Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

NFL posts Brock Lesnar’s Vikings highlights

UFC 200 - Weigh-in

LAS VEGAS, NV - JULY 08: Mixed martial artist Brock Lesnar poses on the scale during his weigh-in for UFC 200 at T-Mobile Arena on July 8, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Lesnar will meet Mark Hunt in a heavyweight bout on July 9 at T-Mobile Arena. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

Getty Images

The NFL, as America’s most popular sports league, doesn’t need to piggyback off other sports to garner attention. But the biggest mixed martial arts event of the year is happening tonight during the slowest time on the NFL calendar, and so the NFL has decided to get in on the action.

Brock Lesnar, who will fight tonight at UFC 200, is best known as a professional wrestler and former UFC heavyweight champion, and before that he was an NCAA wrestling champion. But Lesnar also had a brief stint in the NFL, and highlights from that brief stint can now be seen on the NFL’s YouTube channel.

Lesnar spent training camp and the preseason with the Vikings in 2004, trying to make the roster as a defensive lineman. He never really had much of a shot of making the team, given his lack of football experience beyond high school. But at 6-foot-2 and 285 pounds, he looked the part of a defensive lineman, and those who saw him in Vikings camp said he had the athletic talent to do it.

“All the Vikings’ coaches and players talk about how impressed they have been with his attitude,” FOX broadcaster Curt Menefee said during the game.

Longtime Patriots guard Stephen Neal, who took on Lesnar in the 1999 NCAA heavyweight wrestling championship, has said he believes Lesnar could have made it in the NFL if he had jumped straight into football after his college wrestling career, as Neal did. (Lesnar, in turn, has said Neal could have been a good UFC fighter.) We’ll never know what kind of NFL player Lesnar might have been, but on a day when millions of people will watch Lesnar fight in the Octagon, the NFL is reminding fans that Lesnar once played on an NFL field.