July Stands for Suffering

Seriously.  There's no football, no basketball, and even preseason soccer won't be for another week.  So, I'm going to spend this week talking about our draft.

Here they are:

Sharrif Floyd - DT (1st round)
Xavier Rhodes - CB (1st round)
Cordarrelle Patterson - WR (1st round)
Gerald Hodges - LB (4th round)
Jeff Locke - P (5th round)
Jeff Baca - G (6th round)
Michael Mauti - LB (7th round)
Travis Bond - G (7th round)
Everett Dawkins - DT (7th round)

Now I've said plenty about the Vikings' management and FO over the years, same as the rest of us (ha!), but I have to applaud Rick Spielman for this year's draft.

Our defense is pretty freaking glittery with stars to begin with (which is why I'm so surprised we had way more offense in the all-NFC North team than defense) and then we added Floyd and Rhodes on top of what we've got?  I can't tell you how glad I am a beast like Floyd gets to learn from our resident badass Kevin Williams.  The Williams Wall was one of the best tandems in pro football, and if we can get Floyd a partner in asskickery, we may get something almost as great again!

Rhodes is a big body that we desperately needed to give some match-up advantages against the big speedy receivers we've been having trouble with for the past couple years.  Hopefully we can eliminate some of the big gashing plays we've given up recently.

Patterson is more of a question mark - I was absolutely astounded that we traded back up, and so was Dad - but there's no denying he's explosive and very fast.  He did pretty well managing the transition from juco to the SEC, so I'm crossing all my fingers and my toes that he'll have a good transition from NCAAF to NFL too.

The rest I don't know much about, so I'll do a little digging and post about them later.

SKOL!