Vikings Day 2 Picks - CB Booth, G Ingram, LB Asamoah

Analytics

We don’t have “athleticism” data to work off of, though it should be noted that Booth has been praised for his athleticism by evaluators. The Vikings thought his athleticism was in the top tier of the class after accounting for his length and build; players with longer legs, in particular, have difficulty changing direction, but Booth is remarkably quick despite that.

Pro Football Focus doesn’t log Booth as having given up a single deep reception in 2021. The only long receptions Booth is credited with giving up were both YAC-heavy plays when he was not beaten over the top. In fact, Booth only gave up one deep reception in 2020, and that was in the first game Clemson played. For the next 21 games, no receiver hauled in a deep reception against him.

While that doesn’t prove his athleticism outright, it does imply it, which is the best we can do in this case.

As for how Clemson used him and how he performed, we have a wealth of data to look at. First, a broad look at his productivity in coverage.



As one of the younger corners in the draft, Booth benefits from an age score that provides context for all the other scores. Players who play well against older athletes while they’re still gaining experience and developing have higher ceilings, and being able to perform well at a young age speaks to how they can translate as they grow into themselves in the NFL.

It looks like Booth was targeted at an average rate when compared to the rest of the corners in his draft class but performed well when targeted. He allowed a relatively low completion rate and rate of passes that “deserved” to be caught, per Sports Info Solutions. Not only that, his coverage grades from both PFF and SIS were high, which is to say that people grading these players found that Booth was great in coverage even in the situations where he may have allowed a completion (or near-completion).

In terms of raw production, he does all right. His slightly above-average rankings in ball-hawk rate — the percentage of passes thrown his way where he gets his hand on the ball — and yards allowed per snap in coverage speak to him being a good player, though they’re not quite befitting a first-round pick.

It’s one thing to produce like this if you’re always playing a soft zone or in the slot, but if a player demonstrates versatility in his playing style, that’s a bigger bonus. So we can take a look at how Clemson used him to see if he has that on his resume.



Here, we see that, relative to other cornerbacks, Booth was used more often in zone than in man coverage. In raw numbers, it’s about a 60-20 split, with the other 20 percent devoted to other types of coverages (like combination or mixed coverages or specialty red-zone coverages).

This had to be done in relative terms because no cornerback in the draft saw fewer than 30 percent of his coverages come in a zone look of some sort, while man coverage spanned the range from 8 to 62 percent of all looks. With Booth on the low end of that, we can see that Clemson primarily relied on his ability to keep his eyes on the quarterback and close on the ball.

But we also know he was effective when they put him in man coverage. His grade in man is one of the highest in the draft, though not quite as high as Trent McDuffie or Ahmad Gardner. The yardage number isn’t great, but he nevertheless performed his job well. In man coverage, he didn’t allow a single reception of more than 17 yards, and the 17-yard reception came with a healthy amount of YAC.

So we see that Booth primarily has been a zone-coverage cornerback who has been good in his limited opportunities in man coverage. Not only that, Clemson was comfortable putting him in press as well as off coverage and didn’t feel the need to restrict his opportunities there, either.

Interestingly, we see a stark difference between the “inside” and “slot” rates. Inside rate is a measurement of how often a player lined up inside the numbers, regardless of whether the opposing receiver was the offense’s outside-most receiver. This usually happens in condensed formations, where the receiver is often in a reduced or “nasty” split close to the offensive linemen. The “slot” rate counts how often Booth lined up against a receiver who was in between the offensive line and another receiver in some way. So we know that Booth has extensive experience inside, perhaps because of the nature of the offenses in the ACC, but without playing much slot coverage.

This might mean he has more versatility in the slot than his numbers imply because of how often he had to defend the inside route tree. That does mean he had to be closer to the ball on running plays, but his share of tackles in the running game isn’t notably high or low compared to other cornerbacks and neither is his rate of tackles near the line of scrimmage. Run-game numbers typically do not translate from college to the NFL at cornerback, but it is worth noting that Booth had a high rate of missed tackles compared to his contemporaries both in the running and passing game.

What all of this evidence tells us is that Booth has been a good cornerback despite playing at a young age and has primarily been used as an outside-zone corner with a number of deployments. Without athletic data, this is the profile of a second-round pick with borderline first-round potential, depending on the scheme. If Booth is as athletic as scouting reports (and the Vikings) say, then it’s easy to see why he’d be a first-round pick. And what pushed him down into the second round are likely the injuries.

Injury history

Booth’s medical profile is extensive and required significant attention from teams throughout the draft process. Booth himself said of the decision to forgo workouts that “I kind of made it hard for everybody to love me. I know everybody really, really liked me, but I was hard to love,” adding that he wasn’t surprised to fall out of the first round. “I knew that the medical thing might play a role,” he said.

The list of potential concerns goes back to high school, and it probably didn’t ease scouts’ concerns that Booth hasn’t played a healthy season since then. It started with Osgood-Schlatter Disease, which might be best described as growing pains: The bones in his legs grew faster than his tendons, causing pain. This condition can be exacerbated by athletic activity but can be played through without additional damage.

Unfortunately for Booth, pain and swelling continued well after his growth spurt, a sign that he developed tendonitis in his knee as a result of the condition. He played through this minor tendon damage until after his freshman year of college, and he underwent surgery on his right knee in January of 2020.

Booth also suffered several shorter-term injuries, like a thigh bruise that forced him to miss a late-season game in 2020 and a hamstring strain the following season that took him out of a game. He also suffered a stinger that year and was put on the concussion protocol as a precaution. That injury kept him out of the rest of the Louisville game and the entirety of the subsequent game against Connecticut.

Booth also had two surgeries 11 months apart for a sports hernia, one in April of 2021 and the other in March of 2022. That surgery occurred after Clemson’s pro day on March 17, which he opted out of because of a quadriceps strain he sustained while training for the combine. As a result, Booth did not participate in any of the typical pre-draft workouts.

Listed like that, his injury history is alarming. And teams, of course, agreed, which is why he fell out of the first round. Ultimately, the injuries played a role in his draft fall, but the Vikings are betting on his upside.

And individually, his medical concerns aren’t all that significant. The stinger, thigh bruise and hamstring strain are fairly normal for players to deal with and do not persist over time. It is also fairly normal for children to experience growing pains and the Osgood-Schlatter Disease typically resolves itself without issues.

The subsequent tendonitis is a concern, but tendonitis can have a variety of causes, some of which are long-term issues and others which aren’t. At its base, it means there have been small tears across the patella that can get worse over time and may need surgery to resolve, which he had.

If the surgery was the product of a larger tear of the patellar tendon, that would be a long-term concern as there is a high risk of re-injury, a drop-off in performance and a shorter career. It is possible that Booth had surgery to address persistent tendonitis rather than a large tear, in which case the re-injury numbers would not apply. Given that the average NFL player’s recovery time for a full patellar-tendon tear is 391 days and Booth was ready to practice by early August that year, Booth’s case may have been less severe than the typical tear.

The sports-hernia surgery is fairly common among NFL athletes, and cleaning up that surgery isn’t surprising either. It’s the same set of procedures that Vikings left tackle Christian Darrisaw had his rookie year, though his second surgery was in August rather than March, and Darrisaw was kept out of practices throughout training camp as a result.

After he was drafted, Booth projected he would be ready to participate in practices at rookie minicamp, though self-reports from athletes before they work with a team’s training staff are notoriously unreliable.

Return-to-play rates for sports-hernia surgeries are between 93 and 96 percent, and Vikings senior advisor Ryan Grigson was unconcerned, saying, “A lot of guys have the same surgery, always have positive results … I think he’s going to be fine.”

The question that NFL teams likely had: How many one-off injuries can a player have before the total number of those injuries becomes a concern?

Booth, of course, spun it in the other direction: If he was good enough to earn a first-round grade on film while he was playing through an injury, how much better would he be when he’s finally healthy?

“I know I’m more healthy than the guy that was on tape that going into these meetings everybody is putting up,” he told teams before the draft. “Ten times better than the cat on tape.”

Let’s check that tape.

Film

Analysts loved Booth on tape. Ian Cummings at Pro Football Network ranked him as the fourth-best player in the class as did his colleague at PFN, Oliver Hodgkinson. The folks at KC Sports Network ranked him fifth overall. Cummings justified his ranking by saying, “Booth is the best all-around playmaker at cornerback. He has lightning-fast feet and unreal corrective twitch and energy in his movement. He’s supremely explosive, with impressive fluidity, physicality and run support. At the catch point, Booth is hyper-instinctive, and he makes gravity-defying plays on the ball.” He gave Booth the CB1 spot over Derek Stingley and Ahmad Gardner because of his length and upside.

Hodgkinson echoed the praise, saying, “The freak athleticism, incomparable catch-point ball skills, quick feet, loose hips and tremendous change-of-direction ability enable him to play the game at the highest level. Some injury concerns might impact his overall selection, but Booth is as talented as they come.”

KC Sports Network liked his length but emphasized his scheme versatility and fluidity, saying Booth “is one of (those) players that after watching them, there is just an understanding they look different. His body control and athletic profile is not one that is often seen in the NFL and makes him incredibly scheme diverse coming into the NFL.”

There were worries, however. Shane P. Hallam at Draft Countdown ranked him 44th, while Ross Jacobs at College Football Metrics ranked Booth 42nd. Charlie Campbell at Walter Football ranked him 40th and was perhaps the harshest with his on-field assessment of Booth. Campbell did not bring up Booth’s injury history but instead dinged him for what he considered to be average awareness of the ball in the air with work to be done to develop his instincts and awareness. Hallam and the group at College Football Metrics both praised Booth’s on-field abilities but were worried about the injuries and recent surgeries.

The Athletic’s Dane Brugler was in the middle, ranking Booth 26th. “Booth stays in phase because of his lower-body quickness and hip-flip skills to mirror routes, staying coordinated in his transitions and in position to make plays on the ball,” he wrote. “There is nothing finesse about his play style and he takes his contain responsibilities seriously in the run game, but his downhill aggressiveness makes his tackling an adventure. Overall, Booth’s tape has some volatility and he must mature his feel for spacing, but he has fluid athleticism, finds the football and disrupts the catch point, three important ingredients to playing the position at a high level. He has NFL starting traits (if he stays healthy) and projects best in a man-heavy scheme.”

There are some universals when it comes to appraisals of the former Clemson cornerback: He’s fluid, athletic and deploys his length well, giving him schematic versatility. Concerns about his injury history were the biggest reasons for Booth’s disparate rankings.

It’s easy to forget that he’s over six feet tall with his movement skills. His quickness resembles that of a 5-foot-10 slot corner at times, and very often he can use that to recover when a receiver crosses his face. With good speed and excellent change-of-direction skills for his size, Booth looks to be the complete athletic package.

On top of that, the Vikings love his attitude and competitive toughness, which shine through on any review of his film. His competitiveness can get the best of him at times — as a freshman, he threw a punch during a game and was forced to ride the bus home with the equipment managers instead of flying with his teammates. But for the most part, he can play controlled. Even if he can sometimes be a bit too physical downfield, he only had one pass-interference penalty in his three years at Clemson. One thing the Vikings came away with in their background work on Booth was that competing matters to him.

Booth is a fun player to watch and has posted some impressive highlights. But what sticks out is not how he played at Clemson, but how he projects given his competitiveness, technical refinement and overall athletic ability. He doesn’t seem to have the instincts or awareness of Vikings first-round pick Lewis Cine, but that’s a high bar.

Booth is a good cornerback who fell in the draft because of an uncertain injury situation. If he can stay healthy, the Vikings might just hit it big.

As an inside linebacker primarily tasked with shorter coverage responsibilities, Asamoah wasn’t tested too much. The NFL will test him more. But seeing these traits, I’m not worried about his ability. That’s what makes him a viable backup linebacker by Day 1. You can trust him in his coverage responsibilities, and, assuming he learns the playbook as well as the next guy, you can trust him to go the right way in the run game. He’s just a little too small to be a dependable starter as it stands right now.

Asamoah’s scheme fit is in line with all of Adofo-Mensah’s draft picks in the first two days. He’s explosive, rangy, and smart enough to read concepts and execute complex coverage patterns. The vision for Ed Donatell’s defense is clear, even down to the rotational players. Whether Asamoah can be more remains to be seen, but the package the Vikings drafted can immediately fill a role.