This past summer I wrote a piece trying to reflect how much on-field "return" the Vikings received in 2022 relative to the investment into those players - that article can be found in the Purple Pain Original Contect Section here: link. The basic premise was to explore how well the Vikings investments (rookie contracts, player extensions, etc.) paid off in 2022 and what 2023 might look like.

Now that we're approx. 30% into the 2023 season, I think it's worth exploring what dividends the Vikings are actually seeing vs. the investment that was made. 

There are two sources that I use to look at the values: Spotrac's Team Value Rankings and OvertheCap's (OTC) individual player evaluations. 

Spotrac's Team Value Rankings
Their "Value Rankings" consist of a sum of a team's individual qualifying player "TVS" (True Value Score), which is made up of their current avg salary against production points, which are made up of statistical categories relevant to their position (players need to have played 60% of available snaps to qualify); in a nutshell, it's trying to measure how well a player - and ultimately the team - is producing relative to their salary (ie, managing the cap). Here is a snapshot of Spotrac's 2023 Team Value Rankings through Week 5 (link):



Takeaways:
- As you can see, the 49ers are not only the top team in the NFL at 5-0, but #1 in "value" because they're spending the least amount of 2023 cap dollars to get the roster/record. How can they do this? Well, it helps if you Draft really well and you have a starting QB on Day 3 rookie contract. Yes, they have some expensive contracts that will constrain their cap starting in 2024, but they can kick some of those cap dollars down the road to keep the majority of their team in-tact. 
- The Lions have obviously done a good job extracting value from their investments, primarily their draft picks. While Goff's $33.5m APY contract may seem like a bunch, he's played relatively well in 2023 and relative to the $40m+ a year market value some teams paid this offseason for the likes of Daniel Jones and Derek Carr, Goff provides a decent value. Their other longer term investements have primarily been along the OL (Decker and Ragnow). 
- The Vikings come in at 26th - they are right in the middle in terms of total cap dollars spent (16th most), but with an underachieving record of 1-4, the investments aren't paying off. 
- I displayed the Steelers at 18th primarily because, while the teams at the top have the best records in the NFL and the teams ranked at the bottom have bad records, Pittsburgh is an example of a team with an "Ok" record, but they were 7th in cap dollars spent in 2023 so even though they officially have a winning record at 3-2, relative to what they spent they aren't getting a Top 10 return. 

2023 OTC Valuation thru Week 5: Offense
While Spotrac does assign individual scores to players, they don't provide an individual dollar figure of a player's "value" to compare against their invested cap hit. That's where OTC comes in.

OTC has their "OTC Valuation", which calculates the dollar-value being provided by a player based on his on-field performance relative to the current market for his position. OTC primarily uses PFF grades and snap counts, as their article on their "OTC Valuation" states (link): "While snap counts do not tell us much about a player’s performance they are telling us that the coaching staff must see something in that player to keep trotting him out there week after week. Even if the coach is simply forced by circumstance to play someone, there is value to just taking a snap."

I bet most Vikings fans have used OTC a few times to look up a player's contract or cap hit(s), but you may have overlooked their prior season's OTC Valuation figure. Below is Justin Jefferson's profile on OTC - notice the 2023 OTC Valuation figure right underneath the header information. I compare that against their contract APY (Average Per Year) value which just simply takes their the players total current contract and divides it by the # of years:


So you can see, so far in 2023 Jefferson has generated $26.7m in "value" to the team while only costing them $3.3m per year on contract costs - this is the value of getting starting level production from your rookie contracts, and in Jefferson's case, All-Pro level production.

Here is a table for the rest of the offense:



Takeaways:
- Outside of Jefferson, another individual value that stands out is Kirk. Like I mentioned with Goff earlier, thanks to all the QB extensions that were signed the past two offseasons that ballooned the contract APY to $45m-$50m+, Kirk's 1-yr extension of $35m (signed last offseason) relative to the production he provides is actually good value. 
- You can see that OTC really values snap counts and PFF grades in the OL values and Ezra, Ingram & Schlottmann all earned solid value relative to their contracts as their PFF grades & snap counts are a bit higher than perhaps what fans might perceive them to be via the "eyeball test" on Sundays.
- With our WR1-WR3 group on rookie contracts, it's probably the best WR "value" group in the entire NFL. 
- The most disappointing position group on offense is the TE group as Hockenson and Oliver haven't lived-up to their deals so far in 2023. 
- We knew coming into 2023 that the offense would have to carry the Vikings and it's no surprise that if you take away Jefferson's & Kirk's values, the offense as a whole would be "in the red", mainly because of Hockeson and the dead cap hits of Thielen/Cook/Reagor. The latter isn't so much of a problem because we knew we'd have to "eat" those contracts at some point, but Hockeson's value is a complete eyesore and has fans thinking about the negative value of that last Rudolph extension Rick did.  

2023 OTC Valuation thru Week 5: Defense



Takeaways:
- The Vikings are getting really good value from their ILB group as all 4 players are providing more on-field "value" than what they're costing the team. Hicks' figure might be surprising, but PFF has graded him really solid overall and he's not really breaking the bank at only $3.5m per-year and while Pace, Jr. is still just a rookie, he's playing productive snaps and costing us peanuts being an UDFA. 
- The eyesore on the defensive side is obviously the three big FA signings this offseason: Lowry, Murphy & Davenport. The combined negative value for all 3 so far is ($18.2m). Davenport's negative value is primarily because he hasn't played much in the first 5 weeks and if he remains healthy and active, I suspect his 2023 OTC Evaluation will increase, but I can't image Lowry's will go up. I'm wondering if part of Murphy's issue is that he's playing out of position on the outside as he does typically grade better in the slot, but we al know the problem is that we don't have much in the way of outside CB depth.  
- While Harrison Smith had a nice game in Carolina, it still doesn't make up for his hefty APY contract value. You have to imagine that this is his last season in Minnesota. 

2023 OTC Valuation thru Week 5: Special Teams



Takeaways:
- Greg Joesph is having a solid start to 2023: 4/4 on FG's, 14/14 on Xpt's, and his 82.6% TB % is the highest he's ever had, although that could be the result of new touchback rules. Still, he's earning his $2m 1-yr extension. 
- The dead cap is Podlesny and I used Spotrac's Dead Cap totals as the source for those figures. 

2023 OTC Valuation thru Week 5: Kwesi
To perhaps evaluate how Kwesi's roster-building has done (seeing as many fans are looking ahead to 2024 already), I separated the players Kwesi has either extended, acquired (trade, free agency, waiver wire, etc.) or drafted:



Takeaways:
- One way to look at this is to compare the total # of players in the red (21) vs green (17) and suggest that Kwesi hasn't done a good job when just looking that # of players. That probably speaks more to the quality of the depth, as it's currently lacking and you'd like to see more players in the green. 
- The other way is to look at just pure contract value which probably suggests that when he hits on someone, he really hits. Cases in point: Kirk's extension, Hicks, and the draft "hits" of Addison, Pace & Evans. 
- Kwesi has struck-out so far on the first "long-term" extension (Hockenson, hopefully he turns it around this season), and while Davenport, Murphy & Lowry have been disappointments, they aren't on long-term deals. That being said, we will be eating a bit of dead cap in 2024 if we don't resign them as Kwesi did push some of the contract into future years beyond 2023 by using Void years. 
- I think Roy, Nailor, Blackmon and Ward could possibly flip from red to green by the end of this season and that would give a bit more "value" from the Draft side of things. With Hicks probably gone in 2024, you'd like to see more value out of Asamoah, though.