The 2024 NFL draft has come and gone, and in its wake, there’s been a lot of excitement around the Minnesota Vikings. After a disappointing season in 2023 marred by injuries, there’s a renewed sense of hope around the team and their new quarterback — first-round pick J.J. McCarthy.
McCarthy comes in and is charged with leading the Vikings into a new age, as is his fellow first-round pick Dallas Turner on the other side of the ball. As McCarthy comes in to replace long-time Viking Kirk Cousins, so too does Turner, replacing long-time star edge defender Danielle Hunter. It’s a time of a lot of turnover for the Vikings and an exciting new era. But how long before that new era starts to pay dividends for the team?
It won’t happen immediately, at least not according to the latest predictions from Pro Football Network. In their latest 2025 NFL mock draft, writer Oliver Hodgkinson uses the site’s predictive software to set the draft order, and it comes out with the Vikings picking sixth. A disappointing, but not altogether unpredictable, result.
So where do the Vikings go with another top-10 pick? Hodgkinson has the team getting more help in the defensive backfield with Notre Dame cornerback Benjamin Morrison. Here’s Hodgkinson’s analysis of the selection:
The addition of Shaq Griffin and multiple CBs in the previous draft cycle points to the Minnesota Vikings looking to upgrade their secondary. They do that in this 2025 NFL Mock Draft with Notre Dame standout Benjamin Morrison, a top-five prospect on the PFN Big Board. He closes space in a heartbeat and has the ball skills to routinely snag interceptions in the NFL.
Certainly, another top-10 pick isn’t what the fans want to see from a team that feels like it’s a quarterback away, but the reality is that this team’s development is going to take some time, and there are some significant holes on the roster yet that could hamper it.
However, if McCarthy develops the way fans and the coaching staff think, this prediction could look bad come next April.
