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With their season officially over, the Minnesota Vikings have started making moves with an eye towards the 2017 season. The first thing they did was to sign ten players to what are known as “Reserve/Future” contracts.
A “Reserve/Future” contract is a generally a one or two-year deal for the NFL league minimum. Players that sign these contracts are added to a team’s 90-man roster at the start of the new league year in March. Only players that were not on an active NFL roster at the end of the regular season are eligible to sign these sorts of deals, so a lot of them are signed by practice squad players.
The Vikings signed all nine of the players that were on their practice squad at the end of the season to these contracts yesterday.
Sterling Bailey, DT
Moritz Böhringer, WR
Kyle Carter, TE
Cayleb Jones, WR
Marquis Lucas, OT
Tre Roberson, CB
Bishop Sankey, RB
Austin Shepherd, OT
Cedric Thompson, S
The Vikings added a tenth name to that list on Tuesday, as they signed former Texas Tech punter Tyler Symmank to a Reserve/Future contract. Symmank had a tryout this offseason with the Vikings, and his signing with the team could be the first indicator that the team is not planning on bring back soon-to-be free agent Jeff Locke back for the 2017 season.
UPDATE: According to the team’s Twitter account, we can add two more names to this list. Those names are offensive tackle Reid Fragel and kicker Marshall Koehn.
Fragel was a seventh-round pick out of THE. . .dramatic pause. . .Ohio State University by the Cincinnati Bengals in the 2013 NFL Draft, and has played in just one NFL game in his career. He has been on several practice squads over the past four seasons.
Koehn went undrafted out of the University of Iowa in 2016. He made a bit of a name for himself at last year’s NFL Scouting Combine, where he put up a 40-yard dash time of 4.61 seconds. . .faster than ten different wide receivers. He signed with the Miami Dolphins, but did not make it to the regular season with them.