Don’t Forget the Vikings’ Other Injury from Week 5
Reasonably, a lot of the attention is going toward RB1 Aaron Jones. After all, the former Packer has proven that he still has plenty of ability even though his 30th birthday will soon arrive.
One downside of that focus, though, is that another Vikings injury is being a bit overlooked.
Backup corner Akayleb Evans also missed part of the London game due to a hip injury. Similar to Jones, Evans is operating on a week-to-week basis. Kevin O’Connell offered the update in his press conference, explaining, “Akayleb Evans is really on a pretty similar timeline, as well.” In other words, Evans “avoided a long-term injury” — as O’Connell said about Jones — but is operating on a “week-to-week” timeline.
The Vikings’ Other Injury: CB4 Akayleb Evans
For a time, Mr. Evans was a starter.
He impressed early, showing in his rookie season that he has some ability. Yes, the Ed Donatell defense was regularly getting demolished, but there were still bright spots from long-and-strong corner (he’s 6’2″ and weighs close to 200 pounds).
He played in ten games as a rookie, staring a pair. He snagged 23 tackles, a pair of passes defended, and a trio of tackles for loss. Evans did so across just 162 defensive snaps, so there was definitely promise. His PFF grade from that season was coming in at 47.2, but he was a rookie operating from within the Donatell defense.
As a sophomore, Evans picked up fifteen starts in fifteen games played. The defensive snaps swelled from 162 to 855, a major workload increase that speaks to some early-season success and promise.
Of course, Evans struggled toward the end of the season. His confidence appeared to be shot and he got beat with some regularity. A corner plays a very visible position where mistakes are easy to spot, even for a novice NFL fan. Getting his game back to the initial half of the season isn’t impossible but may be challenging.
By the end of 2023, Akalyeb Evans was sitting on 65 tackles, 7 passes defended, 3 forced fumbles, and 1 interception.
The 2024 season has involved Evans working through a demotion. Byron Murphy Jr. returned as a locked-in starter and then Kwesi Adofo-Mensah added veterans Shaq Griffin and Stephon Gilmore as boundary corners. Those three — Murphy, Griffin, and Gilmore — are hogging the corner snaps, relegating Evans to a CB4 assignment.
So far, Evans has just 3 defensive snaps in 2024 but he has been a fixture on special teams, most prominently as a gunner. He has 62 snaps for Matt Daniels’ part of the operation.
If the injury sidelines Evans for a little while, then Minnesota will turn to Fabian Moreau and/or Dwight McGlothern to jump into that CB4 job. Keep in mind, too, that the safety depth is abundant, so Brian Flores could always turn to Theo Jackson, a well-regarded backup safety, to soak up some snaps in the defensive backfield.
An underrated storyline for the current Vikings is that all of their starting corners are scheduled to be free agents in 2025. Of the trio, Murphy is the most likely to return given that he has some youth on his side (which is to say nothing of his coveted versatility). The point, folks, is simply that a year in a diminished role could realistically lead to Akayleb Evans stepping into a starting spot in 2025.
He is currently accounting for under $1.2 million on the cap. Next season, that number will grow but still be below $1.3 million.
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.