The Minnesota Vikings need a quarterback in this draft. That much is easy to see. The hard part is picking the right one — and determining what it’s worth to them to get him.
With this top-flight class — featuring Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels, Drake Maye and J.J. McCarthy — the Vikings are poised to set up their future with the 11th and 23rd overall picks that could be packaged together for a move into the top five.
But they realize, no matter how well set up they are for a rookie with a quarterback-friendly coach in Kevin O’Connell and a superstar wide receiver in Justin Jefferson, there is no guarantee in this highly calculated yet no-better-than-a-coin-flip exercise of finding that franchise player in the NFL.
“I think our odds will be better than the margins. How good are those odds? Obviously, it’s still a pretty risky thing,” third-year general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah said. “But just because something’s risky doesn’t mean you’re scared of it.”
Teams are using premium draft picks on quarterbacks at an increasingly high rate. This draft is slated to be the eighth in the past nine years with at least three QBs taken in the first round, which matches the number of times that happened in the first 38 years of the common draft era.