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Attempting to grade the Minnesota Vikings’ 2021 draft class, as I say in the post-draft period every year, is a bit of a fool’s errand. There’s no way to tell exactly how good a bunch of players will be before they’ve ever even set foot on an NFL field, no matter how good we may feel about those selections at the time.
We can, however, start taking a look at how the 2020 draft class for the Vikings has performed, and the gang at Pro Football Focus thinks pretty darn highly of the group that the Vikings brought in last season.
PFF has re-graded all of the 2020 draft classes, and the Vikings were one of just four teams to receive an “A+” grade from their staff. The other team that got an A+ for their 2020 draft class was the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the team that won the most recent Super Bowl.
Here’s what PFF had to say about the Vikings’ 2020 draft haul:
While the Jeff Gladney pick is up in smoke at this point, the Vikings may have come away with three quality starters in the first three rounds. Justin Jefferson is obvious after breaking the rookie receiving record, but Cameron Dantzler was quietly the second-highest-graded rookie corner after a strong second half of the season.
The grade wasn’t that much of a jump for the Vikings, who received one of four A grades from PFF for their draft class immediately after last year’s draft. But they did fare much better than their NFC North division rivals.
No other NFC North team managed to score higher than a B in the PFF re-grade. That mark went to the Chicago Bears, who went from a B+ right after the draft to a B now. The Detroit Lions had one of the biggest drops in the league, going from an A grade on draft weekend to a C after the season, while the Green Bay Packers held steady in having PFF’s worst grade in both the post-draft and the re-draft grades, garnering a D in both.
The Vikings’ 2021 draft class got a B+ from the folks at PFF a few weeks ago. Hopefully when the dust settles from the 2021 regular season we will see a similar jump for the purple when the re-grades come in.