Minnesota Vikings training camp preview: Harrison Smith has never had a partner like Lewis Cine
You’re never going to believe this: A first-round pick has high expectations.
The Minnesota Vikings are expecting first-round safety Lewis Cine to make an immediate difference on a defense that has struggled over the last two years.
From Day 1 of rookie minicamp, head coach Kevin O’Connell made it clear that he wants Cine to step up right away.
“I told him, 'Hey, lead this group out here,’” O’Connell said after the first day of rookie camp. “There's a reason why you were our first-round draft pick.”
The former Georgia star has something working in his favor as he enters his first NFL training camp: He gets to play alongside All-Pro Harrison Smith.
In the past, there have been few more favorable situations than lining up next to Smith.
His safety partner from 2015-2018 Andrew Sendejo had four straight seasons allowing under a 90 quarterback rating on throws into his coverage and graded as high as the 18th best safety in the NFL by PFF in 2017.
Midway through 2018, Anthony Harris took over the full-time safety job and crushed it. He allowed zero touchdowns, picked off three passes and graded third best at his position. Harris followed up that act in 2019 by leading the league in INTs and ranking second by PFF. Even in a down 2020, Harris still finished in the top half of the league in grade and then signed with Philadelphia in the offseason.
Xavier Woods was up and down in 2021, ultimately ranking 32nd out of 64. He allowed under 60% completion percentage into his coverage.
Along the way, Smith never ranked outside of the top 20 and scored in the top three by PFF in 2015, 2017 and 2019. Over his career, the 2012 first-rounder has given up an absurdly low 57.6 QB rating on throws into his coverage.
The Vikings elected to restructure Smith’s contract this offseason rather than moving on from their ultra-valuable safety. They also gave him a partner who has much greater pedigree than any of his previous cohorts — by a mile.
Sendejo and Harris were undrafted. Woods was taken in the fifth round by Dallas and signed a cheap one-year contract with the Vikings. In terms of athletic prowess, the website Relative Athletic Score placed Sendejo as an 86th percentile athlete, Harris 41st and Woods 76th. Cine’s Combine scores placed him in the 99th percentile of athleticism — nearly 10% greater than Harrison Smith.
Cine also comes with a different skill set. While Smith’s fellow safeties were usually required to hold the fort while he flew around to different spots on the field based on situation and his instincts, Cine has the raw talent to do some of the same things that have made Smith a borderline Hall of Famer.
At Georgia, Cine became known for his ability to explode toward the line of scrimmage and blow up the opposition.
“From a coaching perspective, I want that guy,” former safety Matt Bowen told Vikings.com. “I want him in my secondary room because he is a tone-setter. He is an ultimate tone-setter.”
The defensive MVP of the college championship game had both coverage and rushing grades over 80 by PFF while playing deep safety, in the box and at slot corner during his time as the Bulldogs’ engine on the back end.
“I'm a problem-solver, the fact that I can do a whole lot of things, and coaches love that,” Cine said. “They don't want a one-trick pony. I can run. I've got the size. I'm smart. I can do…everything, the whole nine yards."
The Vikings, it appears, will ask him to take on the whole nine yards.
“Those safeties drive the ship in a lot of ways for where we’re rotating down, whether we’re playing shell coverage or single-high coverage, a lot of it from the same look, so any rep he can get out there with teammates and communicating, that’s a huge thing for him,” O’Connell said.
As he enters camp next week, Cine looks to be as ready as any rookie can be, in part because he’s a tape junkie, much like Smith. O’Connell said that before Cine was even introduced as the team’s first-round pick at TCO Performance Center he was already asking questions about things he saw on film.
But the NFL is a different beast from college football. How do safeties adapt?
In 2020, PFF studied every position’s learning curve and found that safeties were among the positions that adapted the quickest, producing more Wins Above Replacement per 100 snaps as rookies than cornerbacks and linebackers.
Recent history has plenty of examples. Last season Miami’s rookie safety Jevon Holland became an instant star with an 84.7 PFF grade and 87.7 grade in coverage. The second-rounder allowed just an 88.6 QB rating against and racked up 16 QB pressures. Raiders rookie Trevon Moehrig also graded well above average in coverage.
In 2020, Antoine Winfield Jr. played a key role in the Bucs’ Super Bowl-winning defense as a first-year player. The year before that Juan Thornhill did the same for Kansas City, giving up a 69.9 QB rating into his coverage on 614 passing snaps.
The 2018 class featured two stars in Derwin James and Jesse Bates, each of whom ranked as top-notch players at their position by PFF as rookies. Justin Reid also graded above 75 for Houston in his debut season.
In 2017, Marcus Williams, John Johnson, Budda Baker, Xavier Woods, Jamal Adams and Eddie Jackson all stood out as rookies.
That doesn’t mean it worked for everyone. Pittsburgh’s Terrell Edmunds, Carolina’s Jeremy Chinn, the Giants’ Jabrill Peppers and the Jets’ Marcus Maye all had below average graded rookie years.
While the Vikings are counting on Cine to be the freakishly talented partner that Harrison Smith has never had, the job won't be gifted to him. Last year when Cam Bynum was asked to fill in for Smith due to COVID he performed admirably. The team has insisted they were impressed and that Bynum will still be part of the mix. He took a number of first-team reps in minicamp and they could open camp splitting reps. The bar won’t be low for Cine to get the S2 gig.
But if he quickly shines in camp, it won’t be far fetched to expect a season reflective of other rookies who have been difference makers right away in recent years.
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