The Vikings traded 20 positions and chose Georgia safe Louis Ceni with the last pick in the first round of the NFL Draft Thursday night.
Cine became the fifth defender of the Georgia National Championship team drafted in the first round, heading to the Vikings after the Jaguars selected pass ruser Travon Walker with the first pick, the Eagles defensive tackle Jordan Davis ranked 13th overall and the Packers used both first. – The ball players on the Bulldogs defenders (back-back Kwai Walker and defensive intervention Devonte White). Georgia became the first team in NFL history to have five defensive players selected in the first round.
At the 6-2 cinema, the Vikings added heavy security to their defense as Harrison Smith heads into his eleventh league season and sophomore Cam Bynum attempts to win the job alongside Smith after leaving Xavier Woods for free. an agency. Cine (pronounced SEEN) broke nine passes in his senior year in Georgia to earn a third-team honor at All-America, and performed a 40-yard dash of 4.37 seconds in the combine.
“The guy did a lot of playing on the best defense in college football,” said Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell. When we asked [the Georgia players], “Which of your teammates would you like to bring with you?” The name Louis Ceni came up a lot.”
He said the Vikings could look for ways to put Cine, Smith and Bynum on the field at the same time, adding, “There are a lot of things you can do to be dynamic in defense.”
With players like Team Washington in the corner, Trent McDuffy, Notre Dame Safety Kyle Hamilton, and Florida State cavalier Jermaine Johnson, the Vikings reclaimed 20 spots from 12th, picking up 32, 34 and 66 picks from the Lions for a 12th overall finish. And the second Vikings (No. 46 in general).
General Manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah said “there was an idea” for the 12th pick, but the Vikings relied on a pre-project process to make the deal, eventually taking in a player GM said the Vikings had tied the 12th and 19th picks.
He said the Vikings got calls about pick number 32, adding “there was a curve ball at the end” before they decided to choose a cinema.
The Alabama Lions chose wide receiver Jameson Williams with the Vikings pick. This move gave Minnesota three picks on the second day of the draft. Adofo-Mensah said the Vikings looked at Williams, among others, with the 12th pick, but decided the trade offer from the Lions was positive.
Drafts of charts measuring the value of each pick were broken down on whether the Vikings won the trade, or whether they should get more from their opponent in exchange for a 20-point chance of going up.
The 32nd pick — which the Lions got from last year’s Super Bowl Rams champion Matthew Stafford — made it the first time the Vikings had had a first-round final pick since 2014, when they returned to the first round to pick Teddy. Bridgewater.
In Adofo-Mensah’s first draft as general manager, he orchestrated a maneuver that became familiar to Vikings fans in Rick Spielman’s final drafts: Recirculation.
This was the third year in a row that the Vikings were traded again in the first round. They returned six places with their first-round second pick in 2020, taking 31st place Jeff Gladney. Last year, they moved back nine places from 14th to 23rd before choosing left-footed tackle Christian Dresu.
Fans at the Vikings recruiting party at U.S. Bank Stadium reacted at first with the move, then with fury when they saw the team had returned to the final selection for the first round.
Adofo-Mensah, who came to the NFL after working on Wall Street, said in his pre-project press conference on Tuesday that he believes “volume really matters” in the draft — although he added that the data wouldn’t support the idea of storing late-night shots. The round is at the expense of the first player.
This move was probably motivated by an attempt to add more picks in the top 100 picks, an idea generally supported by data.
“You have a great team, you have a need for depth and you have things to fill in, so I think size really matters,” Adofo-Mensah said on Tuesday. “Now I’m going to push that whatever graph anyone uses, no amount of seventh-round choices is going to equal the value of the first choice. You can do it with a thousand seven-round choices and that won’t equal the value because there’s a peculiarity that comes with first-round selection and no It can be replaced easily.
“Those are the things you have to go and think about in your mind. It’s not a simple math equation. I love these conversations now as a GM because I used to be one of the people building those charts, and I kind of laugh with people,” I don’t know. Let’s just talk about this and use it [charts] As a background panel, but let’s talk about this and sort of understand the dynamics that’s going on. “
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