What time are the Vikings picking in the first round of the draft?

KANSAS CITY, MO - APRIL 28: Former Minnesota Viking great Robert Smith announces the pick in the third round of the NFL Draft on April 28, 2023 at Union Station in Kansas City, MO. (Photo by Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) | Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Estimated time: 10:24 p.m. ET (18th overall)

We have finally. . .finally. . .made it to Draft Weekend in the National Football League, ladies and gentlemen. In a little less than twelve hours, the 2026 NFL Draft will officially get underway in Pittsburgh with the first round of this year’s selection meeting, and we’ll be covering all of it for you right here.

But if you’re busy or if you, heaven forbid, have to work or something crazy like that on Friday, you may just want to tune in to see who our Minnesota Vikings use their first-round pick on this evening and would like to know when that’s going to be. We’re here to try to help you figure out when that might be or, at the very least, try to give you a somewhat reasonable idea.

The festivities get underway at 7:00 PM Central time this evening on ESPN, ABC, and the NFL Network. The networks will do their normal introductions to set the scene for what’s going to be going on, which will take up the first bit of time. We’ll give them five or six minutes or so for that.

From there, we’ll move on to the Ceremonial Booing of Roger Goodell, a tradition as time-honored as the salmon returning to Capistrano. Everyone will boo, and the Commissioner will make some remarks and officially open the Draft, putting the Las Vegas Raiders on the clock at #1 overall. That should come at about 7:10 PM Central time.

Now, the rules have changed this year so that teams now have eight minutes to make their selections for the first round rather than the ten minutes they’ve had for the past few years. And even though everyone in the known universe has known who the Raiders are going to take at #1 for the last three-plus months, you can be assured that the Raiders will take every one of those four hundred and eighty available seconds to get Fernando Mendoza’s name to the podium. That would have Goodell announcing the first pick somewhere around 7:18 PM Central.

Based on the eight-minute rule, if all seventeen teams that pick before the Vikings take their full allotted time to make their selection, that would put the purple on the clock somewhere around 9:24 PM Central, unless my math is off.

But not every team will take their full time, and there’s always the added wild cards of trades happening, things being slightly delayed for whatever special presentations the league has in store, and those sorts of things. My best guess is that, if you want to be safe, you should probably tune into your network of choice sometime around 9:00 PM Central time this evening. You should still be comfortably within the window to see the Vikings make their selection.

And don’t worry. . .I’m sure that ESPN, ABC, and the NFL Network will all find a way to go to a commercial break right before the Vikings make their first-round pick, as is tradition.

In any case, if you do happen to miss the Vikings first-round pick, or any of their other selections over the course of the next three days, you can always check our our Minnesota Vikings Draft Tracker to keep yourself up to date on everything that our favorite team is doing over the course of Draft Weekend as they build a roster to, at the very least, attempt to hit the “over” on the 8.5 win line that our friends at the FanDuel Sportsbook currently have them projected at as things stand right now.