MMQB’s All-Time NFL Draft Missed Two Very Prominent Vikings

The staff over at The MMQB undertook a fairly interesting task this past week. They did what they called an All-Time NFL Draft, a 25-round selection process in which literally every player that has ever worn an NFL uniform was eligible to be selected in an effort to make the best possible teams. The assumption that they made was that players that were good in one era would be good in any era. . .which may or not be a flawed premise, but that’s what they decided to roll with.

The Vikings were fairly well represented, with 21 players that have some sort of ties to Minnesota being selected in the 25 rounds of the draft. The Vikings might not have been their primary team, but they spent at least a little bit of their career with Minnesota. Here are all of those players in the order that they were selected.

• Alan Page, DT (selected #35 overall)
• Jan Stenerud, K (selected #40 overall by Dan Fouts. . .who selected a punter at #4 overall)
• Gary Zimmerman, OT (#93)
• Carl Eller, DE (#105)
• Mick Tingelhoff, C (#106)
• Brett Favre, QB (#110)
• Paul Krause, S (#116)
• Dave Casper, TE (#134)
• Randy Moss, WR (#138)
• John Randle, DT (#147)
• Chris Doleman, DE (#150)
• Ron Yary, OT (#158)
• Randall McDaniel, G (#171)
• Steve Hutchinson, G (#197)
• Roger Craig, RB (#207)
• Hugh McElhenny, RB (#217)
• Joey Browner, S (#227)
• Morten Andersen, K (#231)
• Cris Carter, WR (#262)
• Gary Anderson, K (#264)
• Pat Williams, DT (#271)

Do you notice any prominent Vikings missing from that list? I sure did. Well, there are a lot of them, but two of them stand out more than any others.

The first one is Adrian Peterson, who apparently. . .at least according to this. . .is not one of the 24 best running backs in NFL history (each of the 12 teams was required to draft two running backs). If we’re looking at just on-field factors, the assumption that there are 24 running backs in the history of the league that were/are better than Adrian Peterson is kind of ridiculous. I just don’t get how someone could make that argument with a straight face.

More egregious, at least in my opinion, is the omission of quarterback Fran Tarkenton. If we’re going on the assumption that players that were good in one era would be good in any era, how are we excluding the guy who, for a stretch of at least a decade, owned literally every meaningful NFL passing record by a significant margin? There were a lot of great quarterbacks selected in this draft, but for Tarkenton to have not been selected seems like a fairly significant oversight, in my opinion.

There were players like Jared Allen and Jim Marshall that weren’t selected, and Bud Grant wasn’t taken in the one-round draft that was done for each team’s coach. It’s a pretty cool concept overall, I think, but I’m still a little confused about how Peterson and Tarkenton somehow didn’t make their way onto anyone’s roster.