Future of the Vikings, Part 7: Cornerbacks
A closer look at where the Vikings can add to the secondary
By Matthew Coller
Welcome to the second-to-last installment of the Future of the Vikings series. Here we look at the Vikings’ 2026 outlook at cornerback…
How did the starters perform in 2025?
Last offseason the Vikings seemed very excited about Isaiah Rodgers. At the owner’s meetings, Kevin O’Connell said that Brian Flores had been adamant about signing him and felt that he had a good chance to be an impact player.
Well, Flores was right. Rodgers, who had never been a full-time starter before played 963 snaps and finished with the 12th best PFF grade out of 77 starters.
The final numbers don’t really tell the story of his season. Rodgers had one of the wildest games that any Viking has ever put together in Week 3 when he scored two touchdowns and was given a 99.9 PFF grade. But his subsequent six weeks were rocky. From Week 4 through Week 10, Rodgers had six missed tackles and had a brutal game against the Eagles in which he gave up 151 yards on seven targets including a bomb touchdown into his coverage.
After that downturn, the Vikings defense as a whole flipped a switch as did Rodgers. From Week 11 through the remained of the year, he gave up just eight completions for 84 yards on 13 targets and had the seventh best coverage grade by PFF.
The nature of the cornerback position is one of ups and downs, even for the best players in the sport. Overall Rodgers’ ups were more frequent than his downs and he gave the Vikings an impressive amount of total value by playing the entire season healthy.
Because of his size, there will likely always be issues with tackling so long as he’s a starting outside corner and playmakers have a tendency to get cooked sometimes but Rodgers’ strong season at two years, $15 million was one of the best bang-for-buck singings of the offseason and he will go into next year locked in as a starter.
On the other side, the Vikings made a massive investment in Byron Murphy Jr. in the 2025 offseason, signing him to a three-year contract worth $54 million.
The immediate returns were not what they expected. After two seasons of Murphy Jr. playing exceptionally well in Flores’ defense, he finished 59th of 77 starting corners in PFF grade and gave up the 9th worst completion percentage on throws into his coverage.
He graded as the 18th best overall in 2024. What happened?
One thing is that interceptions come and go from year to year. In 2024, he had more than any corner in the NFL and in 2025 he didn’t see the same types of opportunities to make splash plays.
Grades can be a little deceiving at times, too. In terms of snaps her target, Murphy had the 7th best rate in the league, meaning that teams avoided throwing into his coverage at a similar rate to Pat Surtain.
Murphy Jr. was also not often targeted deep downfield often, cutting down on chances to get interceptions and pass breakups. He ranked 15th of 77 in lowest average depth of target into his coverage. The longest completion toward him only went 30 yards and that happened in Week 1.
Another thing that impacted his grade was penalties. He tied for the 9th most flags in the league.
So we can’t say that Murphy Jr. was as effective as previous years but he was far from a major problem on the defense and had remarkable health playing over 1,000 snaps.
The Vikings are in good shape at starting corner.
The rest of the depth chart, however…
They only paid for the lack of depth a little bit
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