Because of another player switching positions
Since the Minnesota Vikings selected Lewis Cine with the final pick of the first round of the 2022 NFL Draft, the former Georgia standout has had a pretty rough go of it. His rookie season ended after just four games following a nasty leg injury, and he struggled to get onto the field last season in any meaningful capacity.
2024 is shaping up to be a make-or-break year for Cine with Minnesota, and it looks like things might have gotten that much tougher for him because of a position switch by one of his teammates.
Alec Lewis of The Athletic has written a piece with one tidbit on all 90 players currently on the Minnesota roster. We might go over some of those tidbits in another story, but the one specific one that I want to focus on for this piece is the revelation that Najee Thompson has switched positions from cornerback to safety and is likely to make the roster.
Thompson was signed as an undrafted free agent last season, and though he didn’t see the field on defense (that I can recall) he immediately established himself as a very good special teams player, particularly as a punt gunner. If they’re moving Thompson to safety in order to give the players competing for cornerback snaps some more time to evaluate them, Cine is going to have a real uphill battle to make the squad at safety.
Clearly, Cine is behind Harrison Smith, Camryn Bynum, and Josh Metellus on the safety depth chart. If we figure that Thompson makes the roster as a safety, at least nominally, that probably only leaves one spot on the 53-man roster for another safety. Cine will be competing with Theo Jackson and Jay Ward, among others, to claim that spot.
If he wants to prevent himself from going on the list of the worst first-round picks in Vikings’ history, Lewis Cine is going to have to bring it in a big way when everyone gets to Eagan in mid-July. With the way things are shaping up right now, he might need even more than that to stay in purple going forward.
