this new defense, or you'd love to resolve it and trade him and give him time to you know go learn a new system and adjust there I mean that's not the Vikings concern but I don't think one way or another him being here changes it I do think within the next couple weeks it would be the best for all everybody involved if there is some sort of solution to this one way or another yeah and I was going to ask you about what date do you start kind of

getting nervous about this thing because i think that there's a lot of situations that people would be comfortable with comfortable with paying him a very reasonable and competitive amount with top pass rushers but not resetting the market because that's just too risky with the injury history and with their salary cap future and with his situation it's not like you can make it real cheap for the first two years and then get it to be expensive later that's something you can do with guys on rookie contracts it's really hard to do once someone is on their second contract or I guess it would be third but their their second past their rookie contract if you're making 27 mil yeah maybe one year it's 20 and one year it's 30,

but you can't make it like six. Like they can do a little bit with the rookie contract, spreading it out into the early years. And I think that if they were to trade him, and by the way, I am told, I got a text message earlier today that he followed the Jaguars on Instagram. So, you know. break out the eyeballs okay uh one of these times that's actually going to be predictive of something and then i'll have to stop making fun of it so far that's never happened but uh so if he gets traded to the jaguars for a

second and a fourth i think everyone's comfortable with it but i i don't know you give me the date if we get to a certain point and neither one of those things has happened it's gonna be like uh is anything gonna happen here so what's today is like july 24th is that right uh 25th my computer says okay i would say i think the first pre-season game is sometime around like august 10th or something i think if we get to there basically two weeks from now two weeks and some change and there's still nothing and we're through i mean at that point you're already through you're over halfway into training camp you've had these spurts of four days five days at a time and you're leading into the first preseason game and joint practices and all that,

if he still has just been here the whole time and not really participating and nothing's happened, that starts to become, I think, a really potentially awkward situation. I want to go a little later than that. I might even say the third preseason game. That's how much patience I'm willing to give this because I don't care if he practices.

I truly don't. In 2020 is a good example of how there were no preseason games and it was a truncated practice schedule. And a lot of veteran players just came out that year and were the same guys. A lot of them, if you've been through this, and I know it's a new defense, but is it a new defense for him? Hey, stand over there and go kill that guy.

That's his whole career. That's the career of a defensive end. Maybe that's simplifying it a little too much when you're an outside linebacker, but probably not. And he's going to be here, which means he can learn it. Do I need him running around? Probably not. I mean, Kevin O'Connell has taken this approach with, I mean, a lot of veteran players, really, uh, they do usually practice and stuff like that,

but, uh, you know, he doesn't play them in preseason games. I think he believes that, you know, a lot of these guys are good enough to where they don't need super intense training camps, super intense preseason games. and Daniil Hunter is probably among the list of guys who need it the absolute least it's just probably past the first or second preseason game is where you start to go it's getting a little late he's getting a little late into the season here but if it were to happen I mean when did Khalil Mack get traded it was almost right before week one do I want to go all the way to September before I start saying all right what is going on here which is not good for the content

where every day it's like Daniil Hunter nothing back to you but I think I'm a little I think I'm able to be a little more patient with this than uh. Yeah, that's fair. I think, okay, my initial date was probably a little early because that's still a month ahead of week one. And I'm forgetting, we've seen players get traded later, much like right before the season or extensions, like Dalvin Cook extension a few years ago happened really up close to the start of the season. I think that's a good point that, you know,

these practices for these veteran star players and preseason, whatever, it doesn't matter all that much. They're going to be getting their work in, both in and away from the facility. Like, Daniel Hunter is going to be ready to go. Kweisi Dapomansi said today, or no, it was O'Connell who said it, like, I saw him, he looks like Daniel Hunter. He looks like he did all of last year. I think that guy is going to be ready to go. So we can push that date back a little bit, but it's just a weird situation where this has been going on for a long time now. And you listen to the show a lot, you know that this has been going on for a long time now.

We've been talking about it. And they were getting trade calls on him. This was early June when that report came out, teams were were contacting them to inquire about his availability and it just it doesn't seem I don't have any inside information on this it doesn't seem like the two sides are any closer to kind of finding an agreement it seems like Daniel Hunter's side and this is just kind of natural for a star player. They're asking for a lot. They're asking for a contract that would kind of maybe reset the market. He turns 29 this year, but he still has maybe three, four years of being really, really productive.

He just proved last year that he was healthy and was top ten in the league in pressures and had ten sacks and really kind of heated up as the season went along. The Vikings, they're not going to want to give him that because that's the way it works when you're kind of putting the salary cap pieces together. You don't want to pay an edge rusher that much money unless they're like Nick Bosa or something. This is a guy who has been really, really productive. He also missed a season and a half due to injury not that long ago,

and he does turn 29. He's not 26. So I get it from both sides I don't know if if they can meet in the middle and then if they can't you really have to consider trading him and what's his value does his value or does what you could get back in a trade change or diminish the longer this drags on I don't know could it go up as maybe people get hurt and teams look around like hey that that guy would be really nice to have on our football team I don't know could it go up as maybe people get heard and teams look around like hey that that guy would be really nice to have on our football team I don't know the answer I think you probably could get a second and a fourth or something along those lines and then your defense is even further depleted but you have that draft capital that you could maybe use to trade up next year you have

the future salary cap space cleared it's's all just walking this competitive rebuild line. And Kweisi Adafamensa had an interesting comment on that today that we can get into about how, you know, they tasted the playoffs last year. And he looked at Kevin O'Connell and was like, man, we got to do this every year. And they are trying to win. Like, I don't think there's any kind of debate about that.

They are trying to win while also reshaping the roster at the same time. And we said this earlier, if you trade Daniel Hunter, that doesn't feel, that's not a winning move. We're more rebuilding move. Can those two things coexist? Are they going to have the best offense in the league and the worst defense in the league? How is that all going to work?

So it's a fascinating situation. It's not, I don't know that we're any closer to it being resolved, but we'll be here talking about it until something happens. Do you remember what date, because I just looked this up, that the Vikings traded for Yannick Ngakwe? Because it was the same situation. He was asking for a new deal. I don't know if he held out or held in or whatever at this point,

but he was fighting the team for a new deal at that point, and the Vikings traded for him. Do you remember what the date was? I want to say that was like an August 30th situation or something like that. Did you look this up? That's the exact date. Really? Yeah, right on, dead on, August 30th.

I have a weird memory on things like that sometimes. I remember that because it happened at 6 a.m., and I woke up a couple hours later, and I was like, you just don't have to do this at 6 a.m. No. woke up a couple hours later and i was like well you just don't have to do this at 6 a.m no i don't know they must have been done the night before and it just got out at 6 a.m when adam schefter woke up to his text or whatever and then they traded him away two months later that was they sure did that was uh december 22nd or something no it couldn't have been that far was it that far maybe it was no no i thought it was like october

when they traded him oh maybe it was october i just had it up it doesn't matter Baltimore Baltimore yeah he's been on like four teams since the his initial Jaguar stint so yeah oh October 22nd was it yeah December but uh yeah so I think that that kind of gives us a little bit of a timeline we've seen two edge rushers that were in similar spots get traded really about two weeks before the season or week before the season this could play out deep into the summer my thing is that a lot of times some team it's not just injuries but we'll look at their team and watch them practice and go we're good we should trade for one more guy to get us over the hump and then that offer

gets bumped up from a second to a first, and that's where you make the deal. And maybe that's what Kwesi is waiting on. But I would also say they waited on a Delvin Cook deal and waited and waited and waited and it never happened. We got absolutely nothing on Justin Jefferson, TJ Hawkinson or Kirk Cousins except for I would say today nothing is ever for certain but if you were like 75 percent that Kirk Cousins isn't getting extended you might have gone up to 85 percent today there was no yeah we'd like to get a deal done it was more Kwesi Adafo-Mensah saying, we're prepared for all situations going forward. And Kirk Cousins telling his agent to not call him unless he's got a deal in place, which means I think that he's not

going to be calling him. It just feels like everybody's comfortable with this. I thought that at the end of minicamp. And I also wondered, okay, is Kirk maybe just trying to like, get us to not ask any more questions by, Hey, I'll, I'll talk about that in March, but there was no, Hey, I want to be a Viking for life. I've been telling my agent to try to get something done here, but I'm going to play it out. It was basically, I don't know, whatever. We're playing. That's it. That was the, that was the vibe I got. Yeah. I mean, I think I've been at more like 90, 95% on this for a while.

There was, you know, Kweisi and, and, and from the Vikings perspective, I got yeah I mean I think I've been at more like 90 95 percent on this for a while there was you know Kweisi and and from the Vikings perspective there was no resolution there and then Kirk Cousins you mentioned he said like yeah let's we'll talk about this next March like they're having this isn't a thing that is his these conversations aren't happening like we're gonna play out this season and we're gonna go from there and I think he's confident in that I think he I think he believes that he's going to have a big season in the second year in Kevin O'Connell's offense. And I think there's reason to believe that

if the offensive line can protect him a little better and not get him killed like we saw in the Netflix show. And, you know, he's got TJ Hawkinson for the full offseason and they drafted Jordan Addison. And I think he feels like he's going to have a big year and he's going to go into next year and he's going to keep doing what he's been doing for a long time which is just kind of playing the business game really well and then maximizing his earnings and if the Vikings don't want to give him another 35 million average per year over a few seasons

I bet he can find it or I bet he thinks that he can find another team that will do that so I don't think I don't think he's too worried about the a possible extension right now and he is comfortable also going into a season without a deal I mean he did that the last year of his contract in Washington and then two more years after that when he was playing on the franchise tag like as long unless he suffers some big injury which has never happened to him in his career, he is a good enough quarterback that he's always going to be in high demand around the league. High demand. Well,

some demand, some demand or enough demand. Enough. How about that? Sure. I mean, Derek Carr had a bad year last year for the Raiders and was in enough demand from a desperate team.

And I mean, I think that when you look at the situation in San Francisco if Brock Purdy's not really their guy or or Trey Lance then they become the obvious de facto we all saw this coming for five six years that he ends up going there but there's got to be every year three to five teams that think they're a quarterback away from being legitimately competitive one of them this year got Aaron Rodgers one one of them got derrick carr like this happens every single year and he knows that and his agent knows that and i'm sure he looked at what derrick carr got and thought if i win 10 games with 100 quarterback rating 30 touchdowns nine picks and i'm pretty good and i

you know i have a good playoff game somebody's giving me 42 million 44 million I mean so from his perspective he's probably got a number that he's just not going to come off of because it's based on projections for what he's going to get next year if he enters the free agent market in comparison to what say Daniel Jones and Derek Carr got and that's going to be the difference though if he plays well is that Carr didn't play well and still got paid that much if he plays well he's going to have somebody calling for sure that there will always be those teams and it's funny because we look around the league and we go yeah most teams look like they're set right now and by the end of

the year we go oh 10 more teams need quarterbacks uh i want to talk about the competitive rebuild because quesadilla fomento was asked about that and i thought that he said something rather insightful he didn't say he sort of just cruised by it but i was like oh wait really because what he said was that when he said competitive rebuild when he first got here it was part of a three-year time horizon and I don't know that I've ever heard him say a specific number of years on that so I guess we're in the year to rip most of it down phase that they probably planned on from day one from the first meeting when he was hired with the Wilfs and we're going to run this out there we're going to try to do everything we can to win and then we're going to run this out there. We're going to try to do everything we can to win. And then we're going to tear half of the roster apart,

put a bunch of young players in and see what happens. And all along, we're going to probably keep Kirk at quarterback to make sure that we remain competitive with Justin Jefferson and do what the Wilfs want, which is try to make the playoffs. And also told the story about talking to Kevin O'Connell about like, hey, we want to do this every year after they made the playoffs last year. But I found that to be quite interesting. So next year, third year of the time horizon then means the new quarterback arrives and that becomes then a new time horizon, I guess, but it seems much more like this was the plan from the

outset that that was kind of confirmed by Kweisi Adafo-Mensa today. Yeah, it makes sense. You come in year one. There's already kind of this foundation. You see what you have. No, you set the foundation. There's already a base of kind of roster talent, but you set the foundation of what you want to be, your identity and all those things, and you go try to win a bunch of games. I don't

think they ever anticipated that they would go 11-0 in one score games and have kind of the magical ride and the biggest comeback in NFL history and all those things. And then all this offseason, it's become clear that they were not kind of, you know, being prisoners of the moment and reacting to 13 wins and saying, let's keep going forward, forward, forward, up, up, up, because that wouldn't have been the smartest thing to do. They made some necessary moves that may have been difficult decisions at times. Maybe they weren't difficult at all to plan kind of for 2024.

And this year, I think they still have a chance to be pretty good, especially on the offensive side of the ball but it's still about making these broader moves to set yourself up for 2024 and go from there now we don't know what the quarterback situation will be it's it's a weird thing because if they're good enough then do you have the ammo to go trade up for one of the guys what are you are you going to bring Kirk back what are you going to do so it's still all very much a work in progress and as he said I mean you just kind of you want to be scenario based and you want to plan it's like it's like the draft he used that that comparison

if if this guy's here that's what we do if this situation presents itself here's what we do and like there's no way they can know right now here's what's going to happen next this season next offseason here's who's our quarterbacks going to be 2024 week one like they're just going to kind of go from here and try to figure it out and have these plans in their mind that they think are the best possible outcomes and then react to new information and things like that what I thought was really interesting that he said was he basically admitted like yeah we're trying to to adjust the roster while still winning. And I know that that is riskier than tearing this whole thing down and bringing it back up. He said that.

He's like, I could give you the mathematical probabilities or whatever if we were to, you know, fully bottom out. That's my words, not his. And then come back up from there. That is a more straightforward path. But as we've talked about for years, the Vikings and their ownership clearly don back up from there that is a more straightforward path but as we've talked about for years the Vikings and their ownership clearly don't want to do that so he is walking this middle line this competitive rebuild is the phrase that he used that I don't even know if he anticipated would blow up the way that it did because he kind of laughed when he was asked

when those words were brought up to him today but it's a risky thing to do it's a tough line to walk it's a reason why you know we haven't seen a lot of success stories in recent years of it happening unless you're like the chiefs and you land you trade up and land Patrick Mahomes at the 11th or 12th pick or whatever he was so um that that to me was interesting that you know may I wonder if in a different situation a different different organization, a different world, if Kweisi would have loved to come in his first time as a GM and just go full Ryan Poles and just tear things down and completely build up. But whether it's ownership or whether it was just the decisions that he and Kevin O'Connell made,

that's not the plan here. And I think it also makes sense because the Vikings have a lot more star talent than the Chicago Bears do. So I get it. But man, it's a tough, tight rope to walk. I'm not envious of kind of the decisions that he's had to make this year and then the decisions that he'll have to make moving forward. You know what team I'm going to be watching in regards to the Vikings competitive rebuild? You brought up Chicago. That's not the team because Chicago was in a position to be so epically horrific that they could draft number one overall. I'm actually going to be watching and naturally like it's sort of the race of the rebuilds, the new, the GMs get hired the same year. So of course we're going to be paying attention to that. But the Carolina Panthers were super mediocre, which the Vikings would have been had they tried

to tank. They would not have won three games. They would have won seven last year. They didn't have a hard schedule. They have Justin Jefferson. Even if Marcus Mariota was their quarterback, like I suggested last year, if they were going to rebuild, they would have won seven games, right? And they would have won seven games, right? And they would have been in position to trade up for the number one overall pick and draft Bryce Young. And it's kind of going to be like the two worlds that I think are comparable. You could have been that seven or six win team if you had gone down the rebuild and

not the competitive rebuild. And, uh, even just, uh, Eric Eager now is Sumer sportser sports formerly of pff people know him on the show he did a study of this about how hard it is to escape the middle and found exactly what quase he's talking about i'm sure it's similar math uh and similar historical data showing the teams that go to the bottom get back to the top teams that are at the top often do stay there for a long period of time that's because of Peyton Manning Ben Roethlisberger elite quarterbacks will keep you there but the middle is the hardest place to get there it's like if you've already got the elite quarterback year after year you will stay

there or if you're horrific you could get back there but in the middle it's tough unless of course the Vikings as you mentioned ultimately draft the next Patrick Mahomes or whatever great quarterback and set him up with this team and then there's a lot of things that have to happen to get there which can lead into a discussion about some of the other players that were talked about in part Jordan Addison uh one comment that Kweisi Adafomensa made that I thought stuck out was he said that basically everybody in Jordan Addison's life is going to work to make sure that he learns from this and does not repeat this particular incident. I thought that was an interesting comment, kind of like he's got a lot of people in his corner

and nobody wants to see this happen again. This was not a Mike Zimmer type of response. This was a, he knows what he did. He's going to learn from this mistake and so forth. But one thing that I've seen conflated that I don't agree with is the expectations for him or his odds of success based on this. What he did was stupid, reckless, could have killed someone, could have killed himself. Never, ever, ever should happen again. But I don't think it has a whole heck of a lot to do with what happens when he steps on the field on Wednesday.

Oh, no, I agree. That was a thing I saw in the initial reaction to the news that I just didn't really agree with. And I think it's easy for people to kind of run with things and maybe even take some innocent quote he said earlier and try to paint a character issue or something with him. And I just don't think that's fair. I think he's a kid who may, I mean, he's an adult, but he's a young guy who made a really dumb mistake. And I think, and I would hope knows, hopefully knew right away,

I can't ever do this again. But if he didn't, it does seem like, you know, Kevin O'Connell has talked to him and Kevin O'Connell was using kind of a stern tone when talking about this with with us even and um teammates you'd hope maybe like like a justin jefferson or and then other people in his life his family like it does seem like he has a good support system and it's been made very clear to him if it wasn't already that this cannot happen again and so you'd think that he will learn from it and realize I have this incredible opportunity in front of me to make a lot of like life-changing money playing in the NFL and potentially become a star wide receiver in the NFL and I can't be doing silly things like driving that fast and possibly throw it away I don't think that that

means anything in regards to his potential role or what he'll look like on the field this year. I think people should brace themselves for the reality that right now he is at best the number three wide receiver. K.J. Osborne is firmly ahead of him as of right now with no training camp practices yet because Osborne was out there all offseason. Osborne's been in the league for a few years. Jordan Addison was not out there. He's supposedly healthy and he's going to be out there, but he's got work to do if he wants to supplant Osborne and be that every down kind of two wide receiver set player right away. And I don't expect that to happen week one. I think that'll take time. And if he forces his way onto the field over the course of the season I mean Justin Jefferson didn't start week one that was maybe a Mike Zimmer situation as well but that was a 2020 because remember he got COVID it was you know that was

I think in any other year Justin Jefferson started yeah but yes I understand what you're saying it it does take time like even Stefan Diggs didn't get out there right away. With the Addison thing, though, the one thing I wanted to bring up is I'm curious about accountability when it comes to their culture in particular. Because there haven't been a lot of opportunities. I guess the Ole Udo thing that happened turned out to be kind of nothing. And maybe they knew that from the outset. And so they didn't cut him or whatever after he got arrested during what was it the bye week or whatever it might have been last year they led a charmed life nobody got in trouble there weren't many problems there wasn't a lot of adversity everything kind of fell their

way and you know the way that kevin o'connell talked about it i think he balanced pretty well the like we need to take this seriously with he made a mistake and has to learn from it but i also you know i there were times where i did respect mike zimmer and how angry he would get about things that would happen off the field and so forth and eventually there were a lot of them so i don't know that it prevents them but i also feel like with a rookie there has to be an extra layer of accountability that i don't know that it prevents them but I also feel like with a rookie there has to be an extra layer of accountability that I don't know is going to be a thing um you know if he's out there first team right away you kind of are going to go all right well I mean I don't know I mean are you

really is he really learning the lesson of the from this right away like penalty wise uh or are you just kind of going to talk to him and please ask him not to i i don't know i mean i don't i don't understand like this is like parenting like i don't know how hard do you come down on somebody would fining him like i'm sure they're $50,000 yeah i'm certain yeah certain and we just might not ever find they don't announce it yeah yeah they don't have to announce when they find a player internally but i'm certain of that but i guess i just wonder like is that enough or should it be like jalen nailer's gonna start and you're gonna have to earn this because you did something i mean to to kind of say like while he's young and made a mistake is really underscoring how dangerous it is yeah

right i mean this this is it wasn't going 40 miles over the speed limit. It's gone 85 over. Right. Right. And I don't know how we feel about the whole dog explanation, but there's no reason unless I mean, there's really no excuse for that to ever happen. Exactly. And, you know, you know how much of a dog lover I am. Yes, I do. And you know what? I might push it a little. 140? Well, the Honda Civic doesn't go 140. But even 90, I would say, is pretty dangerous.

So I guess I don't like that characterization. Also, just real quick story, and we've got more stuff to get to, including I made my five favorites for Mr. Mankato and Need Your Reaction. But when I first moved here, maybe like the fifth day I lived here, I was in my apartment and all of a sudden the lights went out in our entire building and all of us were like, what is going on? Is this like twilight zone? We walk outside and there was a burning vehicle like right in front of our apartment complex that had hit the electric lines. And it turned out what happened was somebody was doing just what jordan

addison was doing flew over a hill at 100 miles an hour and hit an innocent mother of four and killed her right in front of our apartment complex like this is what can happen man yeah that and that's your career that's going right down right down the tube if that happens and you are one person turning in front of you or one deer you didn't see like it's not just a oh well you know it's a rookie mistake or something like it is that serious so i don't i don't want to you know soapbox it too much but i don't feel like it's something that you should just kind of say hey buddy let's not do that again um i don't know there needs to be accountability within the building i think to

really get the message across i agree i think kevin o'connell was from what he was saying to us they were they were making it clear that he needs to know how serious that was that that was not just some little mistake that you can you know ever quickly forget and everything's fine like that is really something that just under no circumstances can ever happen again okay a slightly different subject by slightly i mean extremely different subject uh two players received heaps of praise there were buckets poured of praise and then dumped out all over us for these players i'm covered in alexander madison and and Josh Metellus praise. Which praise do you believe more? The Harrison Smith soliloquy about Josh Metellus,

which I was going to write about that and I asked the question, so I appreciate his fantastic answer, or Kweisi Adafomensa, who really went into detail about how much he respected alexander madison even before he was the vikings gm which one do you believe more um i will say that both of them i like you know you believe some parts of it and then others you're like all right let's let's relax a little bit i think I believe the Metellus stuff more, though. I think Alexander Madison is a good running back.

I think he's a starting caliber running back. I think he has some flaws that make him not Delvin Cook, and that's the reason why he was the backup for the last four years. I think the Vikings made a very reasonable decision to get a little bit cheaper and go with Madison at that position. And that makes sense that Kweisi Dalfamensa, who made that decision, would then praise him and talk him up and say, oh, he's been capable of being the starter the whole time. And I do think he's going to be fine.

We'll see if there's some issues that pop up with, I don't know, pass protection or vision being able to find the right hole every time and things like that. Madison just doesn't have kind of that same game-breaking speed and home-run hitting ability that Dalvin Cook does. The Metellus stuff, though, was really interesting where, yeah, you just asked Harrison Smith about him, and it would have been easier for him to give an answer.

Like, oh, yeah, Josh is good. He's been coming along. Like, it's been cool to see him grow and things like that. No, he really – he said, like, Josh Metellus is super, super, super smart and could be a coach in a meeting room and lead a whole meeting and do that. And Harrison Smith, who's been in the league since his 12th season, he learns a lot from Josh Metellus. you know you can handle every role that you give him whether it's special teams or defense or whatever and it just kind of adds to this growing sense

that we've gotten all offseason from a bunch of different people that Josh Metellus has a chance to be a really important player on this defense and be used in kind of that hybrid, I don't know, Joker or star or whatever role it'll be called in Brian Flores' defense where he's playing some traditional safety and he's playing in the nickel at times and he's lining up in the box and he's rushing off the edge and he's doing all these different things. And it just, I don't want to like let the hype grow insane that he's going to be some like pro bowl type player but um for a guy who hasn't played a whole lot on defense and has been this special teams ace it's just it's really something to to pay attention to in training camp and moving forward that josh metallis could could play 500

600 defensive snaps this year and be a factor don't you just sometimes with a guy you just get a feeling like their momentum is growing uh and maybe that you never thought that they would i mean i wasn't even sure josh patels was going to make the team last year and when i did a 53 the very very first which is always you know way off the first 53 but i don't even remember if i had i don't even think i had them on there like i just they had a couple more guys. They drafted a safety. I thought, you know,

maybe they'll need an extra linebacker or whatever. And I'm sure that internally the previous regime liked him as a special teamer, but it was like, I don't know. I don't know if they're going to like him as a special teamer. And then all of a sudden last year, I think really during camp,

we started to see, well, he's getting all those reps yeah and he's getting those reps ahead of scene and then when they picked him to play against Detroit and he stepped in and he played well and then considering what he was doing on special teams he's been an impact player there for years you just sort of feel that wheel turning um it was that way for Anthony Harris that's the best comp because both are very very intelligent players and I can sort of say it like I get a vibe. This guy's really, really smart and you know, whatever.

But when Harrison Smith goes into detail, it just means so much more than if I tell you that's kind of my impression from talking about him. And so I'm on board. I'm like, I'm really on board with the Josh Metellus thing, which sort of brings us also to the Lewis scene thing, which i'm not i'm just not feeling like this is gonna go in a direction where he starts this year uh cam bynum of course is really the starter to beat at this moment but they seem to like bynum he was the starter in minicamp he's the starter for every snap last year and then you have this high praise for josh

metellus to be backed up by how he played last year when he got opportunity it just seems like the bar has gone up i remember saying last year i don't know how high the bar is you should be able to clear it if you're lewis seen the bar has gone up since these guys got their opportunities and i'm having trouble seeing him end up being the starter i know we are a long way from that. There's injuries. There's developments that we can go through. It's just at this moment, just my July 25th feel,

is that Louisine will be a special team when the season starts. Oh, yeah. I agree with that. I think it's just kind of we should caution Vikings fans basically into keeping expectations tempered for Lewis. Because I think it would be easy to see, oh, this guy was a first-round pick last year. He played for those unbelievable Georgia defenses. They got talked up a bunch when they picked him and his downhill recognition and his playmaking and all these things. And then, you know, the injury happens, but you see this kind of inspiring story where the dude is walking on crutches like a month later,

and he's posting these workout videos in January and February, and he's running around and looking good at OTAs. And you can sort of talk yourself into the hype there, and this is going to be a big return, and he's going to be starting this year. And I just would say to set your expectations low. I don't want to write him off at all because that just would be unfair because we just haven't seen him play very much football,

and I want to give him that opportunity, and I want to watch – I really want to watch him in training camp and in the preseason and see what he looks like. But I would say that you're right, that that bar has been raised with Bynum and Metellus, and that we haven't heard anything really that would suggest that he's kind of rising with that bar and preparing to jump over it. And he absolutely can,

and I think he will get the opportunity to impress and to put himself right in that mix. But yeah, I would be surprised as of right now if he's a starting safety week one. I'd even be a little surprised if he's a starting safety in like week seven at this point. So we'll see. It's entirely possible. But just that is not something that I think people should be kind of counting on or expecting heading into the year. Well, the way that Harrison Smith explained it, which was really good, and he also explained something else.

Harrison Smith during the season is a different person than before training camp to us with interviews and stuff. I think part because he never wants to give away game plan stuff or whatever, and so he'll get asked, well, what are you going to do about this opposing player? I don't really want to say.

They haven't lost any games yet. So he's not annoyed or anything. And he's not, he's not, everyone's the healthiest they're going to be right now. So they're, they're in good moods. I thought that was funny though,

that he explained that he's in a bad mood a lot of times on Mondays because he feels all banged up from the day before. But yeah, I mean, I think that he explained it really well to say that when you don't understand where you're supposed to be going, you can't be the athlete that you are physically. And that's why mock draftable and relative athletic scores and all those things are great when we're analyzing the draft, those tools that tell us how athletic guys are.

But it doesn't matter if you can't fully utilize it. So anyway, I've got my five favorites for mr mancato you might disagree with some so i'm gonna run down them okay uh my number one favorite is jaron hall and my reasoning is the dude is gonna play uh the the i mean it's gonna be nick mullins and then it's jaron hall season and if he plays well that'll get a ton of attention it's the easiest thing to watch on tv people will get excited and and i've always forgot about or wanted to make the distinction but mr menko we're including pre-season games here right oh yeah pre-season a huge part is a huge part and

that's why jaron hall makes a lot of sense yes it's not just training camp practices absolutely he's not going to see a single first team rep and there's a Josh Browning or no Jake Browning situation. Yeah. But that is unlikely to happen these days yet. I think that his if he performs even halfway decently in these preseason games, there will be a lot of, oh, Jared, all very exciting. And his his bar to clear for impressing is like Kellen Mond, which is very low. Very low. Extremely low.

I would expect that he's better than that, but I don't know. Number two is Dwayne McBride. Again, it's a wow position. Running back. He's got the ball a lot. If he ended up as maybe, I don't even know if he has to move up the depth chart. Just be really impressive like ty chandler was last year uh thayer thomas is number three for me because there's nothing like an underdog receiver

i know this is your guy the more i've looked into thayer thomas the more i'm kind of intrigued actually um i like it he was a walk-on he just just fought his way here. Interesting athlete as an MLB draft pick. So I like that. Ivan Pace Jr. people are already getting excited about because he was a highly ranked UDFA. And then I think my underdog number five pick is Jay Ward because if Jay Ward makes some noise in preseason, makes a couple plays, gets a sack, gets a pick six, whatever,

he's going to get a lot of attention for that and also if he moves up on the depth chart he doesn't have to be a starter but even if he's like a backup if he just creates that buzz from some playmaking I think he's going to get a lot of opportunity to do that so there are my five favorites did I did I miss people I like those five I'll throw out a couple more names for you okay i think we always say when we're watching these practices and and i mean preseason games do it wide receiver is a really easy position to impress and i think there's a few guys there another one that i would throw out is tristan jackson just because i think not a rookie guy who's been around for a few years. Still eligible, though, because he hasn't played in a game, right?

Yeah, I think so. It doesn't have to be a first or second year player, does it? There's no real set rules. I've always viewed it as I don't think Tristan Jackson has ever played in an NFL game like a regular season game. So if you haven't, you can still win Mr. Mankate. Okay. So I like that so i think tristan jackson just from watching him earlier this offseason just seems like kind of a guy who's confident in

this offense and in his ability i mean he was originally on the rams practice scout squad with kevin o'connell like there's a history there um he's just a guy who you haven't heard much about it is unlikely that he ever becomes a major regular season producer in the NFL but um I think he has a chance to play a lot in training camp and preseason and impress people with his kind of size and speed combination I will say I do like the Thayer Thomas one as well but that's just another receiver I would throw out um I don't Makai Blackman is another one where he's sort of like we've already almost advanced him into being like right in that starter mix so i don't there's a debate over whether he's

eligible like yeah i always thought the cutoff was fourth round other people will argue third round i don't know i think fourth i think it's like fundamentally long shots but he was like but there are people who will go third round third the last pick right the third round i think he's eligible okay if he's eligible i think he's another one because he's like he's a rookie who just doesn't really feel like a rookie because he was in college for six years and he's 24 years old right right um so and and just his tape from his his one year at usc is impressive i think his ball skills, like he's just a guy who's going to be fun to watch out there, I think. And when you're a DB, I mean, it's a tough job and you're going to get beat a lot, but you also have a chance to, if you make one interception in an entire like two days of a training camp,

that's going to be written about and that's going to be a headline and that will stand out. So I think he has a chance to to do that and and to make some plays in preseason action um i think those would kind of be the other two i would throw in there but i i like your list a lot okay before we put a bow on it what are you most interested in for day one tomorrow of actual practicing. Day one of actual practice. No pads yet. No fans yet. I mean, the boring answer is it's just going to be kind of nice to be back out there and see a training camp practice.

And I guess it won't be all that different from kind of the OTA and minicamp stuff that we saw. I think some guys we've already talked about that I'm going to be watching closely would just be Jordan Addison, Louis Seen. Those are obvious. Those are your last two first-round picks. Those are really kind of potential big swing guys. I will be curious. Another thing we've talked about, will Daniil Hunter do anything?

My guess is no. I don't know. You got one while i continue thinking i just want to see who goes out with the first team yeah like i want to see those first reps will it be any different from the end of minicamp right yeah well and it also gives us a starting point for everybody so with first team second team third team we'll all take note of that and then where do they go from there like where do those trends go and that'll be something that we'll be watching very closely throughout camp i mean that's really the fundamental thing we do is go out there every day and watch who's getting the reps and so forth and see how it changed the first day and i've

never done this before but i want to is write down the entire depth chart on day one and then see how it changes yeah so we'll do that every week as uh you will be on the show each week breaking it down um and i don't know maybe twice if we need you it depends on what happens if there's like big breaking news we want you here um so anyway but there's gonna be some breaking news in some form or another over the next month because there always is and there has to be and there's still these three or four players with unresolved situations and who knows what could pop up the the football season is back folks we are back we are back but at very least at very least once a week here on the show as always kind of back to

our normal schedule and it'll be this way for the rest of uh the season so um very good very good thanks a lot will for your time thank you all for listening and football is back my friends