Jalen Redmond Is Good, In Case You Failed To Notice

“Who’s #61? He’s a dude.”

After Vikings-Patriots joint practices last year, fellow degenerate Tyler Forness spoke with some media members on the Patriots side to get an outside perspective on the 2025 Vikings. That was the first thing they said. 

Jalen Redmond had made enough of an impression to demand the A topic instead of J.J. McCarthy, Drake Maye, or any of the other major storylines from the eventual AFC Champion Patriots, or ever-chaotic Vikings. But for some reason, he’s not the kind of player that people know outside of his number.

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Redmond has recognition where it matters: inside the Minnesota Vikings building. Here’s Kevin O’Connell giving him a game ball after the Vikings’ win over Arizona on December 1st, 2024.

He drew attention elsewhere in the division, too. In advance of the Vikings’ game in Detroit last year, Dan Campbell said “I think Redmond’s an outstanding player. I really do. I think that guy’s disruptive, I think he plays the run, I think he gets the edge in the pass game.”

He even got some highlights in the box score, tying Eric Wilson for third in sacks in 2025. Yet, Redmond is still a relative unknown. He’s so under-the-radar that he’s not even on this list of under-the-radar Vikings defenders. He’s just “#61” to people outside of Minnesota’s orbit.

Such is life for players who have to go through the UFL. Jalen Redmond spent 2024 with the Arlington Renegades, whose season ended on June 2nd of that year. On June 18th, he signed with the Vikings, and a little over a month later, he was back in pads, grinding away at training camp.

If you come from a spring league like the UFL, or the USFL, XFL, or AAF before it, there’s an undeniable stigma. You didn’t make it, after all. Most of those players were cut by NFL teams, or maybe didn’t even get the call at all. The presumption is that you weren’t good enough for the major leagues, and beating up on the other rejects isn’t so impressive.

Still, he earned the attention of Ryan Grigson, of all people, and the rest is history. If you were following Redmond’s story through Midwest City, Oklahoma and the Oklahoma Sooners, you may have seen it coming.

Redmond was more of a basketball player in high school, and didn’t decide to strap on pads until spring of his sophomore year. Most players we talk about at this level have played since childhood, so Redmond was already behind. It didn’t matter. Two years later, he committed to Oklahoma.

His career at Oklahoma was thrown into chaos before it could even start. He awoke from a summer nap with indescribable pain in his chest. It turned out he had blood clots in his lungs, known as a pulmonary embolism. It’s a life-threatening condition, and football had to go on hold.

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With some blood thinners, he was able to play a bit his freshman year, but had to cut it short when the blood clots came back. When the COVID-19 pandemic threatened the 2020 season, Redmond opted out due to his condition. 

All told, he’d play four seasons at Oklahoma, but the stop-start nature and the perceived risk didn’t make for an attractive enough package to get drafted. Doctors told him the issue was, apparently, random, and that his blood wasn’t defective. NFL teams were cautious. Adding to that complication was the fact that his age deflated his draft stock.

Alas, he’d have to grind it out as an undrafted free agent in Carolina. But that, too, was derailed by a calf strain that turned out to be another occurrence of blood clots. He didn’t make the Panthers and had to resort to the UFL. 

Redmond wears 61 because that was assigned to him as a roster longshot in 2024. He didn’t keep it, but it serves as a reminder of the depths he had to crawl through to revive his NFL career and overcome a medical condition that he couldn’t have done anything to prevent.

Now, #61 is good enough to demand the spotlight. It’s time we start calling Jalen Redmond by name.

Redmond started the season as a rotational player, but after the bye week, he was functionally promoted to a bona fide starter. Defensive tackle snaps in Brian Flores’ defense are subject to rotation no matter what, but after Week 5 and their subsequent bye, there was a clear top two on the depth chart.

It’s a long way from the Arlington Renegades to supplanting a two-time Pro Bowler on the depth chart. But Hargrave had his struggles, which is why the Vikings reduced his role on defense and eventually released him. However, simply starting over Hargrave doesn’t necessarily validate Redmond as a bona fide pillar of the defense. He needs to produce as well.

From a raw production perspective, Redmond generated 35 pressures in 2025, logging a pressure on 10.0% of his snaps, per Trumedia. That’s fourth on the team in terms of volume (behind Jonathan Greenard, Dallas Turner and Eric Wilson), and 26th in the league among interior defensive linemen. By rate, he ranks 36th among interior defensive linemen.

Different charting organizations will have different rates (Next Gen Stats puts him at 9.1%, or 29th among all interior defensive linemen when rushing from the defensive tackle position), but either way, Redmond produced pressure more efficiently in 2025 than the Vikings got from any season by Sheldon Richardson, Dalvin Tomlinson, or Linval Joseph. In fact, the only interior rusher to produce more efficiently than Redmond was Javon Hargrave, also in 2025.

Pressure isn’t everything. Hargrave’s issues in run defense apparently overshadow his 11.0% Trumedia pressure production. Don’t take my word for that; the Vikings deliberately chose Redmond instead. Similarly, it’d be unfair to compare Redmond to Joseph or Tomlinson apples to apples, as those players had more run defense-focused roles.

In the run, Redmond logged 30 run stops (which PFF defines as EPA-negative tackles). That ranks 7th in the league among all defensive linemen, and 25th among defenders at any position league-wide. Only Eric Wilson produced more stops for the Vikings with 36.

In the last ten years, only Harrison Phillips in 2023, Jordan Hicks in 2022, Eric Kendricks in 2016 and 2019, and Linval Joseph in 2016 and 2017 produced more stops among all Vikings defenders.

Redmond saw quite a few more run snaps in 2025, however, thanks to the Vikings trailing quite a bit. In fact, in 2024, his run stop percentage was higher at 9.0%, but he played only 116 snaps against the run, both due to game script and a more rotational role.