Zulgad: Vikings’ decision to sign Dalton Risner is a better late than never move
If the Minnesota Vikings felt despair after their latest clunker on Thursday night in Philadelphia dropped them to 0-2, they likely gained hope on Sunday by watching several teams look as sloppy and disorganized as they did. Early season NFL games are rarely pretty and often filled with warts.
This was especially true in the NFC North. The Lions and Packers both failed to hold leads, dropping to 1-1, while the Bears fell to 0-2 and appear to be as big of a mess as they were a season ago.
The takeaway for the Vikings? Get your act together, beat the Chargers on Sunday at U.S. Bank Stadium, and you have a chance to bounce back from a start that has included seven giveaways in the first two games.
But improvement must be immediate and that urgency was felt Monday at TCO Performance Center as the Vikings reportedly agreed to a one-year deal with veteran guard Dalton Risner. The deal is expected to be worth about $4 million for the remainder of the season, according to ESPN, meaning Risner will be making more than either of the Vikings starting guards.
That would be left guard Ezra Cleveland and right guard Ed Ingram. One of them almost certainly will lose his job to Risner, who played exclusively on the left side during his first four seasons with the Denver Broncos. The Vikings could have Risner replace Cleveland, or they could move Cleveland to right guard, a spot where he started as a rookie, and bench Ingram.
Risner, a second-round pick by the Broncos in 2019, visited the Vikings early in training camp but the team elected not to sign him. Still, it appeared to be an indication that coach Kevin O’Connell had concerns about the guard positions. Ingram had a shaky rookie season after being a second-round pick last year but still played in all 18 games, including the playoff loss to the Giants.
The struggles of the interior line in 2022, especially in pass protection, became even more obvious watching quarterback Kirk Cousins get beat up by pass rushers during the Nextflix docuseries “Quarterback” that premiered in July. The Vikings, in what ranks as some serious wishful thinking, were hoping that Ingram, Cleveland and center Garrett Bradbury would continue to progress.
But Cousins is still taking too many hard hits and the Vikings’ run game has been dreadful, averaging an NFL-worst 34.5 yards per game. It doesn’t help that Bradbury was lost early in Week 1 because of a recurrence of a back injury and has been replaced by Austin Schlottmann.
The 28-year-old Risner made no secret of the fact he wanted the Vikings to sign him in recent weeks, responding to fans of the team on Twitter saying that he was ready. We’ll now find out if he was right and if other teams made a mistake by not signing him as a free agent last March.
Risner should provide a significant upgrade in pass protection. He surrendered 29 pressures in 967 snaps and 15 games last season, according to Pro Football Focus. Ingram and Cleveland gave up 58 (worst in the NFL) and 53 pressures, respectively, and Risner’s pass-blocking grade was 30 points better than Ingram’s and 18.5 points better than Cleveland’s.
Here’s the bad news. Risner’s career-high grade from PFF was 64.4 as a rookie and last season it was 61.1. The NFL’s best guards reach the low 90s or high 80s. The issue has been Risner’s run blocking.
He has had a run-blocking grade no better than 63.2 in his four seasons and last year that number fell to 53.4. Cleveland and Ingram were considered better run blockers than Risner heading into the season, but clearly the inability to get Alexander Mattison going has Vikings general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah willing to take a chance on Risner.
There’s a case to be made that Adofo-Mensah looks desperate and that he should have signed Risner in August in order to give him nearly a full training camp to prepare. In the case of Ingram, at least, this looks like a stubborn move from a GM whose first draft class is looking more and more as if it is filled with busts.
Risner, of course, will have no role in the Vikings beginning to hang onto the football, or stop the run game on defense. But if he succeeds in helping keep Cousins upright, perhaps the NFL’s 12th-ranked scoring offense can make its way into the Top 10 and the Vikings can start to climb out of this hole and take advantage of being in a bad division.
