Vikings’ 2026 NFL Draft Needs Look Familiar
You can roll your eyes all you want, but we do draft reporting around the clock, baby. The NFL teams’ draft process is a year-round thing, so why shouldn’t it be for those who write about it, too?
2026 is a special draft year as it stands for these Minnesota Vikings, as they currently sit $50 million+ over the cap for the 2026 season. That is, of course, with a lot of time between now and when they must become cap-compliant for that year. Either way, the Vikings will need to fill some positions of need with some rookie-scale contracts to help that hit, and these positions are where the Vikings could look to do so.
Those positions of need just look quite similar to their needs in the 2025 NFL Draft. Some would say they’re exactly the same.
Cornerback
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: the Minnesota Vikings will probably need to look to draft a cornerback in the upcoming NFL Draft.
We said the same during the most recent draft (and the year before that, the year before that, so on and so forth), and in a shocker, the Vikings didn’t spend a single modicum of draft capital on the cornerback position. Instead, they will be relying on the newly-extended Byron Murphy Jr, as well as a returning Mekhi Blackmon and free-agency acquisitions such as Isaiah Rodgers Sr. and Jeff Okudah to hold down the Vikings’ secondary in 2025.
A couple of guys on prove-it deals in a room led by one true above-average veteran and a promising third-year player that hasn’t played a snap of NFL football since January of 2024, lead me to believe that the Vikings will be taking another hard look at the cornerback class this coming April.
Here are some names at cornerback to keep an eye on this College Football season:
- Malik Muhammad, Texas
- Jermod McCoy, Tennessee
- Avieon Terrell, Clemson
- A.J. Harris, Penn State
- Chandler Rivers, Duke
- Jalon Kilgore, South Carolina
Nose Tackle
Assuming that in a traditional Base 3-4 package Harrison Phillips plays nose tackle, and Jonathan Allen and Javon Hargrave play one the ends (though Hargrave has proven to be an effective nose tackle as well in the past), the nose tackle position is another that the Vikings could look to address early on in the 2026 NFL Draft. Notice a trend?
Harrison Phillips’ contract runs out after the 2026 season, and unless Taki Taimani hits a huge stride in his development, or the Vikings want to put Hargrave at nose tackle in 2027, there isn’t much of a succession plan on the defensive interior. The other thing about it all is that the Vikings really probably should just draft one anyway, because everyone on the Vikings’ defensive line is pretty old.
Some defensive tackle names to track this College Football season:
- Zane Durant, Penn State
- Darrell Jackson Jr., Florida State
- Dontay Corleone, Cincinnati
- DeMonte Capehart, Clemson
- Lee Hunter, Texas Tech
- Bear Alexander, Oregon
