2023 Minnesota Vikings Mock Draft Database, v1.0 (pre-Combine)

Happy Saturday, everybody, and welcome to the first installment of your 2023 Minnesota Vikings Mock Draft Database! With a history that goes back a full decade. . .yes, we’ve been doing this for 10 years now, except for 2017 when the Vikings didn’t have a first-round pick. . .I’m pretty sure this is the longest-running NFL Draft database devoted exclusively to the purple.

For those of you that might be new, basically what yours truly does every week until the draft is aggregate a bunch of mock draft picks for the Vikings from around the internet and puts them in one place, with links back to the entire draft for those that want to go back and see how a particular draft fell. We’ll keep up with this so we can see the trends for individual players throughout the entire pre-draft process and see how momentum shifts as things change with the roster in free agency and other things.

We usually start with a smaller number of drafts and expand out to 100 mocks by the time we hit the draft. As we get closer to the draft, more and more people will be putting out mocks and updating them more frequently, so it makes sense to expand things as we go along. This pre-Combine version will serve to give us a little bit of a baseline to get us started.

With that, here is the collection of 30 mock drafts that make up our first Minnesota Vikings Mock Draft Database for the 2023 offseason.

Given that the Vikings are quite a ways down the draft board, it makes sense that there are a greater variety of players mocked to them than there would be if they were picking higher. For example, throughout our 2022 Mock Draft Database, there were 26 different players mocked to the Vikings in the seven installments we did when they were picking at #12 overall. This year, with the Vikings picking at #24, there are already 23 different players being mocked to the Vikings in our 30 drafts, with only five players garnering multiple selections.

As you’d probably expect, the most popular position connected to the Vikings so far is the cornerback position, with 10 of our 30 mocks going in that direction for the Vikings. Two cornerbacks garnered multiple selections in our first Database of the year, with Georgia’s Kelee Ringo (3 selections) and Cam Smith of South Carolina (2 selections) appearing multiple times. There were also five other corners that got one selection each:

• Emmanuel Forbes, Mississippi State
• Joey Porter Jr., Penn State
• Deonte Banks, Maryland
• D.J. Turner, Michigan
• Devon Witherspoon, Illinois

The next-most popular position for the Vikings is one that might be a bit of a surprise but probably shouldn’t be: wide receiver. Seven of our 30 mocks for this week have the Vikings taking another pass catcher, with two receivers getting multiple mentions. They were injured Ohio State star Jaxon Smith-Njigba and North Carolina’s Josh Downs. Jordan Addison of USC and Zay Flowers of Boston College each received one mention in our first week.

Edge defenders have some solid representation this week, as five different players at that position are being mocked to the purple. Each of those five players received one vote. They are as follows:

• Lukas van Ness, Iowa
• Myles Murphy, Clemson
• Nolan Smith, Georgia
• Keion White, Georgia Tech
• B.J. Ojulari, Louisiana State

Safeties were up next with three selections, including the last player to get multiple picks this week in Alabama safety Brian Branch. Branch got two selections this week, with Texas A&M safety Antonio Johnson getting one pick.

That leaves five other selections, divided between three other positions, to round out our Database for this week. Interior defensive linemen received two picks this week, with Pitt’s Calijah Kancey and Clemson’s Bryan Bresee each appearing once. Off-ball linebackers received two selections as well, split between Henry To’o To’o of Alabama and Drew Sanders of Arkansas. And, to round things out, a pick with some serious “one of us” energy as Minnesota center John Michael Schmitz was the lone offensive lineman to appear in our first Database of the year.

As always, we will be providing a couple of graphs and charts in each installment of our Mock Draft Database so that everyone can see how things are shifting and changing. The first one is our trends graph, lovingly referred to as the “Jell-o Salad” graph, which shows how individual players are rising and falling throughout the pre-draft process. That one will first appear in v3.0 because. . .well, trying to declare a “trend” after one or two weeks is kind of silly.

However, we do have our graphical representation of this week’s selections in our “Donut” graph. This shows the picks for each individual week, and we try to keep the position groups organized by color so that when we do get to the trends graph you can see how the stock of individual players within a position group is faring compared to their peers at those positions. That might be a bit trickier with all the different players that are likely going to be in our Database by draft day. . .after all, there are only so many shades of purple (or any other color). But, we’ll do our best to make it work.

With that, here’s the first Donut graph of the 2023 Mock Draft season. I will take this moment to remind you that if you find the graph too difficult to read, you can embiggen it by clicking on it.

(Yes, embiggen is a perfectly cromulent word.)

See? That’s a whole lot of colors already, and we’ve only been at this for a week.

That’s the first installment of our 2023 Minnesota Vikings Mock Draft Database, folks! We’ll continue doing this every Saturday until we hit the 2023 NFL Draft in Kansas City on 27 April.