2020 Offseason Moves In Hindsight

When the Minnesota Vikings lost to the previously winless Atlanta Falcons, 40-23, and entered the bye week, it seems like a certainty that they would start to sell off pieces and try to enter the Trevor Lawrence sweepstakes. The question wasn’t if they’d tank, but to what magnitude they would do so.

They had just traded Yannick Ngakuoe to the Baltimore Ravens. Who was next?

There was a vocal segment of the fanbase that wanted a full-fledged Miami Dolphins-style rebuild. That didn’t mean trimming around the edges. It meant dealing away Adam Thielen, Harrison Smith, Eric Kendricks, Anthony Barr — popular players who still had something left in the tank. In the case of a guy like Kendricks, 28, they’d be dealing him in his prime.

As we sit here today, that’s a win for the anti-Mike Zimmer crowd. It’s also hard to see how Rick Spielman survives it, although I suppose if he’s the one executing the first sale, ownership may allow him to try and revamp the team.

It’s also a win for North Dakota State fans because there’s no guarantee that the Vikings would get the No. 1 overall pick. Remember, the New York Jets remained winless until Week 15, but they might be drafting high enough to get Trey Lance. The Marshall, Minn.-born quarterback is One of Us and would be entering a high-pressure situation after only playing one game of college football last season.

It’s not necessarily a win for the anti-Kirk Cousins folks, however. He still has an albatross contract with two more years left, and there’s no guarantee that Minnesota could move off of it. Whichever quarterback they take in this scenario, and we have to assume they are tanking to take a franchise QB, is spending a year minimum on the bench while the Vikings court suitors for Cousins.

Tanking always seems more attractive than tinkering with a flawed but talented roster, for some reason. Part of that is how important the quarterback is, of course. Urban Meyer isn’t coming out of retirement to coach the Jaguars if they have the 3rd pick. He wants to coach Lawrence.

But bottoming out isn’t a surefire way to succeed.

Remember, the Kansas City Chiefs traded up to take Patrick Mahomes, and they were lucky he was still there at 10th overall. The Chicago Bears had to hilariously take Mitchell Trubisky over Mahomes and Deshaun Watson at 2. Seven other teams had to select players like Corey Davis, Mike Williams, and John Ross instead of a player who could become the next greatest QB of all time.

Until this season, the Cleveland Browns hadn’t qualified for the playoffs since 2002 and blew through so many QBs it became a meme. They took Baker Mayfield 1-1, and nobody’s certain how good he is. They built an offense to mitigate his shortcomings, meaning Kevin Stefanski treats him like he’s Cousins.

Broadcasters are quick to note how bad the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have been ever since Tom Brady headed south because of how hilarious it is to compare his accolades to Tampa’s franchise records — and the Bucs have been in the league since 1976. They drafted Jameis Winston first overall in 2015, put an arsenal of weapons around him and a stout defense behind him, and let him go after his rookie contract because he threw 30 interceptions last year.

Jacksonville provided Blake Bortles ample time to develop and ended up giving Gardner Minshew starts. Jared Goff was taken No. 1 overall and seems to be holding Sean McVay and the Los Angeles Rams back. Justin Herbert is phenomenal, but how certain are we that the Los Angeles Chargers will maximize him?

Honestly, we could have just started with the Dolphins. Miami burned it down, has a good coach and GM, and enters next year with a lot of uncertainty. They went 10-6, but they missed the playoffs, and Tua Tagovailoa was battling 38-year-old Ryan Fitzpatrick for playing time all year. If they were all-in on Tua, they wouldn’t be in the Watson sweepstakes.

There’s also the question of if the Vikings pull off the 1-15 record. That means that they lose to the Detroit Lions twice and have to lose the Jacksonville game. It’s easy to look at a 7-9 team that was blown out by the Falcons, lost a must-win game to the Andy Dalton-led Dallas Cowboys, and went to overtime with the Jaguars and go, of course, they’re capable of going 1-15.

But consider this: Whoever is coaching the team isn’t incentivized to tank. Zimmer sure isn’t; he wants to keep his job. If he’s fired during the bye week, do you think Gary Kubiak wants to retire after a one-win season? Does Andre Patterson want 1-15 on his resume? Is there anyone in the organization that would?

It’s so funny that the Jets won two games, taking themselves out of the running for Lawrence, but Adam Gase doesn’t care if they get a franchise quarterback. He knows he’s getting fired. And many of the players on that team are going to end up elsewhere or out of the league next year. None of them want a winless season on their resume.

A stripped-down team also does a disservice to players who will be the team’s foundation for years to come. Cameron Dantzler and Jeff Gladney would have to play without Harrison Smith behind them. Justin Jefferson doesn’t have the historic season he has without Thielen lining up next to him.

Cousins is never going to drive winning like Herbert, Watson, or Mahomes — few quarterbacks do. It’s fair to say Zimmer is too old-school. It would be fun to draft One of Us with hopes that he becomes a transcendent QB. But a great outcome isn’t guaranteed after a fire sale. In fact, it’s not incredibly likely.

A team with Thielen, Kendricks, and Smith is worth watching on Sundays. Players like them make the next wave of stars like Jefferson, Gladney, and Dantzler better. They still may find a steal, like Stefon Diggs or Everson Griffen, in this draft. And they may make a change at coach and QB in the near future if it’s warranted.

The Vikings probably made the right call during the bye week, even if it isn’t as fun as blowing it all up.

Zimmer later said they “miscalculated.”

From the outside, where jobs aren’t on the line, the situation heading into 2020 was a little more clear. It wasn’t too difficult to see that the roster was thin in so many places that if anything went wrong, they were going to miss the playoffs. In fact, two Pro Football Focus analysts predicted on the Purple Insider podcast that the Vikings would go 7-9 or 6-10 in 2020 for that reason. It was also foreseeable that the Cousins contract would ultimately make things more difficult with the cap.

Many folks who have been trained by the “trust the process” 76ers or Ricky Bobby’s art of “if you ain’t first you’re last” might have figured that a wiser long game would have been to let Cousins hit free agency after 2020 and look for the golden ticket of a good QB on a rookie contract.

Had they taken the approach of stepping back in 2020, the Vikings would still have a second-round pick, $30 million more in cap space and be walking into a draft with five or six first-round quarterbacks.

None of this is to suggest that Kirk Cousins is bad or that the decision makers ruined the franchise’s future but it certainly raises a question about whether pressure concerning their job status influenced the brass to make short-term decisions last offseason.

This offseason’s moves have brought about many of the same questions.

In a piece in The Athletic by Mike Sando, anonymous executives wondered if throwing money at the problem on defense to sign players like Dalvin Tomlinson and Patrick Peterson was the right approach.

“Zimmer’s first mistake was saying he’d never had a bad defense,” an exec told Sando. “His second mistake was going for the quick fix in free agency with risky vets instead of coaching those young guys they brought in. They run that complex scheme and when it doesn’t work, it’s the execution, so they sign vets.”

“They paid an old, declining corner and they paid a nose tackle,” an exec said. “I’m not a fan, but that’s what Zimmer wants to do with his defense, and he has had great defenses. Maybe this is what stirs the drink.”

There’s a hint of Ngakoue trade in the air. A whiff of gotta-win-now. Teams that are playing the long game don’t usually restructure every contract in sight to sign a 31-year-old corner coming off his worst year.

Now, the moves may work out great and the Vikings’ defense could return to form in 2020 with the return of injured players and development of last year’s draft picks. Zimmer’s history suggests he always bounces back and the Vikings could be very good if things break right. However, the prediction experts in Vegas don’t see it that way. The Vikings opened with only a 43% chance to finish with a winning record in 2021 per DK Sportsbook.

It’s hard not to wonder how the last two offseasons might have been different if the philosophical approach after 2019 was that the winning window closed in San Francisco.

“I can guarantee you they don’t put the franchise tag on Anthony Harris and they probably trade Riley Reiff when they’re sitting there at 1-5,” PFF’s Eric Eager said on the Purple Insider podcast. “If they do that, now we’re talking about the eighth pick in the draft, the seventh pick in the draft and you’re looking at this saying, oh my goodness we get Mac Jones or Trey Lance and if we want to get spunky we move up to the third pick and we can get Justin Fields or Zach Wilson.”

But stepping back like that is not often possible in an NFL that fires one-third of the league’s coaches and GMs every year.

What if there wasn’t pressure to either win or get fired?

What if GMs and coaches had terms like politicians instead of contracts that are basically year-to-year? What if they had five or 10 years and then got reelected or replaced at the end rather than working under the gun at all times? Would we see many teams handle things differently?

Former Eagles and Saints scout and ex-Bills director of player personnel Jim Monos, who now appears on the Go Long Podcast with former Bleacher Report writer Tyler Dunne, thinks that executives would operate differently and often smarter in a system that didn’t constantly put them in the crosshairs.

“I think in theory what you’re saying is the correct way to sustain success,” Monos said “If you don’t feel that rush to win this year, you can make more sound decisions, especially financially and drafting too.

Monos used the Raiders and Bears, who intersect at the Khalil Mack trade, as examples. One team’s top decision makers Jon Gruden has complete job security. The other, Bears GM Ryan Pace, faces constant discussion about job status.

While Gruden faced scrutiny for trading Mack at the time, his 10-year contract allowed the Raiders to look at the roster and make the decision that paying one pass rusher $141 million before they were ready to compete for a Super Bowl was not a smart move.

“People were killing [the Mack trade], they have a quarterback with Carr in place and they’re trying to build this thing….the Raiders did the right thing,” Monos said.

On the Bears’ side, their trade up to draft Mitch Trubisky blew up, so they acquired veteran journeyman quarterback Nick Foles.

“When you feel pressure, the head coach goes out and picks Nick Foles because he knows his offense even though Trubisky was clearly better than Nick Foles,” Monos said. “When you’re feeling pressure, these are the types of moves you make. Nick Foles was a desperation move.”

Though they are at different sides of the spectrum in terms of decision making, both clubs have slumped into the middle of the pack in the NFL because their draft picks did not work out. The picks acquired in the Mack trade for the Raiders, Trubisky for the Bears.

As a former scout, Monos feels that missing on draft picks can reasonably be considered a fireable offense, but history tells us that no team is consistently good at drafting over long periods of time.

“Year to year, you can have this [great] draft with the same staff and same GM and pull off a garbage draft,” Mono said.

PFF’s Timo Riske studied the matter and found drafting success or failure happened in short bursts but long term it was questionable whether any team was actually better at drafting.

Riske wrote: “…this doesn’t mean that there aren’t any differences between teams and their scouting departments when evaluating draft prospects. It does mean that the statistical evidence for the existence of significant differences is fragile, to say the least.”

Monos explained that the entire Bills staff was in agreement that Sammy Watkins was the best player in the 2014 draft so they traded up to get him, a move that did not ultimately end up changing the franchise’s trajectory even if all sorts of professional evaluators in their building believed him to be the best prospect.

“[Fans and media] think ‘I can pick better than they can’ but until you’re in it — and the other thing that’s hard is, do you know how many other people’s decisions you’re factoring in?” Monos said. “You have your scouts, you have to have your coaches involved because they throw a fit. You might have 10 damn reports on one guy in college and they could be 10 different things. That’s the problem. That’s where it gets hard.”

The Vikings have gone through this too. In 2015, they nailed the draft of the decade by picking Trae Waynes, Eric Kendricks, Danielle Hunter and Stefon Diggs. The very next year, the most valuable player picked was Mackensie Alexander, who just returned to the team on a veteran minimum deal. The lack of hits from the 2016-2019 drafts left the Vikings short on depth heading into the 2020 season.

From the outside, separating bad luck and bad process is a tricky beast. Was it bad process to pick Laquon Treadwell over Michael Thomas when the rest of the league made the same mistake of passing on Thomas?

At the same time, the Vikings have drafted for instant needs in recent years because of the pressure to win now. They may have missed opportunities because of that.

That brings us to another hypothetical: What if the Vikings’ brass had a new five or 10-year term that started in 2021. How would they have approached this offseason?

“Being more of a probabilistic guy, if I had a six-year contract for my coach and six-year contract for my GM, I probably trade Cousins to a team that’s looking for that next QB and build the thing back up,” Eric Eager said on the Purple Insider podcast.

Monos hasn’t covered the Vikings closely but he knows how he’d do things as a GM differently.

“If I’m the GM and somebody tells me you have five years and you’re getting judged on your draft picks and free agency and the GM has final say, I wouldn’t give two sh—s what the coach said about any player,” Monos said. “I’d say ‘OK listen, my job is to give you talent, you figure it out.’ I’m telling you, it’s my job on the line or I’m telling you this defensive tackle can play, I don’t care if you run a 3-4 or 4-3. You have to care a little bit with scheme but at the end of the day the great players can play in any scheme. If I had five years and I know I’m getting judged on picking talent, I’m just picking talent.”

Zimmer said last week in his pre-draft press conference that the Vikings are in position to take the “best player available” this year but in recent seasons they traded up to take Dalvin Cook to replace Adrian Peterson, selected Garrett Bradbury because they were switching running systems and picked Justin Jefferson and Jeff Gladney to replace Stefon Diggs and Xavier Rhodes. It doesn’t seem likely that with needs along the offensive and defensive line they’ll take BPA but if they had five years, maybe they would.

Obviously the five/10-year term idea will never happen. Owners would never sign off on having to sit and watch as their decision makers’ full plan either came to fruition or not. Even Monos can’t fully get behind it.

“I want to support the theory of a 10-year contract…in theory I like it because I’m a believer in stability but I think you have to be held accountable as well,” Monos said.

So here’s the question: How should owners handle GMs and coaches? Monos has two ideas: To tie both the GM and coach together and make it clear which one has final say.

“When you start mixing the ‘the coach is calling a good game but we’re not drafting good players,’ well every coach is going to tell you that they don’t have good players and every GM is going to tell you they’re not being used right,” Monos said. “When you’re an owner you have to sync those guys up and pick which one you want to have the power.”

The Vikings’ owners have checked the box of tying the GM and coach together. It has never been made clear who has final say on roster moves but the team has certainly been built in Zimmer’s vision.

We’ll never know whether they would have handled things differently over the last two years with immunity from being fired. We can only say that it might have given them the freedom to take a broader view. Then again, as Monos points out, there’s always second guessing no matter what kind of pressure exists on decision makers.

“Coaches don’t get it right all the time, we don’t get it right all the time,” Monos said. “That’s why everybody wants to work in football.”