Post by Purple Pain on Mar 30, 2023 10:32:16 GMT -6
Purple Insider: What move would make the Vikings' offseason a success?
It is hard to win the offseason when your cap situation looks like a teenager who got ahold of their parents’ credit card and had a field day at the Mall of America. The Vikings were backed into a position in which they couldn’t keep veterans like Eric Kendricks, Adam Thielen and Patrick Peterson and couldn’t replace them with top-of-the-market free agents either.
That’s a problem years in the making, not just this offseason. Some of it is connected to Rick Spielman’s desperate moves and draft misses and some of it stems from the current regime’s decisions last offseason when they fought to run the most competitive roster possible out in Year 1 of the Adofo-Mensah/O’Connell era. When the offseason grade includes “Used Resources Well,” the natural follow up is: What resources?
If the idea from the moment the Vikings lost to the Giants was to get the salary cap organized and hit refresh on the roster, they only mildly accomplished that by letting a few veterans walk. Keeping Harrison Smith, adding void years to Marcus Davenport, Byron Murphy and Dean Lowry’s contracts and restructuring Kirk Cousins’s deal to hit hard in dead cap space in 2024 do not exactly fit into the category of roster-reset moves.
So you could argue that Football Outsiders hit the nail on the head when it comes to the C grade for the “Coherent Plan” category.
You could also reasonably argue that it’s premature to grade these things because the offseason is far from over.
Is there something that would bump up their grade? Moves they could make that would make the picture clearer?
There’s a few different answers that could work here. First, resolving the tension between the team and Za’Darius Smith and Dalvin Cook. If both players are returning, then there’s no point in talking about a “competitive rebuild” again. That would mean another all-in offseason in which the Vikings actively hurt their future to win now. And that’s fine if they project as a Super Bowl contender. Presently, they do not.
If Smith and Cook are moved and players like Davenport and Alexander Mattison/Ty Chandler are inserted into their spots and the cap space created by their exits is used for more signings that are reflective of a now-and-later approach like with Davenport and Murphy then we could see a clearer picture.
Without those decisions made, we are grading a test after reading only half of the answers.
Grading the offseason has to rest largely on whether Justin Jefferson signs a contract extension. The Vikings have made publicly clear that they want him to ink a long-term deal and Adofo-Mensah said that he’s such an important piece of the puzzle that he’s looped into big-picture discussions. If Jefferson catches his first pass of 2023 without a contract for the future, that situation will loom over the team’s head every day going forward. Does he want to be here? Will he demand a trade? Are they going to tag him? Get ready for lots of noise in that case.
If the Vikings end up with a negative score on the “Improved Roster” and a five-year Jefferson extension, we could still give them a pretty darn good grade for the offseason as a whole because few players in the NFL are more valuable and harder to replace — including quarterbacks.
Oh, right, quarterback. The elephant in the room.
The front office may have been forced to show its hand when they restructured Cousins. Not getting an extension done by the end of March is new in the Cousins era. His previous two deals came before nightfall on the first day of free agency. To let things get this far is a sign that the end date could be near on Cousins’s tenure.
Uncertainty still lingers with ESPN reporting some executives believe the Vikings could be in on Lamar Jackson and NFL Network’s draft analysts picking Will Levis and Hendon Hooker for Minnesota. By the way, nothing in Cousins’s restructure says that they can’t still extend him.
If they somehow landed Jackson — which would take Moses coming down from the heavens to part Lake Minnetonka — then the Vikings would get an A-plus, no matter the risk/price. That’s a swing for the fences and a jolt of excitement into a franchise with first-round-out malaise.
Likewise if they select a quarterback in the draft and give that player an opportunity to sit behind Cousins for an entire season before taking over and (presumably) inheriting Jefferson, they’d get an A-plus.
Getting through the offseason without an extension and forcing Vikings fans to spend Saturdays watching Drake Maye and whatever other QBs emerge as prospects is less inspiring but might be the right route. That would score an incomplete grade and give Vikings fans even more to worry about i.e. whether they will have an opportunity to land someone or get left in the cold with the next Spergon Wynn.
Extending Cousins would be the most difficult to grade. The Vikings did have a top-10 offense last year. Cousins and O’Connell did seem to have a good connection. But an extension doesn’t come along with the long-term certainty at the QB position that we might think. Age an expense would still linger as significant concerns. Plus Derek Carr signed an extension before the 2022 season and he plays for another team now, so an extension doesn’t always equal stability. It would probably just make things more difficult on the Vikings if they wanted to walk away after 2023.
So while we expect the Vikings to create some more cap space somehow and add another player or two from the free agent market, there isn’t another middle-of-the-road signing that could change the “Coherent Plan” grade. There are major decisions to still be made and if the Vikings resolve those foundational situations like Smith/Cook, Jefferson’s contract and the QB situation by opening day, they can have an A-plus-plus, even if there are some other micro moves that could be nitpicked.
Are we a long way from those things being resolved or days? Who knows. If they are in on Jackson, get comfortable. If they’re drafting a QB, it’ll be a month. If they are going to create cap space to make some crazed move that we never see coming, that could happen at any hour. If they are going to leave things hanging in the balance, we’ll be asking these same questions for a long time — and they won’t get too many thumbs up in the process.
It is hard to win the offseason when your cap situation looks like a teenager who got ahold of their parents’ credit card and had a field day at the Mall of America. The Vikings were backed into a position in which they couldn’t keep veterans like Eric Kendricks, Adam Thielen and Patrick Peterson and couldn’t replace them with top-of-the-market free agents either.
That’s a problem years in the making, not just this offseason. Some of it is connected to Rick Spielman’s desperate moves and draft misses and some of it stems from the current regime’s decisions last offseason when they fought to run the most competitive roster possible out in Year 1 of the Adofo-Mensah/O’Connell era. When the offseason grade includes “Used Resources Well,” the natural follow up is: What resources?
If the idea from the moment the Vikings lost to the Giants was to get the salary cap organized and hit refresh on the roster, they only mildly accomplished that by letting a few veterans walk. Keeping Harrison Smith, adding void years to Marcus Davenport, Byron Murphy and Dean Lowry’s contracts and restructuring Kirk Cousins’s deal to hit hard in dead cap space in 2024 do not exactly fit into the category of roster-reset moves.
So you could argue that Football Outsiders hit the nail on the head when it comes to the C grade for the “Coherent Plan” category.
You could also reasonably argue that it’s premature to grade these things because the offseason is far from over.
Is there something that would bump up their grade? Moves they could make that would make the picture clearer?
There’s a few different answers that could work here. First, resolving the tension between the team and Za’Darius Smith and Dalvin Cook. If both players are returning, then there’s no point in talking about a “competitive rebuild” again. That would mean another all-in offseason in which the Vikings actively hurt their future to win now. And that’s fine if they project as a Super Bowl contender. Presently, they do not.
If Smith and Cook are moved and players like Davenport and Alexander Mattison/Ty Chandler are inserted into their spots and the cap space created by their exits is used for more signings that are reflective of a now-and-later approach like with Davenport and Murphy then we could see a clearer picture.
Without those decisions made, we are grading a test after reading only half of the answers.
Grading the offseason has to rest largely on whether Justin Jefferson signs a contract extension. The Vikings have made publicly clear that they want him to ink a long-term deal and Adofo-Mensah said that he’s such an important piece of the puzzle that he’s looped into big-picture discussions. If Jefferson catches his first pass of 2023 without a contract for the future, that situation will loom over the team’s head every day going forward. Does he want to be here? Will he demand a trade? Are they going to tag him? Get ready for lots of noise in that case.
If the Vikings end up with a negative score on the “Improved Roster” and a five-year Jefferson extension, we could still give them a pretty darn good grade for the offseason as a whole because few players in the NFL are more valuable and harder to replace — including quarterbacks.
Oh, right, quarterback. The elephant in the room.
The front office may have been forced to show its hand when they restructured Cousins. Not getting an extension done by the end of March is new in the Cousins era. His previous two deals came before nightfall on the first day of free agency. To let things get this far is a sign that the end date could be near on Cousins’s tenure.
Uncertainty still lingers with ESPN reporting some executives believe the Vikings could be in on Lamar Jackson and NFL Network’s draft analysts picking Will Levis and Hendon Hooker for Minnesota. By the way, nothing in Cousins’s restructure says that they can’t still extend him.
If they somehow landed Jackson — which would take Moses coming down from the heavens to part Lake Minnetonka — then the Vikings would get an A-plus, no matter the risk/price. That’s a swing for the fences and a jolt of excitement into a franchise with first-round-out malaise.
Likewise if they select a quarterback in the draft and give that player an opportunity to sit behind Cousins for an entire season before taking over and (presumably) inheriting Jefferson, they’d get an A-plus.
Getting through the offseason without an extension and forcing Vikings fans to spend Saturdays watching Drake Maye and whatever other QBs emerge as prospects is less inspiring but might be the right route. That would score an incomplete grade and give Vikings fans even more to worry about i.e. whether they will have an opportunity to land someone or get left in the cold with the next Spergon Wynn.
Extending Cousins would be the most difficult to grade. The Vikings did have a top-10 offense last year. Cousins and O’Connell did seem to have a good connection. But an extension doesn’t come along with the long-term certainty at the QB position that we might think. Age an expense would still linger as significant concerns. Plus Derek Carr signed an extension before the 2022 season and he plays for another team now, so an extension doesn’t always equal stability. It would probably just make things more difficult on the Vikings if they wanted to walk away after 2023.
So while we expect the Vikings to create some more cap space somehow and add another player or two from the free agent market, there isn’t another middle-of-the-road signing that could change the “Coherent Plan” grade. There are major decisions to still be made and if the Vikings resolve those foundational situations like Smith/Cook, Jefferson’s contract and the QB situation by opening day, they can have an A-plus-plus, even if there are some other micro moves that could be nitpicked.
Are we a long way from those things being resolved or days? Who knows. If they are in on Jackson, get comfortable. If they’re drafting a QB, it’ll be a month. If they are going to create cap space to make some crazed move that we never see coming, that could happen at any hour. If they are going to leave things hanging in the balance, we’ll be asking these same questions for a long time — and they won’t get too many thumbs up in the process.
... and neither is this Chris guy.