The Vikings kept six safeties a year ago. If they keep six again this year, the math says Cine, McCain and Ward are battling for two spots. McCain has versatility, having also played cornerback in his 131-game NFL career, and arrived last month in large part because he played well under Flores in Miami years ago. Ward also has cornerback flexibility that Flores has been tinkering with all camp.
In other words, you start to see why Cine wasn’t celebrating Saturday after what was easily his best three hours as a pro. It is, after all, hard to get too excited about sacking a quarterback when you’re a 24-year-old former first-round pick and you’re still on the field to get that sack with four minutes left in a preseason game.
What happens to Cine when cutdown day arrives Aug. 27? Good question, assuming he makes it to cutdown day as a Viking. General Manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah showed a week ago he’s willing to pull the chain on the eyesore that was his initial draft. He shipped second-round bust Andrew Booth Jr., a cornerback, to Dallas at a point when the Vikings are starving for help at cornerback.
And Cine is an even bigger bane of Adofo-Mensah’s ′22 draft. It’s just less noticeable because Adofo-Mensah inherited from Rick Spielman what has become one of the league’s best safety trios in Smith, Bynum and Metellus.
You sense a touch of sadness when you look at Cine after Saturday’s game. You’re kind of happy the kid played well, even if everyone will call it meaningless.
“It was just football, in my eyes,” Cine said. “Just having fun. Not thinking too much. Running around, having my legs under me, working on everything that I had to work on just to show myself.”