Defensive Tackle · Minnesota Vikings
Monkell Goodwine
No. 96 · Rookie
Three years at Alabama. Thirteen snaps. Then he started over.
National Christian Academy, in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, does not have a field of its own. The team practices where it can. That is where Monkell Goodwine learned to play football — and, according to Goodwine, where coach Andre Kates taught him something that would matter more than any drill: how to read a recruiting process, how to separate the coaches who meant it from the ones who did not.
By the time the 2021 signing day came around, Goodwine had sorted through Clemson, Maryland, and Texas A&M and landed on Alabama. Four stars. Top 100 in the country. The top-rated prospect out of the state of Maryland. Nick Saban and Tuscaloosa.
Then three years passed.
In those three seasons, Goodwine appeared in five games and recorded zero tackles. The total snap count across that entire stretch: thirteen. There is no soft way to say it. Alabama had recruited one of the best defensive line prospects in the country, and he spent his college years on the sideline. Whatever Kates had taught him about reading coaches, nothing in the playbook covers three years of near-invisibility at the highest level of college football.
He entered the transfer portal.
South Carolina gave him a starting role. He graduated in December 2024 with a degree in services management and made the SEC Fall Academic Honor Roll in his final season. At the end of the year, the Gamecock coaching staff voted him the Overcoming Adversity Award alongside teammate Buddy Mack III. The coaches pick that one. They watched what it took for Goodwine to become a starter, and they called it by name.
When he declared for the 2026 NFL Draft, he wrote a letter. He singled out his mother and credited her with displaying true courage. Not his journey, not his growth — her courage. Whatever the last few years cost him, that is where his mind went when he sat down to write it out.
The Minnesota Vikings signed him as an undrafted free agent. Among their twenty UDFA signings from that class, his guarantee was one of the three highest.
Content sourced from publicly available information. Gripd is an independent fan platform not affiliated with the NFL or any team.