The Vikings opened their offseason program without safety Harrison Smith, but the door hasn\u2019t been closed on the veteran\u2019s return if he decides to play in 2026. <\/p>\n
Smith wrapped up his 14th season in the final game of the 2025 campaign and said late in the year that he was unsure if he would be back for a 15th year. Smith is currently a free agent and head coach Kevin O\u2019Connell said that he has remained in touch with the longtime cornerstone of the defense. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a few days, but now that you remind me, I\u2019ll probably bug him today,\u201d O\u2019Connell said, via the team\u2019s website. \u201cIt\u2019s something [where] we\u2019re still trying to give Harrison as much space as possible, and I think he\u2019s earned that<\/a>. If it\u2019s anything at this point, it\u2019s seeing how he\u2019s doing, seeing how his family is, seeing how his golf game is.\u201d<\/p>\n Josh Metellus, Jay Ward, Tavierre Thomas, Theo Jackson, and Kahlef Hailassie are the current safeties on the Vikings roster. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Vikings opened their offseason program without safety Harrison Smith, but the door hasn\u2019t been closed on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596995,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-596994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}