NFC Notes: Lions, Packers, Vikings

Vikings

Vikings’ GM Rick Spielman reiterated that he never felt the need to call QB Kirk Cousins to let him know the team was selecting QB Kellen Mond in the third round of the draft.

“I spoke to him Saturday morning and talked to his agent and just let him know that we want to make sure we have competition behind him, that there’s no doubt that Kirk’s our quarterback going forward, and that we want to create competition to see who’s going to be the backup,” Spielman recently told Pro Football Talk. “Kirk was great. He understands. He knows he’s our guy, his agent knows he’s our guy. Right now, we’re just focusing on getting ready for this season coming up.”

Spielman notes that the Vikings wanted to bring in competition, as the team now has three young quarterbacks in Mond, Nate Stanley, and Jake Browning.

“We wanted to create competition with all our young quarterbacks, with Nate Stanley, with Jake Browning, and now with Kellen Mond,” Spielman said. “To have those guys come in and compete and just see where it takes us. You’re always kind of looking at your roster and where it may be two or three years down the road, but that’s hard to predict as much as you roster plan,” Spielman said. “Every rookie that we draft, we’re hoping that regardless of the position that they’re going to be here, whatever role they end up carving out, they end up helping the Minnesota Vikings whether it be in the backup role, starter role, special teams role. We’re just trying to put the best 53 players together and trying to bring in young competition every year to compete with the guys that are currently on our roster. You’re always looking down the road, but you don’t know that until you get everything in the building and start working with these guys and let’s just see where we’re at down the road.”

There were still rumors that the Vikings were looking at drafting a quarterback higher this year, especially Ohio State QB Justin Fields. However, it was Mond who ended up receiving the most attention from Minnesota.

“We spent a lot of time on the quarterbacks this year,” Spielman said. “The one thing that Kellen, it really stuck out to us on his progression from his rookie year to what he did his second year then this year I know seeing him performing that Florida game off the tape and how he won a close game. Then he goes down and wins a bowl game against North Carolina, who had a lot of great players on that roster who got drafted this past weekend. Then you go down to the Senior Bowl and it’s the first chance we get to see him live and see how he kept ascending through this process. How well he played at the Senior Bowl, we sent our coaches down to his Pro Day. Andrew Janocko, our quarterback coach, really liked his workout. In fact, I spent Thursday night and Friday watching our Zoom call again with our coaches and going through getting to know the kid because a lot of times this year for me personally, I didn’t get to talk to a lot of these kids because the month of March, I was traveling so much trying to get to as many Pro Days. But our coaches and our scouts and working together I think we did over 200 Zoom calls this year and we recorded them all so I can go back when I got off the road or this time when I had time in the evening to sit there and listen to these Zoom calls to get to know these kids because I’ve never had an interaction with them except when I was down at the Senior Bowl. His interview was very impressive and our coaches think there are things that he needs to get corrected but they’re all correctable with coaching. He has some really natural athletic skills. He can throw on the run. He’s a great scheme fit here for what we’re trying to do.”