The Minnesota Vikings have had some of the best players in the NFL since 2000, despite not having won a Super Bowl. Narrowing that list down to four players to place on their Mount Rushmore is a tough exercise that is bound to alienate fans.
Recently, Bleacher Report made their Mount Rushmore lists for each NFL team. The Vikings’ four players were:
- DE Jared Allen
- RB Adrian Peterson
- S Harrison Smith
- DT Kevin Williams
The two players who are non-negotiable on the list are Peterson and Williams. Peterson played for the Vikings from 2007-16, rushing for 11,747 yards and 97 touchdowns. He won the NFL MVP in 2012 when he ran for 2,097 yards and carried a Christian Ponder-led team to the playoffs. The end of Peterson’s tenure in Minnesota may have been wonky, and the end of his career was forgettable, but he was the face of the franchise for years as the Vikings struggled to find a quarterback.
Williams never received the fanfare of Peterson, but he was a force from 2003 to 2013. He had 60 sacks, scored four defensive touchdowns, and was selected to the All-Pro First-Team five times in six years. As one half of the “Williams Wall” with fellow defensive tackle Pat Williams, Kevin and the Vikings’ defense led the league in run defense for three straight years from 2006 to 2008. They ranked second against the run in the magical 2009 season.
The last two spots are where this list gets tough. Smith’s career feels like Kevin Williams’, where the national perception never quite matched his on-field production and local love. Allen, meanwhile, was a firecracker both as a player and with his personality.
Allen registered 85.5 sacks in six seasons with the Vikings, his best season coming in 2011. Despite going 3-13, Allen racked up 22 sacks, a Vikings record, and half a sack short of Michael Strahan’s league record. He was voted First-Team All-Pro three times in six seasons with Minnesota.
Smith is entering his 14th NFL season, all of which have been spent with the Vikings. He’s the active leader in interceptions (37) and has 20.5 sacks, making him the sixth player in NFL history to record 35 or more interceptions and 20 or more sacks in his career.
These two deserve to be on a list like this, but the reason they aren’t slam dunks in this particular exercise is because of the omission of Randy Moss. The article even alludes to this, saying that the final spot came down to Smith and Moss.
Leaving wideout Randy Moss off this list was incredibly difficult. However, the Hall of Famer spent more seasons outside of Minnesota than he did with the Vikings after the year 2000, and he cemented his spot in Canton as a New England Patriot. Our last spot instead goes to safety Harrison Smith, a six-time Pro Bowler who is about to play his 14th season for the Vikings.
Despite only playing five full seasons with the Vikings from 2000-04 (and a brief second stint in 2010), Moss still caught 425 passes for 6,416 yards and 62 touchdowns. He may not have played as long as the other players on this list, but Moss was the best receiver in the league when he played for the Vikings.
Of course, that’d open up a discussion to have Justin Jefferson on the list, as he has played the same number of regular-season games as Moss did in his first stint with the team. Perhaps this list is perfect and rightly excludes two dominant receivers who didn’t have the same tenure as other players on the list.