Through the first preseason game, we have some really interesting movement in who has adjusted their stock.
The Minnesota Vikings are nearing the end of training camp with joint practices against the Baltimore Ravens on the horizon. After their first preseason game , several players have separated themselves from the pack while others have raised serious concerns. From undrafted surprises to a former 10th overall pick trending in the wrong direction, here is a look at the biggest stock risers and fallers from Vikings training camp.
Price might be the biggest surprise of training camp. While he may not become a favorite for Mr. Mankato just yet, Price has proved he is more than a return specialist. Against the New York Giants , he caught four passes for 51 yards and a touchdown, including a catch that made SportsCenter's top 10. You don't normally throw a 5-foot-8.5 wide receiver a fade route, but when you get opportunities to make plays, you have to make them.
Price bailed out quarterback Carson Wentz multiple times and showed he can be a capable receiver. Will he ever be more than a WR4? Probably not, but there is real value in having your return man double as a fourth receiver, and Price is proving he can fill that role. It's a really nice development that showcases the Vikings have a quality depth problem at wide receiver.
When the Vikings drafted Tiernan, it made sense. Minnesota had 33.1% of its offensive linemen snaps played by backups due to health issues in 2025, with players like Christian Darrisaw and Brian O'Neal missing significant time. Drafting Tiernan to be the sixth or seventh offensive lineman after extending O'Neal was smart roster-building. The problem is Tiernan's biggest flaws are becoming a huge detriment.
He stands 6-foot-8 but has only 32.25-inch arms. Short arms aren't necessarily a dealbreaker, but when paired with poor knee flexibility and a tendency to play high, Tiernan waist-bends too much and gets washed out of plays. He loses the leverage battle , and all of that was on full display in a brutal showing against the Giants. Can he improve? Absolutely. But when you don't have the right levers to pull, it becomes a major problem. If he can't learn to play lower and become more flexible, this could end up being a disastrous pick for Minnesota.
Kamara was a fascinating signing after rookie minicamp. Earning a contract after rookie minicamp says a lot. It means you showed more than the undrafted free agents the Vikings already had under contract. Elijah Williams is one of those guys, and Adam Thielen was one back in the day. Show your stuff, earn a contract, and you are four times more likely to make a roster than if you were signed right after the draft.
Kamara looked really good against the threes, and that context matters. He diagnosed plays well, showed great gap integrity, and secured tackles in the hole while displaying nice burst. Because of his success against the 3s, it would be great to see him play against the 2s. That step up in competition will show whether Kamara can be something more or if it was just a flash in the pan.
Safety Jacob Thomas was a nice surprise for the Vikings, grabbing an interception and then earning first-team reps in the first practice after the preseason game. Jackson, meanwhile, is likely going to lose the starting job to Jay Ward . On top of that, he had a brutal couple of plays when it came to diagnosing in open space, taking poor angles and not pursuing the ball well. That has been a constant issue.
There were plays during practice where he came up to fit the run and lost contain completely. Vikings social media posted one where running back Jordan Mason just absolutely dog-walked him, coming right at Jackson and looping around. If Jordan Mason is doing that to you consistently, that is a big red flag. Jackson does have about $3.2 million left in salary cap full guarantees, so if the Vikings were to trade him, they could alleviate about $1.2 million of that with $2 million already in paid signing bonus. Jackson is not playing well enough to secure a spot on this team, and with Thomas's intelligence showing up the way it has, Minnesota needs to take that into serious consideration when building the 53-man roster.
Thomas has been showcasing plenty of interesting things. Coming out of James Madison, he wasn't the most athletic player and relied mainly on his football IQ to have success on the back end. But the one thing Thomas has consistently done is read well. The interception he had illustrated that perfectly. He diagnosed quarterback Brandon Allen throwing the deep ball early, flipped his hips, did not overcommit to the inside, and attacked the ball in the air.
Those little details all matter. If he had his hips flipped a little further toward the inside, he wouldn't have been able to get back to the outside fast enough to make a play, because Allen was trying to hit the honey hole. Thomas has shown plenty for the Vikings to understand what he can do in this defense. With Jakobe Thomas out, he's getting even more opportunities, and that could end up being huge for him.
It would be great for Bell to showcase a lot of good things, but that hasn't come to fruition. Bell hasn't been bad. In fact, he's been completely fine. The issue is that he hasn't shined the way he did during rookie minicamp, OTAs, and mandatory minicamp when there was a lot of hype surrounding him. He just looks like a guy. The biggest ways the Vikings got him involved were gadget-type plays with screens and jet sweeps. That's not a bad thing, but we haven't seen it's pretty disappointing.
For starters, there were legitimate questions about how Claybourne would fare as a pass protector and receiver out of the backfield. There are still some questions about him as a receiver, but his pass protection looked better than expected against the Giants. He had a really nice rep where he undercut a blitzing linebacker, though Wentz held the ball too long before getting it out to the check down. When you cut a guy, he's going to get back up, and Wentz needed to be quicker with that decision. That's not on Claiborne. There are going to be some limitations to his game, like you can't run him at the goal line, which the Vikings still tried to do, and it looked really rough. But his ability to break contain and get the edge is impressive. If he's able to continue stacking good days, it's easy to see why the Vikings made him a priority in the sixth round of the NFL Draft.
J.J. McCarthy lost the starting job, and when that happens, there are a couple of paths. Either you use it as motivation to get better, or you let it affect your play. The short sample size available shows it's affecting his play. He looks worse than he did in his first preseason game two years ago, when he threw for 180 yards and two touchdown passes against the Las Vegas Raiders .
What happened to McCarthy and where it all went wrong is difficult to pinpoint. Whether the injury cratered everything, whether he just doesn't have it, or whether the answer is somewhere in between, McCarthy did not look like a guy you could trust to play NFL football in the regular season. That's really disappointing for a 10th overall pick. Can things change? Absolutely, but the way things sit right now, it is not looking good.
This article was originally published on A to Z Sports. Read the full story here: Vikings Training Camp Stock Watch: 4 risers and fallers ranging from a former first-round pick to a rookie minicamp UDFA
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