Despite Lewis Cine’s big day for Vikings, there’s still sadness around him

CLEVELAND – Vikings safety Lewis Cine was sitting at his locker looking a little sad, frankly, and nothing like you might expect a guy to look after a game-high 10 tackles, one sack, one tackle for loss and an interception.

So, you go up to him. You tell him his coach, Kevin O’Connell, singled him out first in his news conference after Saturday’s 27-12 preseason victory at Cleveland Browns Stadium. You tell him O’Connell said, “Great to see him really look comfortable out there and make some plays on the football. I felt his physicality. I know the guys on the sideline were fired up to see Lew do his thing.”

What say you, Lew?

Head down, Cine says, “I think it was a good game.” You wait for him to elaborate. Nothing.

So, to break the awkward silence, you say, “How do you think camp is going?”

“If I’m being honest, I don’t think camp really went the way that I wanted it to go,” Cine said. “I wanted to come out and really like let it loose, but I had a little bit of a hamstring situation early on. It’s hard to show what you got when you keep getting a pulled this, a yanked that.

“I’m thankful to coach O’Connell for letting me work through it until [Saturday] when I kind of had to prove that I’m me. And we’ll go from there.”

Cine hasn’t said it, but you know he has to be wondering why he’s still a Minnesota Viking. The answer is simple: He was a first-round draft pick in 2022. Otherwise, he would have been long gone, free to sign with a team that might be a better fit than the round-hole-square-peg existence the former Georgia star has lived for the past two years.

You kind of feel for the guy. It wasn’t his choice to trade down 20 spots in the first round to draft him. It wasn’t his choice to skip over multiple Pro Bowl and All-Pro players, including current Ravens safety Kyle Hamilton. He didn’t draft himself 32nd overall.

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An ugly leg injury in London ended his rookie season at three games. He played two defensive snaps.

Brian Flores arrived the next year as defensive coordinator. No one loves safeties more than B-Flo. But Cine had fewer defensive snaps (eight) than healthy gameday scratches (10).

Fast forward to Saturday night, Game 2 of the preseason. A game in which only one starter on either team — Vikings right guard Ed Ingram — played.

The Vikings actually sat their top four safeties — Harrison Smith, Cam Bynum, Josh Metellus and Theo Jackson — to guard against injury. They played only three safeties — Cine, 10-year journeyman Bobby McCain and second-year pro Jay Ward.

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.”

If he makes the team and gets another shot at being a valuable first-round pick, good for him. If he doesn’t, just remember, he didn’t draft himself 32nd overall.