Minnesota has signed Odell Beckham Jr. to its practice squad, the team announced on Wednesday. He is 33, he has played three games this season, and he has caught no passes in them.
That is the whole oddity of it. The Vikings are 4-0 and second in our NFL power rankings, and the receiver they have just added was released by the New York Giants nine days ago without a single catch to his name.
What he was
It is worth being precise about how good Beckham was, because the gap is the story. In his first three seasons he caught 91, 96 and 101 passes and went over 1,300 yards every time. The 91 came in twelve games as a rookie. He has five thousand-yard seasons in all, and 59 touchdowns in 122 games.
The last of those thousand-yard seasons was 2019, in Cleveland. He has not reached 600 yards in a season since.
How it fell away
The decline is not gradual, it is a series of drops. Seven games in 2020, then a torn knee in the Super Bowl he won with the Rams in February 2022, then a full year out. He came back with Baltimore in 2023 and caught 35 for 565, which at 16.1 a catch was respectable if no longer central. Then nine catches for 55 yards across nine games in Miami in 2024, another season out in 2025, and three games with the Giants this year without being thrown to more than once.
Six clubs now, and the Giants twice. Cleveland, the Rams, Baltimore, Miami, back to New York, and now a practice squad in Minnesota.
Why Minnesota, and why now
Two reasons, and only one of them is about Beckham.
The first is Justin Jefferson’s ankle. He picked it up in Week 3, our NFL injury report had him listed as Out for Week 4 and he was inactive for that game. He remains on the active roster rather than injured reserve, and the Week 5 designations do not file until Friday, so this is week to week rather than anything longer. But a team that has played a quarter of its season without its best receiver for one of those games is a team that wants cover.
Behind Jefferson there is not much. NFL.com’s report on the signing has Jordan Addison taking the bulk of the targets, catching 11 of 22 for 163 yards and a touchdown, with no other Minnesota receiver holding more than two catches, Jauan Jennings banged up early in the season and Tai Felton on one catch in four games.
The second reason is a relationship. Kevin O’Connell was the Rams’ offensive coordinator in 2021, the year Beckham arrived in Los Angeles and won a Super Bowl there. Coaches sign players they have already coached, and that is usually the whole explanation.
The number that explains the signing
Minnesota is 4-0 and has scored 86 points. The other two unbeaten teams, San Francisco and Kansas City, have scored 122 and 118. Only Cleveland and the Giants have scored fewer among every team on three wins or more.
Week 4 was the clearest version of it: a 15-10 win over Miami in which the Vikings did not score a touchdown at all, five field goals doing the work, with Kyler Murray going 27 of 37 for 247 yards and T.J. Hockenson catching all thirteen balls thrown at him. Plenty of completions, no end zone.
So the record says contender and the offence says something else. Our model splits the difference by trusting the defence: Minnesota is second on a rating of 95, with a 98% chance of reaching the playoffs. That is the highest playoff figure on the board, and it is built on conceding 51 points in four games rather than on scoring.
Can he actually offer anything?
Honestly, nobody knows, and the structure of the signing says Minnesota does not know either. A practice-squad contract is not a roster spot. He cannot play on Sunday unless the Vikings elevate him, which teams can do a limited number of times a season, and the fact they have not simply signed him to the 53 is the clearest statement of what they expect.
What is defensible is this. A receiver who has not caught a pass in three games is not a solution to anything, and a team scoring 21.5 points a game while winning every week is not in a position to turn down a free look at one. Those two things are both true, and the second is why this happened.
Minnesota travels to New Orleans on Sunday at 1:00pm ET. The model’s read on that game and the other fourteen is in our NFL Week 5 predictions, and every Canadian on an NFL roster this week is in our Week 5 Canadians watchlist.
19+ (18+ in AB/MB/QC) | Please play responsibly | Career figures from ESPN and the signing from the Vikings and NFL.com, accurate at the time of writing | ConnexOntario: 1-866-531-2600 (ON). See your province’s helpline for resources elsewhere.