Fun With the Salary Cap

1. EXTEND KIRK COUSINS (SAVES UP TO $8.75 MILLION)

That’s right, the Vikings can save money against the 2024 cap by extending Kirk Cousins. How, you might ask?

The answer lies in the way signing bonuses and void years work on contracts. When a player receives a signing bonus, the cap hit from that signing bonus gets evenly distributed over the length of that contract, up to five years. So, if a player receives a five-year contract with a $20 million signing bonus, the contract will incur a cap hit of $4 million in every year of the deal. However, if the team cuts that player during the contract, the cap hits from future years accelerate into the current season.

That’s the situation the Vikings are in with Cousins’s contract. Void years allow teams to push salary cap hits into the future on paper while not signing the player for a longer term. A player’s contract voiding counts as him getting cut. Cousins‘ current contract has void years through 2027. But allowing the contract to void would accelerate the scheduled cap hits from 2025 to 2027 into the 2024 season, and total $28.5 million.

If the contract is modified, though, the prorated bonus money Cousins currently has for 2024 is just $10.25 million, with the other $18.25 million coming in 2025-27. That would effectively increase Minnesota’s cap space by $18.25 million for 2024 before extending Kirk. Obviously, Cousins is likely to cost more than $18.25 million in cash, but his total pay for the Vikings in 2024 is capped at $42.5 million due to a rule preventing teams from increasing a player’s salary more than once in a 12-month period. $42.5 million is well below current projections for Cousins‘ salary coming off of his Achilles injury, but let’s use it for a worst-case scenario.

The Vikings can take that $42.5 million and turn nearly all of it into a signing bonus to spread across five total years by adding another void year to Kirk’s deal. The league minimum salary for Cousins as a 10-year veteran is $1.21 million, but the rest can be divided in five. Add in the $10.25 million in money that’s already been prorated, and Cousins would cost $19.7 million against the cap, a savings of $8.7 million.

Of course, the Vikings could also choose to pay more against the cap for Cousins in 2024 to help ease the hit in future years, and try to avoid another year where he potentially costs the team $30-plus million without playing for them.

If the Vikings let Cousins’ contract void, they won’t be able to get this benefit, so they will need to act before free agency to obtain it.

1B. EXTEND DANIELLE HUNTER (SAVES UP TO $1.5 MILLION)

If while reading the section above, you were asking yourself if it also applies to Danielle Hunter, the answer is: yes! However, the savings are not as large. The Vikings owe the star edge rusher about $14.9 million against the cap due to his contract voiding. He only has two void years on his deal, so extending him would initially open about $7.45 million in 2024 cap space.

Given that Hunter had arguably his most productive season in 2023, he’s probably going to be looking at getting close to $25 million per year in free agency. If you want to extend him for that price, you can make his salary the minimum $1.21 million like I did with Cousins above and give the rest $25 million in the first year as a signing bonus. Once you add that to the $7.45 million the Vikings already owe him, you save just under $1.5 million. Of course, you could also choose to pay more up front on Hunter’s contract. Or it’s possible that he might not demand as much money per year or as high of a signing bonus in Year 1 if more money is guaranteed later.

Marcus Davenport likely won’t cost much given that he missed nearly the entire season due to injury, and he’s another candidate for this type of extension. He is scheduled to cost the Vikings $6.8 million against the cap, but the dead number drops to $1.7 million if he’s extended.

2. EXTEND JUSTIN JEFFERSON (SAVES UP TO $11.6 MILLION)

The Vikings currently owe Jefferson, who will be on the fifth-year option, $19.74 million against the cap in 2024. Let’s project him for a market-shattering five-year, $175 million contract extension. His $35 million average per year would beat Tyreek Hill‘s $30 million. I went over how the payout would break down last offseason. Jefferson has played one more year, but the same principles can still apply. In that, I assume the Vikings give him a $35 million signing bonus, which breaks the current record held by D.K. Metcalf at $30 million by the same proportion as the overall contract.

In extending Jefferson, the Vikings can turn his $19 million base salary into the league minimum for him, $1.125 million. With the signing bonus, that’s a total 2024 cap hit of $8.125 million, a savings of $11.618 million.

3. RESTRUCTURE OR RELEASE HARRISON SMITH (SAVES UP TO $11.3 MILLION)
4. CONVERT BRIAN O’NEILL‘S SALARY TO A BONUS (SAVES UP TO $8.85 MILLION)
5. EXTEND BYRON MURPHY (SAVES UP TO $2.175 MILLION)

TOTAL SAVINGS: $44.175 MILLION

If the Vikings made all of the moves recommended above, they would end up with approximately $70.8 million in cap space before free agency. They would keep Kirk Cousins and Danielle Hunter and only cut Harrison Smith. This strategy also obviously mortgages a significant amount of future cap space, particularly in 2025 where the Vikings are projected to have $139.5 million.

To help preserve cap health in future years, the Vikings should probably make the moves above in a way that zeroes out their cap savings rather than freeing up a bunch of space in 2024. It’s highly unlikely that the Vikings will enact the exact cap plan above this offseason, but this exercise should show you that there’s no need to worry about Minnesota’s ability to retain or add talent this offseason. They can easily keep Kirk and Danielle, extend JJ and Darrisaw, and sign the high-priced free agent you covet for under the budget they currently have.

What would I do?

Well, it depends on whether or not they believe this team is close to contending.

If they think they’re close, then the optimal path appears to lie in pushing money into the future. Extending Cousins fits with this approach, although moving on from him wouldn’t necessarily force them to reverse course. There’s always a chance they draft an immediate-impact quarterback or sign a bridge QB (like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers this season with Baker Mayfield) who could give them a fighting chance. Restructuring O’Neill, coming to terms on a pay cut for Smith and cutting players like Phillips and Murphy would provide money to spend at key positions defensively. Over The Cap indicates the Vikings could generate upwards of $40 million in cap space for 2024 if they wanted to (though, again, that would have ramifications for the future).

If the answer to the overarching team-building question is that they’re not close to contending, extending Cousins wouldn’t make much sense. Backloading Jefferson’s extension wouldn’t fit as a strategy, either. Taking this route would leave a perfectly clean slate for 2025. It might even make it easier to draft a high-end quarterback (in 2025) without having to allocate premium future assets. The only question is whether or not ownership could stomach this step back. Would Adofo-Mensah and coach Kevin O’Connell be on board with it entering their third seasons at the helm?

None of this is to say the Vikings face a binary decision. They could, for example, absorb Cousins’ dead-cap hit, draft a quarterback in 2024, try to compete (so as not to jettison Jefferson) and move into 2025 with ample flexibility. It is, however, to say that being realistic matters in terms of what we should realistically expect in 2024 and beyond.