The Minnesota Vikings will be looking to safeties Harrison Smith and Anthony Harris to take care of business at the back end of the defense this season. Here’s a look at the best Vikings safety duos of all-time.
The Minnesota Vikings opened this year’s training camp on Friday and one position they appear to be all set for the season is safety.
The Vikings currently have seven safeties on the roster led by Harrison Smith entering his eighth season. Projected to line up alongside him is Anthony Harris who took over as the starter in 2018 after Andrew Sendejo suffered a groin injury that eventually ended his season as well as his career with Minnesota.
Sendejo’s contract option was $5.4 million in 2019 and it ended up being a price too high for the Vikings as Harris looked more than capable in his nine starts last year. It only took Sendejo 10 days to find another job after Minnesota declined the option on his contract as he signed a one-year deal worth $1.3 million with the Philadelphia Eagles.
According to The Top Tens, a website that allows fans to vote, Smith currently tops the as the best safety of the 2018-2019 season. Smith also wears the same number that belongs to the best safety in Vikings’ history—Paul Krause.
Krause not only tops the Vikings’ franchise record for career interceptions with 53, but he also owns the NFL record with 81 career picks. Gil Brandt from NFL.com ranks Krause as the 11th-best safety in NFL history. Krause played 16 seasons in the NFL, the last 12 with the Vikings.
In a comparison between Krause and Smith, even though they come from different eras, the edge would easily go to the player who wore No. 22 first—mainly because of his longevity and his interception record. But, this time I’m ranking best safety duos in Vikings history. After combing through Minnesota’s starters for each year, here are the franchise’s top 10 safety duos of all-time.
The criteria used includes games started, interceptions and fumble recoveries, touchdowns scored, and their approximate value (AV) assigned by Pro Football Reference. The data was averaged for the number of years each duo players together. A slight edge was given to those duos that played together the longest.