Minnesota Vikings OTAs: Is it possible Mike Hughes won’t be ready for Week 1?

A promising rookie season for Minnesota Vikings’ cornerback Mike Hughes was cut short in the team’s Week 6 victory over the Arizona Cardinals by a torn ACL. Now, just a few weeks after we got word that Hughes was, apparently, ahead of schedule in his rehab, a well-placed Vikings’ source is raising the spectre that Hughes might not be ready for the 2019 regular season opener.

During his radio show on KFAN, Vikings play-by-play announcer Paul Allen said that he would bet on Hughes not being active when the Vikings host the Atlanta Falcons to kick off the 2019 NFL season.

This could present pretty significant issues for the Vikings as they prepare to face Julio Jones and company. The team will already be without Holton Hill at cornerback, as he’ll be serving the first game of his four-game suspension for violating the league’s policy against performance enhancing substances. No Hughes and no Hill would leave a lot of work for Xavier Rhodes, Trae Waynes, and Mackensie Alexander. . .plus whoever would be behind them of any of them were to suffer some sort of injury.

Obviously, there’s still plenty of time to go and plenty of rehab work to be done before we know whether or not Hughes will be ready to go for the opener. However, the 2019 regular season opener comes about ten and a half months after Hughes suffered his injury, and that time frame might put him a little short of a full recovery.

At this point, it will be interesting to see if Hughes starts Training Camp on the Physically Unable to Perform List and whether or not he remains there into the regular season. If that were to happen, Hughes would be forced to miss the team’s first six games, per NFL rules.