With the official start of training camp for the Minnesota Vikings coming this week, we’re sure to hear a lot about guys being in the best shape of their careers, taking it one day at a time, and (insert your favorite offseason cliché right here). However, we may now be hearing it from someone that a lot of us may not have thought about in a while.
In an interview with Josina Anderson, former Vikings pass-rushing star Everson Griffen says that he wants to make a comeback into the National Football
League. His interview with Anderson is about an hour long, and you can see the whole thing in this YouTube video.
In the interview, Griffen talks about reaching one year of sobriety (congratulations to him on that mark), as well as his bipolar disorder, among other topics.
His off-field issues aside, the deck would appear to be stacked against Griffen making a comeback in the NFL for a couple of significant reasons.
The first reason is that he’s 39 years old. Not to say that players can’t be productive in the NFL when they reach their late 30s or anything like that. After all, Chris Doleman came back to the Vikings for one last season when he was 38 years old and put up eight sacks before announcing his retirement.
The much bigger issue is the fact that Griffen hasn’t set foot on an NFL field since Week 11 of the 2021 season, nearly five full years ago. That was in his second tour of duty with the Vikings and, if you’ll recall, it was after that game that the Vikings placed him on the Non-Football Illness list following a mental health incident at his home. That ended his 2021 season and, though we didn’t know it at the time, ended that chapter of his NFL career.
Griffen says that he can be ready in three months. The start of the NFL regular season is about seven weeks or so away, so if he truly is in a position to make a comeback, it won’t be until late September/early October at the earliest.
Don’t get me wrong, I want to wish Everson Griffen the best of luck if he has all of his personal issues sorted out and wants to try to get back onto the gridiron again. I’m just not totally sure how much we should make of it or expect from it, honestly.
