2023 Minnesota Vikings Mock Draft Database, v5.0

And the shift is complete

Welcome to the fifth installment of our Minnesota Vikings Mock Draft Database for this offseason, as we take a look at what the Really Smart Football People™ think that our favorite football team will be doing in the first round of the 2023 NFL Draft. We’re less than five weeks away from the festivities getting underway in Kansas City, and this installment of our Database brings us as dramatic a shift in positional projection as I think we’ve seen since I started doing this Database back in 2013.

We’ve got 70 mocks that make up our Database this week, with about 80% of them having been updated since last week’s installment. We wondered whether or not free agency would affect what Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and company are projected to do with the 23rd/24th overall pick, and man. . .has it ever.

So, let’s not mess around any longer. Here are the 70 mocks that make up our Database for this week. As always, mocks that feature the Vikings being involved in a trade are listed in italics so you can check out exactly what the deal was. Most of them involve trading up, but there was one that involved a trade down, which would seem to be exactly the opposite of what most people think the Vikings should do, but that’s how it’s gone.

The following players made their debut in the Database this week:

• Will Levis, QB, Kentucky

The following players have dropped out of the Database from last week:

• Emmanuel Forbes, CB, Mississippi State (second time dropping out)
• Christian Gonzalez, CB, Oregon
• Josh Downs, WR, North Carolina
• Myles Murphy, Edge, Clemson
• Adetomiwa Adebawore, DL, Northwestern
• Trenton Simpson, LB, Clemson

The following players returned to the Database this week after having dropped out previously:

• Jaxon Smith-Njigba, WR, Ohio State
• Mazi Smith, DL, Michigan

Just from the first handful of picks, you can see that quarterback is quickly becoming another chic pick for the Vikings in the first round, but we’ll address that in a bit.

The big change is something we saw the beginning of last week as far as mock drafters moving away from cornerbacks for the Vikings and toward wide receivers. And, after being at the top of the heap throughout our Database thus far, the cornerbacks have officially been dethroned. In fact, it’s now the wide receivers that are lapping the field, as they appear 31 times in our Database this week to just 14 selections for the corners.

At the top of the pile for this week is the only player to get double-digit selections in this week’s Database, Boston College standout Zay Flowers. Flowers got 10 selections this week to hold off Jordan Addison of USC, who appeared nine times. Quentin Johnston. . .whose name I just realized I’ve been misspelling the last four weeks (referring to him as Johnson rather than Johnston). . .garnered six selections this week, while Tennessee’s Jalin Hyatt and the returning Jaxon Smith-Njigba of Ohio State each picked up three selections in this week’s Database.

The cornerbacks are now in second place, though their grip on that position is now anything but ironclad. Corners appeared fourteen times this week, with half of those selections going to Deonte Banks out of Maryland. Banks had been the leader overall in our Database the past couple of weeks, but now finds himself in third behind Flowers and Addison. The only other cornerback this week to pick up multiple selections is Georgia standout Kelee Ringo, whose name appears four times this week. the other three selections were divided up between three different players: Cam Smith of South Carolina, Joey Porter Jr. of Penn State, and Devon Witherspoon of Illinois.

This brings us to the position that is now, suddenly, the third-most popular among our mock drafters this week: quarterback. Yes, there are ten different draftniks out there that have the Vikings taking a quarterback in the first round, including several scenarios that see the purple trading up to acquire their services. The new leader at that position is Kentucky’s Will Levis, who appears six times this week in his Database debut. At this point, I’m skeptical of any of the quarterbacks falling far enough for the Vikings to take one, and I don’t know if the team is going to trade up for one if they start to drop, but there are people that think it could happen.

The other quarterback is the one that made his debut last week, Tennessee’s Hendon Hooker, who appears four times this week. Hooker missed the second half of the season this year with an ACL tear and really isn’t ready for the NFL level at this point anyway, but if the team wanted a player to sit behind Kirk Cousins for a year, Hooker could be an option. I’m not sure if he’s a good option, but he’s certainly an option.

Interior defensive line is next on the list this week with six selections. four of which went to Clemson’s Bryan Breese. The other two picks were split between Michigan’s Mazi Smith (who made his return this week) and Pitt’s Calijah Kancey.

Edge defenders found themselves selected four times in this week’s Database. Two of those selections went to Lukas van Ness from Iowa, while Nolan Smith of Georgia and Georgia Tech’s Keion White each had one selection this week.

Brian Branch of Alabama continues to be the lone safety still in our Database, as he picked up three picks this week. Finally, the off-ball linebackers wound up with two selections this week, with one each going to Jack Campbell of Iowa and Drew Sanders of Arkansas.

Those are the seventy selections that were made by the mock drafters in our Database for this week. That means we can bring you the graphics, starting with this week’s donut chart. There’s a whole lot more red on here than there was last week and a whole lot less purple. As always, you can click to embiggen the picture.

And, so you can really see the shift from the cornerbacks to the wide receivers as the pre-draft process has gone along, here’s this week’s “Jell-o salad” trends graph, showing how players have risen and fallen over the past five weeks. You can embiggen this one by clicking on it as well.

As you can see, we’re now up to 35 different players being mocked to the Vikings in the first round of this year’s NFL Draft. I’m not sure how many more different names we’re going to see between now and 27 April, but the only consensus at this point seems to be that there is no consensus.

That’s our Mock Draft Database for this week, ladies and gentlemen. We’ll be back next weekend with more mocks and more discussion of how things are trending for the purple as we get closer to draft weekend.