The Vikings are so f*kd. And to think this is the same trap Macc was desperate to take our team. Read the article before commenting. All heil SAM! https://bleacherreport.com/articles...om&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=editorial Minnesota Vikings Are Desperate to Escape the NFL's Worst Quarterback Trap MIKE TANIERMAY 21, 2019 Bruce Kluckhohn/Associated Press The end of May is an awful time for a team with Super Bowl aspirations to still be figuring out how to pay its starting tight end. The Vikings and tight end Kyle Rudolph are at a contract impasse. NFL Network's Ian Rapoport reported negotiations broke off last week. Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk later reported that while talks had not stopped, little progress was being made on a new deal. Whether it's the case that the two sides are not talking or the talks are not progressing, things clearly aren't going well. The 29-year-old Rudolph told Sid Hartman of the Star Tribune that he won't take a pay cut because he is "too young for that," as if anyone needs a reason to bristle at a pay cut. There's lots of trade speculation, which is inevitable when a cap-strapped team and a respected veteran start haggling over pay cuts. Over the last four years, Rudolph has caught 253 passes and 24 touchdowns and hasn't missed a start. He's the sort of player a Super Bowl contender typically wants to keep happy. Rudolph also eats up $7.625 million in cap space this year. The Vikings have just over $1 million in cap space left after signing their rookies, per Over The Cap, and they drafted Irv Smith Jr. in the second round as Rudolph's understudy/replacement. So Minnesota has several incentives to make lowball offers. Retaining Rudolph would give the Vikings their best chance to win this year. But doing so will leave them with almost no financial flexibility and cause cap headaches in future years. Yet trading or releasing him to save cap space will weaken a veteran roster that can't afford to backslide whatsoever after a disappointing 8-7-1 finish last season. Welcome to the Quarterback Trap, Minnesota Vikings! You walked right into it last year when you signed Kirk Cousins to a fully guaranteed three-year, $84 million deal. Now you might have to gnaw off your tight end in a flailing effort to escape. The Quarterback Trap is part Catch-22, part carnivorous plant, part kindergarten finger puzzle. Its mechanisms are simple. NFL teams cannot maintain success without excellent quarterback play. But excellent quarterback play is usually so expensive that it prevents NFL teams from maintaining success. So far, teams have discovered only two reliable escape routes from the Quarterback Trap: Win before your quarterback becomes expensive, ideally while he's still under his rookie contract. Employ Tom Brady. Teams without Brady (or a Drew Brees/Aaron Rodgers-esque reasonable facsimile) or a young phenom usually hope for the best by trying to build superteams around affordable journeymen or paying a premium for a veteran and hoping for some MVP seasons as a result. The Vikings flew straight into the pitcher plant with Cousins by paying a premium for a journeyman whose only hope for an MVP season comes from being surrounded by a superteam. Cousins needs a top-notch supporting cast to be successful. But his salary makes it nearly impossible for the Vikings to maintain a top-notch supporting cast. And so the trap springs shut. Keeping Kyle Rudolph will keep the Vikings in the Super Bowl conversation but will also restrict their ability to improve their roster.Jose Juarez/Associated Press/Associated Press Cousins and his backups (Kyle Sloter, Sean Mannion and undrafted rookie Jake Browning, all of whom work for little more than free pizza) cost the Vikings nearly $30.9 million in cap space this year. Only the Patriots and Lions are alloting more cap space to the quarterback position. The Vikings also have $31.6 million in cap space devoted to quarterbacks in 2020; only the Falcons, Steelers and Packers are on the hook for more. Two years of exorbitant cap allocations for Cousins have forced the Vikings to get cute when negotiating recent extensions: Indispensable wide receiver Adam Thielen signed a four-year extension in April that reduced his 2019 cap hit to $8.1 million by dumping lots of salary and roster bonuses into 2020, 2021 and beyond. Linebacker Anthony Barr's five-year deal after his free-agent courtship (Affair? Brief elopement?) with the Jets is also backloaded with bonuses and guarantees that make him affordable ($5.6 million cap hit) this year but expensive in 2020 and 2021. Defensive end Everson Griffen—stuck in the same too-good-to-cut, too-expensive-to-keep limbo as Rudolph—agreed to a team-friendly restructured deal in March that converted a chunk of his salary into performance bonuses and made him easy to release if he doesn't play at a high level this year.
These moves and smaller ones (restructuring linebacker Eric Kendricks' deal, declining the fifth-year option on perma-prospect receiver Laquon Treadwell) are just an elaborate financial shell game. The Vikings are already projected to be more than $3 million over the cap for next year, and they have a shocking $173 million in cap liabilities for 2021 without a quarterback (Cousins' deal expires after 2020). And that's before adding a possible extension for Rudolph. At least players like Barr, Thielen, Rudolph and Griffen are worth extending. The Vikings overall roster is playoff-caliber. Unfortunately, it's also maxed out, and their cap structure over the next three years will leave them with few avenues for getting better. The Vikings have little choice but to lowball players and backload contracts. The Kendricks restructuring was necessary just to make room to sign draft picks. Extending the contracts of young veteran starters like cornerbacks Trae Waynes and Mackensie Alexander will be almost impossible for the next two years. Signing even a mid-tier free agent is nearly out of the question for a while. Every attempt to improve comes with the risk of losing a dependable Rudolph or Griffen. The Vikings never should have stumbled into the Quarterback Trap. They could have re-signed Teddy Bridgewater or Case Keenum, in-house veterans who led the team to the playoffs in past seasons, for much less than Cousins, allowing them to pass the savings along to their own veterans or free-agent upgrades. The Vikings then could have aggressively pursued a rookie quarterback in the 2018 class. Heck, they could have bid for Josh Rosen's services this offseason if they weren't tied to Cousins. But the need to get better at quarterback, no matter the cost, is the lure of the trap. The Vikings chased a chance at marginal improvement and chose the most expensive of three imperfect solutions. They are now stuck with that decision. Kirk Cousins guided the Vikings to an 8-7-1 record after signing an $84 million deal with the team last offseason.Leon Halip/Getty Images Vikings co-owner Mark Wilf told Hartman that he expects the Vikings to be "a lot better" after a "disappointing" year in 2018. Team owners are supposed to say things like that in late May, of course. The reality is that a lot of cosmic forces must align for the Vikings to return to Super Bowl contention. Cousins must be better than he ever has been, coaching changes must pay big dividends, rookies like new center Garrett Bradbury and Smith must play immediate roles, the defense must be great for a fifth consecutive year and so on. If anything goes wrong, the Vikings will be mired in the wild-card chase again, with no cap space and a nucleus that grows a little older and more expensive every season. The Quarterback Trap doesn't kill a team outright. It just chokes out the team's options and margins for error, leaving it to slowly suffocate under its own attempted solutions. For the Vikings, what should be a routine decision about a tight end now comes down to the choice between getting lucky or getting even more tangled. That's one heck of a trap for a team to find itself in two months before training camp starts. https://bleacherreport.com/articles...om&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=editorial
So glad they’re screwed now. They mocked us for being a bad franchise and the reason why Cousins picked them over us. Then we shrug it off and draft one of the best QBs in the draft. It’s why hitting on the draft is so damn important. Hopefully they repaid us the favor again in overpaying a guy to play a non pass rushing position in Barr and we get a cheap pass rusher in Polite on his rookie contract.
Yeah, we're in such a better position now. Sighs. Not that Cousins would've been a savior or a schlep - we would've screwed that up too. All we have is pieces. Until this franchise gets some semblance of a cohesive organizational philosophy and sticks with it, we are destined for mediocrity.
QB is a premium position. Cousins is a top 15 qb in the league. They had to overpay him. Like the article says they're repercussions to the rest of the roster when you overpay. Rudolph is a nice player. At 7 million is about what he should get for the type of player he is. That being said I don't think having him or not takes away from the Vikings being a potential playoff team. It'll hurt the Vikings but not kill them if they cut or trade him. This is why it is important that Gase builds enough around Darnold now to make the Super Bowl run in the next 2-3 years because once we have to pay him we'll be in the same boat with a qb that makes 30 million and needing to cut productive veterans. Hopefully we have those problems.
Eh this is Tanier's narrative that he likes to push. The Vikings are in a cap bind, but if they hit on their draft picks they'll be fine. And they aren't going to win a Super Bowl with Cousins, but they weren't going to win a Super Bowl with their other options either.
Like the article points out, the Vikes had other options at QB. Maybe they should have picked up Leggett....
This is precisely why drafting is so important after your QB has his big pay day. You need high performers surrounding your QB on the cheap, otherwise your screwed, QB or no. GFY, Vikings.
If anyone needed any more reason t understand that Macc wasn't a good judge of talent, this reminds us that he was saved from himself (as he was when the Browns and Giants passed over Darnold), when the Vikings got Cousins. For those who tried to defend Macc's skipping over Mahomes in 2017 by saying "Well he had his eye on the 2018 QB class all along), this runs counter to that story.
That is why you draft a QB every year and hopes he develops. That is also why you don't overpay for a middle of the road QB at the expense of the rest of the team. The Vikings hosed themselves and I have zero sympathy. Go restructure Barrs contract. They should have given Teddy a shot. Cousins wasn't worth it. We dodged a bullet by shear luck.
We had the cap space to after Cousins, but our roster wasn't a QB away from becoming a Super Bowl contender. Glad we "missed out" on him and drafted a QB.
Vikings stupidity is going to end up giving the shitbag Patriots a top flight TE at a discount. I guess I'll take that and Sam Darnold over the Jets paying Kirk Cousins 3 years fully guaranteed to be Kirk Cousins.
Kirk Cousins = Buyer beware Sam Darnold = Buyer delight (for now) THAT IS WHY We need a no shit GM that can navigate this team over the next few years with the vision that sooner than later Sam will be getting paid a kings ransom .Incidentally, I don think Cousins would have done much better than Sam under our abysmal circumstances in 2018, except getting hurt sooner perhaps.
Cousins is a good QB.You can't help the price of QB's these days. I think 4 or 5 QB's have already topped him with contracts since. It made more sense for the Vikings (who thought they were a QB away from the SB) than the Jets to go after him. Paying your QB top money is a good problem to have, better than no QB, so I can see the argument from both sides. If your QB you pay doesn't deliver, then it is obviously a big problem.
So happy we ended up with Darnold...we’d be in a terrible position instead of a very good one all due to one signing With things the way they are, if your franchise QB refuses to sign a somewhat friendly deal it almost makes sense to trade for picks and re-stock before his big contract is up...Unless he’s an absolute elite QB It would take a lot of balls to do that, but look at what Flacco did to the Ravens, Eli to the Giants, Wilson to the Seawhawks, Cousins and the Vikings....who needs that?
I still maintain at the time it was a smart move to try to sign Kirk Cousins. We had no realistic right to expect Sam Darnold to be available to draft with either the #6 pick that we had originally or even after the trade to be available at #3. It worked out great in hindsight but there was absolutely no guarantee it would at the time Cousins became signable. Given the choice between having Kirk Cousins, Quenton Nelson, and whatever else the 75 other 2nd round picks would have gotten or drafting Josh Allen? I love Allen but how can you not take the Cousins side of that scale? I guess I feel that just because things worked out way better doesn't mean signing Cousins would have been a bad move at the time. I think we just got really fortunate..... which is good. We deserve to get a bone thrown our way at least once every couple decades.
