If the Vikings Are This Excited About Dallas Turner, Shouldn't Everyone Be?

The Minnesota Vikings were waiting for their next pick as last year's NFL Draft rolled along. With offensive players – mainly quarterbacks – flying off the board, the best defensive players began to slide, and Dallas Turner was available as the draft progressed into the late teens.

When the Jacksonville Jaguars were scheduled to be on the clock with the 17th-overall pick, Vikings general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah decided to make a move. He turned to head coach Kevin O'Connell to reveal his intention to trade up and select Turner with the 17th-overall pick. O'Connell had the facial expression of a dog who had just been offered a piece of bacon.

“Turner, we’re getting him,” Adofo-Mensah said.

“Really…” O’Connell said excitedly.

His eyes widened, and people plastered his reaction on the internet almost in real time. O’Connell knew the Vikings had just landed an impact defender. However, people outside Minnesota have had a lukewarm reaction to the selection.

With training camp a month away, it’s hard to declare anything about a prospect. But if the Vikings are this excited about Turner, shouldn’t we all be?

The tepid reaction starts with people's criticism of the Turner pick. Turner was one of the best edge-rushing prospects in the draft, and it wouldn’t have been a shock if he was the first defensive player off the board. He earned a 9.49 relative athletic score, and his 22.5 sacks in three seasons at Alabama made him one of the most feared pass rushers in college football.

Teams usually would be excited about getting a prospect with this pedigree, but analysts have decided to focus on other areas.

ESPN’s Seth Walder has compared the initial cost of acquiring the 23rd-overall pick from the Houston Texans to the cost of trading up with the Jaguars to select Turner, calling it one of the most expensive trades for a non-quarterback in the past 20 years.

“If we combine the two trades – because they resulted in one player – the surplus of value surrendered by the Vikings jumps to a mid-first-round pick,” Walder wrote. “In other words: They spent two mid-first-round picks on Turner. If we combine the lost value from the two trades, Minnesota made the third-most-expensive trade-up of the past 20 years behind only the Julio Jones and Will Anderson Jr. deals.”

Walder noted that the analysis was “slightly unfair” because Minnesota's original intent for acquiring No. 23 was to trade up for a quarterback at the top of the draft. However, when grading the Vikings’ offseason, Walder doubled down and gave it a C- minus citing the decision to trade up for Turner and calling it a “heist of a trade.”

“That the Vikings were not able to trade up into the top three isn’t on them – it takes two to tango – and they deserve credit for holding out and not trading up for McCarthy until they were one pick away, flipping spots with the Jets and picking him at 10,” Walder explained. “But later in the first round, the team traded a ton of value to move up from 23 to 17 for Turner. It was a very pricey trade in its own right, but if we consider the entire move from 42 to 17 and combine the two trades, it was an overwhelming price to pay.”

Walder wasn’t the only one tapping on his Jimmy Johnson or Rich Hill chart. Mel Kiper Jr. also criticized the Vikings in his draft grades, lamenting their decision to use mid-to-late-round draft capital to grab a premium prospect.

“My qualm about [Adofo-Mensah’s] class has more to do with mortgaging the future of this Minnesota roster,” Kiper said. “He made the move in March to get an extra first-rounder at No. 23, which cost him a second-round pick next year. And to trade up from No. 23 to No. 17, he had to give the Jaguars his 2025 third- and fourth-rounders. That means the Vikings have just three selections next year: one in Round 1 and two in Round 5. With a rookie quarterback under center, are they really in position to go all-in right now? This is after they had just two picks in Rounds 1-3 this year.”

Kiper’s analysis ignores the $54 million in projected cap space the Vikings have in 2025 to build around McCarthy and the infrastructure already in place for McCarthy to succeed. But O’Connell didn’t seem concerned about that when Adofo-Mensah told him they were trading up for Turner, and Vikings players also don’t seem to be calculating draft chart values after seeing him in OTAs and minicamp.

Take Christian Darrisaw’s analysis after watching Turner rip through an unnamed offensive lineman with a spin move last month. While some rookies get the “Yeah, he’s solid” response, Turner generated comparisons to the guy he was replacing.

"[Turner] has that burst," Darrisaw said. "He’s quick. He had a spin move, maybe last week, that was quicker than [Danielle Hunter’s]. I was like, ‘Damn, this guy’s going to be special.’"

Drawing praise from a veteran leader on the team in your first week on the job is one thing. However, causing him to drop obscenities to describe that performance already puts Turner into a different tier.

"I saw him put [the spin move] on somebody else," said Darrisaw. "I was like, ‘Holy f---.’ It was one of those. Yeah, for sure. It was definitely a quick one."

Jonathan Greenard, who will help with Turner's development, was also impressed with his physical ability coming into the league.

“Man, a kid like that running 4.4? I mean, it’s like factory-made,” Greenard said. “Doing the fine-tunings, making sure he understands the game better so that we can make his moves more natural and learn and progress in this league. Because that’s what it’s all about, just developing.”

Once again, we should take players' comments at OTAs with a grain of salt. Dalvin Cook had fantasy football players drooling at this time two years ago when O’Connell tried him out in the slot. After Cook's departure last summer, the Vikings gave Kene Nwangwu increased reps at running back. Even Anthony Barr annually had a declaration about him being used more as a pass-rusher this time of year.

But sometimes, a player just has a “If you know, you know” moment. The Athletic’s Chad Graff wrote an oral history of Randy Moss’ arrival in 1998, and franchise pillars such as John Randle, Cris Carter, and Robert Smith knew what they had – even before Moss stepped on the field.

“I wasn’t a college football fan, but we would always have ESPN on in the player lounge, and so in between meetings you would go in there and watch and we saw so many highlights of Randy during the course of the 1997 season,” Smith recalled. “It was like ‘Wow, this guy is insane.’ And then I see that we drafted him 21st and I remember saying point blank, verbatim, ‘This isn’t going to be fair.’”

It would be unfair to suggest that Turner will have a Moss-like impact, but quotes like this could become a thing as we get to training camp. Fans who made the drive to Mankato could remember things like how soft the ball landed in Sidney Rice’s hands and watching him break out with Brett Favre in 2009 or seeing Adrian Peterson for the first time and watching him turn into one of the greatest running backs in NFL history.

Or there’s my personal favorite when the Vikings drafted Cook in 2017. After juking a defender out of his shoes on a goal-line drill, a fan sitting next to me screamed, “THAT GUY IS ELECTRIC,” drawing the attention of everyone and the embarrassment of his wife. (Yes, this is a true story.)

Things like that can make a fan base excited about a player before they hit the field. And the Vikings' reaction so far says they expect Turner to be someone everyone should be excited about.