Draft positions for a successful interior OL

Clearly, interior OL has been a weak point for the Vikings since Berger/Easton and going back further to Steve Hutchinson. There has been a lot of clamoring about drafting G in the first round this offseason, but our draft positioning makes that look like a risky bet. I wanted to see where the successful iOL guys have been drafted.

So, two separate analyses:

1) Draft positions of every all-pro interior offensive lineman in the last 5 years
2) Draft positions for players with top-10 2020 contract values for RG, LG, and C (assuming contract as a measure of quality)

Both routes show the same thing. Median draft position in the latter half of the second round. That isn’t necessarily surprising. The more surprising thing is that for this full set of players (41 total) only 4 were drafted or signed as UDFA beyond the 4th round. For all of the talk about developing later-round lineman, it barely ever happens. At least not to the extent to where they turn into high-quality players.

The distribution in this dataset is:

1st: 13
2nd: 10
3rd: 8
4th: 6
6th: 3
UDFA: 1 (Andrew Norwell)

So, my take-home message is that the Vikings don’t necessarily need to be drafting iOL in the first round, but we better not be counting on a bunch of late rounders.