The Minnesota Vikings wrapped up the first day of rookie minicamp on Friday with 51 players taking the field. Within that group, six of them were on the 90-man roster ahead of the offseason.
Within the 51 players the Vikings have on the rookie minicamp roster, it breaks down like this:
- 6 incumbent players
- 5 draft picks
- 20 undrafted free agents
- 20 on a tryout
Kevin O'Connell describes difficulty in evaluating running backs
One of the more intriguing players to watch over the weekend is running back Tre Stewart. An undrafted free agent out of Jacksonville State, Stewart ran for over 1,600 yards in his one season of FBS football after spending the early parts of his career at Limestone.
He is a very compact player at just 5'9 and 192 lbs with a solid 40-yard dash, but not a lot of other plus measurables on his profile.
Despite all of that, Stewart does possess a lot of plus attributes when it comes to on-field play. He averaged 5.9 yards per carry with 25 touchdowns in 14 games. That kind of productivity stems from two things:
- His ability as a running back
- Rich Rodriguez's system
There were a lot of positives when watching Stewart's film, especially with his vision and contact balance. His compact frame is solid, which makes him hard to tackle.
The last question that head coach Kevin O'Connell answered during his press availability on Friday was about Stewart and O'Connell went into a deeper answer about the running back position.
"Yeah, I think, you know, we wanted to really try to find, you know, no looking at Aaron, Jordan, Ty and obviously Za(Vier) got a chance to get some reps out here today. We just wanted to find some skill sets, some explosiveness, some physicality. We wanted to find that much like what we were thinking with the receiver room. We wanted to find some traits in the Tai felt and explosive a guy that can fly 437, you know, hands catcher away from his body multiple positions, smart enough, tough enough to do a lot like that's what we were hoping to kind of accomplish, and as guys were getting picked there, we were fortunate to have a chance to have a chance to bring him in, and now he just goes into a competitive situation, and what that looks like is you truly never know."
The idea of finding a player with a specific skill set to add to the room is very intriguing. The theory with the wide receiver room is you want to have a basketball starting five with unique and diverse skillsets across the board.
With the running back room, it's not too different. You want to have players who can do different things depending on the situation. That angle led to O'Connell talking about the running back position as a whole, which gave us an interesting answer about evaluating talent.
"Everybody talks about quarterbacks and receivers and how spread offense is and how it's hard to evaluate. I think the running back position has become more difficult, especially down the line, as you go on and so forth into the draft. Because we're going to be in the gun quite a bit, on the ball out of the gun quite a bit. But we also need to know if a guy can stand in the dot and run wide zone, run downhill, tight zone gap scheme, and it's just somehow sometimes harder to see on their college tape, and there's a big time adjustment to that. It's like a quarterback having never been under center. You're saying, yeah, we're going to be able to coach him up to do it. But you really, in a lot of ways, based on a lot of tape, don't know so.
"I think there's, you know, there was some, there's a good example of it, you know, really right in our room. I think Aaron Jones is one of the best pass protecting, quote, unquote, every down type backs we have in the league. And he's not necessarily the biggest, strongest guy, but show me a guy doing some of the things that Aaron does snap in and snap out. And I know body types are a little different but you get the point, so much of it is fundamentals technique, and a willingness to do it, because it is a thankless job at times."
One of the interesting elements with evaluating the college game versus the pro game is how considerably different they are. The spacing, running lanes, and type of athletes you play with and against are considerably different. It can cloud the evaluation especially when you run an offense that is heavy under center and the majority of teams in college football don't run an under center offense.
Did the Vikings just find the next Aaron Jones in Stewart? It sounds like O'Connell was looking for that kind of prototype in the UDFA class and Stewart fits the bill, especially when you are talking about playing out of the shotgun.
This isn't to say that Stewart is going to be a force right away. He still has a long ways to go in order to get things squared away, especially from a pass protection standpoint. If he can get there, the Vikings have a real gem in Stewart.
