Acme Packing Company
Every year for about five years I’ve been predicting a decline for Minnesota Vikings safety Harrison Smith, because, well, most 31-year-old safeties decline pretty quickly. However, Harrison Smith is not most safeties, and to his immense credit, he has bucked the odds year after year after year.
In retrospect, this was actually a dumb thing to project because Smith is in my opinion a Hall-of-Fame caliber player, and those guys tend to age gracefully. The Packers didn’t even acquire Charles Woodson until his age 30 season, and he had many great years thereafter. Smith is not Woodson’s caliber (almost no one is), but he’s a 6-time Pro-Bowler and was the anchor of good defenses for a decade. Harrison Smith is awesome, is what I’m saying. However, one of the unchangeable rules of football is that if you project an age-related decline long enough, you’ll eventually be correct, and here we are.
After averaging almost four interceptions per season from his rookie year through 2022 (a year in which he had five), Smith has just three total picks in his last three seasons, all coming in 2024. His passes defended have cratered as well, and while he’s still a reliable tackler, he’s clearly lost a step and some explosiveness.
PFF grading agrees as, outside of an injury-plagued 2013 season, he’s never received a grade below 74.3 until 2022. From that point forward, he’s yet to achieve a grade over 68.9, and currently sits are an extremely mediocre 55.8 in 2025. Receivers have caught a robust 78.6% of their targets with Smith in coverage for an equally robust 10.8 yards per reception and a 102.1 passer rating against.
This has been a fairly significant problem for the Minnesota defense. Backup Theo Jackson (64.9 PFF grade) and starter Josh Metellus (56.1, but an atrocious 45.9 in coverage) haven’t even been close to replacing or supplementing Smith’s lost production, and the overall defense has greatly suffered for it. While Smith was always there in run support and to clean up messes in the back, the Vikings are currently 29th in DVOA against outside primary receivers and 24th against outside secondary receivers.
By EPA per Play, this was the second-best defense in football last season to Denver with -0.091, but they’ve dropped down to 11th (-0.023) this season at the same time that JJ McCarthy has tanked the offense. I suspect the Vikings were counting on their defense and Brian Flores to maintain a level of excellence and prop up the team while McCarthy develops, but defense is particularly fickle from year to year and the Vikings have simply not been up to the task. Smith’s decline is a big part of that, and without an heir apparent at safety, it’s likely to be a problem for a long time.
