Vikings tight end Kyle Rudolph is a longtime fan of the NFL draft and will be hosting a draft party at 6:30 p.m. Friday at 4 Bells in Minneapolis, with proceeds benefiting the University of Minnesota Masonic Children's Hospital. In advance of that event, he chatted with the Star Tribune's Michael Rand about a number of subjects:
Q: Do you watch the draft kind of like a fan or do you just catch up to it later after it's done?
A: I've always been a fan of football and the NFL. I still watch the whole draft and even the draft process. Whether that's the combine or the draft, I still watch it the same way as a fan. I play close attention to who we add and who our new teammates are going to be. … We have a lot of picks [three] on Friday, and I imagine every one of those guys is going to be expected to come in and play and help us win games.
Q: Back around the time you were picked, it seemed like GM Rick Spielman was loading up on Notre Dame players. Now it's shifted to UCLA guys. What's the deal with that?
A: [Laughs] Yeah, that's [assistant GM] George Paton getting his hands on things. He's a UCLA guy and he's bringing in all his Bruins. But yeah, obviously at one point we had five Notre Dame guys in Minneapolis. Now we've dwindled to just Harrison [Smith] and myself. We're always looking to add more Notre Dame guys.
Q: The schedule came out Thursday. You've known your opponents for months now, but do you have thoughts on how the schedule lays out?
A: I look at the schedule and a number of things stick out personally: When is the bye week? When do we have a Thursday night game? Do we have any crazy potential weather games? Things like that. As you go through our schedule, it starts out with more home games than away games, which will be good. That will give us the opportunity to get off to a great start and have a solid record going into the bye, which is exactly halfway into the year. I think our schedule lays out very favorably. It's cool to get to play on Thanksgiving, and I'm looking forward to that. Opening the season on Monday night at home is cool, too.
Q: Like you mentioned, it's a chance to start fast. You did that last year, and then things took a detour. Now that we're a few months removed from the 2016 season, have you had a chance to reflect on it — or is it the kind of thing where you play the final game and try to just hit erase on the season?
A: You definitely go back and reflect on it. As an organization, for players and coaches, there's a lot of soul-searching over the last four months, trying to figure out why that happened. You look at the way things had gone in previous years under [Mike Zimmer], and we were not only a team that finished games strong but finished the year strong. We won a lot of games in December and January. So it was uncharacteristic of us. But you can go back and look at three or four games we had an opportunity to win in the fourth quarter and we didn't. The ball bounces the other way and we're looking at a 12-4 record and a bye in the playoffs instead of an 8-8 record watching the playoffs from home. You reflect and try to understand why things happened and what we can get better at. You can call it luck, but when those chances come up again next year we'll be prepared to make sure we win those close games.