Ed Ingram Didn’t Dress for the Week 13 Cardinals Game
Kevin O’Connell did his best to put out the spark before it can become a fire, but the NFL is a league where actions speak louder than words.
Prior to the game, Minnesota announced that Ed Ingram wouldn’t dress. The former RG1 is now the RG2 after Dalton Risner stepped into the starting lineup, a switch that many saw coming. What was a bit more unforeseen, however, is not even dressing for a game. Quite the fall for the 2022 draft pick who got snagged at No. 59 to be a long-term solution at guard.
Ed Ingram Didn’t Dress in Week 13
The issue wasn’t an injury. After all, last week’s injury report didn’t include Mr. Ingram. Instead, the issue was needing to fortify the depth around Cam Robinson, the LT1 who is working through a foot ailment.
Kevin O’Connell explained after the game: “Cam Robinson did a hell of a job working through that foot, and he was going to give it a go. But we wanted to make sure, we felt pretty stressed a little bit in Chicago only having one tackle up for the game beyond Cam, so we wanted to get [Walter] Rouse up. And then with that, needed Dan Feeney because Dan Feeney is one of our backup centers.”
O’Connell then says that “it was just a necessity of the numbers for the day” and that we shouldn’t “read anything into it” since “Ed’s been doing a great job.” O’Connell’s concluding thought as he looks ahead to the future: “I would anticipate Ed being back up. Absolutely nothing to do with anything larger picture.”
So, pretty decisive words from the head coach.
The translation is as follows. Cam Robinson is the top tackle but he has been working through an injury that took him out of the Week 12 Chicago game. In that contest, David Quessenberry was the lone backup tackle, so if there had been an injury to Quessenberry, things could have gotten dicey.
Minnesota sought to mitigate that risk by beefing up their tackle depth. That meant dressing rookie offensive tackle Walter Rouse for the game — something we discussed last week — so that Minnesota’s o-line had the starting tackles (Robinson and Brian O’Neill) alongside a pair of backup tackles (Quessenberry and Rouse).
Finally, there’s the need to have a backup center. After all, every play begins with a snap, so not having a C2 in a game would be remarkably foolish (Blake Brandel, presumably, is the emergency C3). The desire for a true backup at center kept Feeney in shoulder pads and a helmet, but that led to the roster crunch that meant Ed Ingram didn’t dress.
Do you buy it? Is Kevin O’Connell’s answer reasonable enough — it certainly makes sense — to fend off any more negativity about the 2022 draft class taking yet another hit? Readers can decide for themselves.
Ingram, 25, is in his third season in the NFL. Originally, he got added at the end of the 2nd to compete for the right guard spot. Veteran Jesse Davis was the main combatant for that spot, but Ingram won by the time the season arrived.
And while he has been durable throughout his career, Ingram has struggled in pass protection. QBs get hit way too often on his watch. Consider some of the pass-protection numbers, courtesy of PFF:
| Year | Sacks Allowed | Hits Allowed | Pressures Allowed | Penalties |
| 2022 | 11 | 18 | 58 | 4 |
| 2023 | 5 | 15 | 42 | 7 |
| 2024 | 5 | 3 | 24 | 3 |
In the coming weeks, keep an eye on Ed Ingram and the Vikings’ game-day roster. The coaching staff needs to decide to sit a certain amount of players every week. Some are due to injury, others are due to their placement on the depth chart. Ingram’s game-day status as a healthy player is definitely something that’s going to generate interest.
Cutting the guard in the offseason would free up more than $1.5 million in cap space.
Editor’s Note: Information from Pro Football Reference, PFF, and Over the Cap helped with this piece.
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K. Joudry is the Senior Editor for Vikings Territory and PurplePTSD. He has been covering the Vikings full time since the summer of 2021. He can be found on Twitter, as a co-host for Notes from the North, and as the proprietor at The Vikings Gazette, a humble Vikings Substack.