Should We Panic About Caleb Banks?

When the Minnesota Vikings took Caleb Banks 18th overall, I was live with Arif and several other regulars on the Locked On Network. I made this face:

That was probably a little harsh, considering how I only really understood the surface level of Banks before the draft. I knew he was considered a second-round prospect by the consensus board, and that his injury history was a major part of his evaluation. 

Rob Brzezinski, acting as GM for the draft, defended the pick by hyperbolizing praise for the Vikings’ medical staff and portraying the pick as a no-brainer.

Despite Brzezinski’s protests, the pick was widely decried as a reach, due in no small part to a near-unanimous national expectation that the Vikings would take Dillon Thieneman, who instead went to the Bears. That was my read too — a second-round prospect taken in the first. That’s bad business.

Whether I agree or disagree, the Vikings were apparently comfortable with that kind of investment in that kind of player. So it doesn’t quite track that, for whatever Tony Pauline’s reporting is worth to you, some in the building already have buyer’s remorse.

Hindsight is 20/20, but here hindsight might be 20/15. Caleb Banks is struggling on the field, and getting outplayed by a teammate drafted 64 picks later, evoking the haunted specter of Andrew Booth and Akayleb Evans.

But no worry, according to Banks, who admitted he was out of shape after his home debut — a result of two years of on-and-off injury rehab. He’ll get the rust knocked off, and things will shore up.

But is that a valid excuse? Can we chalk up Banks’ struggles to a conditioning issue, and pencil him in as that high-potential superstar down the road? Or is something else causing his struggles? Something more permanent?

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Even if he has only been struggling as a result of conditioning, that’s hardly exculpatory for the Vikings. Even if the “best doctors in the world” can keep Banks healthy, knowingly selecting a player that can’t play his first year because of his conditioning is damning in its own right. 

Damning the Vikings over the 2026 draft is a moot point, however, as Rob Brzezinski won’t be at the helm anymore. Nolan Teasley is in charge and is not beholden to Brzezinski’s vision.

But Brian Flores, whom many saw as the real mastermind behind the draft, is still in the room, and may have sway in the front office. Much of the rank-and-file draft operation is intact.

So it’s still a fruitful exercise to ask the original question: is Caleb Banks really struggling that bad? And will it get better if he’s more well-conditioned? That is to say, should we panic in spite of all of these excuses?

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That’s kind of the elephant in the room, isn’t it? How can we, as random laypeople, judge the kind of shape someone like Banks is in? That’s why I usually wouldn’t touch this kind of talker — I’ll only acknowledge its validity now because Banks confirmed it himself. You’re not taking my word for it, nor should you.

So perhaps it can explain the rash of plays from this preseason that feature Banks getting pushed back, washed aside, and generally dominated.

Banks participated for the entirety of training camp, so is his injury a valid excuse for his conditioning? It’s not possible for us to gather enough evidence about his rehab processes at Florida to do anything more than speculate, but for what it’s worth, we do see high effort from Banks when relevant.

Here, Banks has to pursue a scrambling Tyler Huntley and chase him down. Note that Banks takes a nearly flat angle, cutting Huntley off and limiting the gain (which was called back due to penalty anyway).

If we’re going to wade into the speculative territory of effort and work ethic, we need to acknowledge reps like this, where a defender pursues from the backside and chases down the play. Not to mention the 5.04 speed at play, which Banks ran before his foot had fully healed.

Banks’ conditioning may be impacting his explosiveness, although that's not supposed to be his strength.  Instead, he is a player who wins with upper body strength and strong finish. So he can win with swim moves like this:

The opposite would be a build like Dallas Turner’s, who wins with a lot of explosiveness right at the snap, but can get stopped up later in the rep without any way out of the grip of a stronger tackle.

So with the understanding that Banks is a tall, top-down athlete, it makes sense that he would get out-leveraged sometimes. That is to say, I’m not comfortable chalking up his struggles entirely to poor conditioning. Some of this is baked in the cake.