Sacks keep Williams safe

MANKATO, Minn. — The Minnesota Vikings accelerated their rebuilding project this year with an aggressive purge of expensive veteran starters.

Kevin Williams, though, didn’t worry.

Sure, Williams (Fordyce) is one of only eight players on this 90-man roster who are 30 or older, and he’s set to make $7 million this season. But the 10th-year defensive tackle finished 2011 with a flurry. With five sacks in the final seven games, he showed the team and the league that he can still be a productive if not disruptive player in the middle of the line.

“I’m a Viking until otherwise,” Williams said, when asked about the offseason turnover that included the release of Steve Hutchinson, Anthony Herrera, Cedric Griffin and Ryan Longwell. Free agents Remi Ayodele, E.J. Henderson and Visanthe Shiancoe weren’t re-signed. “Whatever happens happens.”

Williams can become a free agent next year. If that is the end of his employment in Minnesota, a decade after he was drafted in the first round out of Oklahoma State, well, he’s not sweating that, either.

“I’m pretty sure I can find a team,” he said.

Williams, cornerback Antoine Winfield and punter Chris Kluwe are the only three players on the roster who joined the team before Brad Childress was hired as head coach in 2006. Winfield, who’s 35, and quarterback Sage Rosenfels, at 34, are the only others older than Williams. But nobody has a longer tenure with the Vikings, now that tight end Jim Kleinsasser has retired.

And he earned himself some more time by the way he played down the stretch last season. He had arthroscopic knee surgery before the lockout and developed plantar fasciitis in his foot during training camp. Then there was the twogame suspension he served after his three-year fight with the NFL over the fairness of his positive drug test that showed a banned diuretic he insisted he didn’t know was in the weight-loss pills he was taking.

As if he’s slipping past an opposing guard into the backfield, Williams this season can finally avoid all those questions about StarCaps.

“That’s like a blessing,” he said. “I’m glad we have that out of the way.”