If you’ve paid any attention to the news about Kirk Cousins lately, you may have a guess as to what the Minnesota Vikings want with him. Kevin O’Connell confirmed that he wants to build around Cousins. Ian Rapoport has a segment every couple of days about how much the Vikings like him. Rapoport reiterated that yesterday on The Pat McAfee Show ahead of Aaron Rodgers‘ much-anticipated letdown (his second such letdown of 2022).
Sure, this might be the thickest smokescreen in human history. But assuming it’s not, how is this supposed to work? Cousins costs $45 million dollars. The Vikings are $15 million over the cap, and they have myriad roster holes. Do they genuinely think they can build a contender out of this situation in one offseason? Only one way to find out.
We have all the resources and brainpower we need to try this for ourselves, so let’s do it. Our goal will be to generate at least an arguably realistic offseason simulation where the Vikings have a roster that can contend in some way or other. To make this a useful scenario, here are the ground rules:
- Kirk Cousins must remain in Minnesota. Operate under the assumption that he can be a Super Bowl quarterback, even if you don’t believe that.
- The Vikings need enough cap space to get their roster to be at least competitive in 2022.
- 2023 and 2024 need to have enough flexibility to contend as well. So that’s a three-year window to maximize.
- Try to simulate contracts that make both parties happy.
That more or less lays out the vague goal that the Vikings seem to be embracing. If they think they can build a perennial contender around Cousins, that means Minnesota can’t just mortgage the future away. They’ve also been clear from the get-go that there won’t be a tank year in 2022 or a full roster tear-down. So, let’s get under the cap, shall we?
Hunter’s Contract
The first and easiest move would be a Danielle Hunter extension. I’ve explained the merits of that in the past, but I pitched a restructure in that article. With the (pre-negotiated) stroke of a pen, the Vikings could turn Hunter’s $18 million roster bonus into $4.5 million payments over the next four years. That leads to a very favorable structure, but there’s a problem. Hunter has two void years on his contract, which means a simple restructure only makes for dead cap down the road.
Void years, in short, are fake contract years. Imagine getting a player to agree to “play” for your team for $0 in 2024 and 2025. Signing bonuses and restructures still prorate over those years, allowing you to spread the bonus thinner. However, the player doesn’t play on those void years, so he walks, and the bonus accelerates when his contract runs out.
A better way to explain it is to look at what happens to most cap casualty contracts. You sign a five-year deal with some prorated signing bonus. You cut that player midway through the deal, and the prorated bonus accelerates. Void years work the exact same way, but it’s planned from the start.
That’s not set in stone though. The Vikings could simply extend Hunter in earnest and un-void those years. If they tacked on two genuine years to Hunter’s contract, those $4.5 million chunks would stay spread out, and we can all agree to keep Hunter in purple for longer. Hunter has to agree to that, so we’ll have to give him a genuine offer:
I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time processing giant spreadsheets filled with seven- and eight-figure dollar amounts. A bar graph might help.
This ties Hunter down no matter what for 2022 and 2023, but his cap hits do not explode until 2024. In 2024, the Vikings could pull a New Orleans Saints-style move with Hunter’s deal, tacking on void years and restructuring to save space if they must. That’s what you need to understand, but if you’re a big-time numberphile and want more detail, here you go.
Extending Kirk Cousins
Cousins’ contract is more straightforward, but we can abuse the salary cap’s systems to mitigate the problems it causes. We’re going to utilize some void years to try and get that $45 million cap cost down. It ties the Vikings irrevocably to Cousins, but we’re operating under the assumption that they don’t have a problem with that.
This extends Cousins at a fat $40 million per year and guarantees enough to make the contract functionally un-cuttable. That satisfies his desires, so we can do this extension. It makes $24 million in 2022 cap space, but it puts too much of a burden on 2023 and 2024. That’s what the void years are for. Those two years give us space to spread out Cousins’ cap hit. We can use signing bonus proration all the way until the 2025 dead cap hit is just too sickening to bear. Right now, a $12 million hit on a massive quarterback contract is easy enough to stomach. If we want cap space in 2023, we can restructure, no problem (reiterating that this sort of salary conversion does not require the player’s consent).
As it stands after these extensions, 2023 only has $32 million to work with. Want to bring that up to $50 million? No problem. Here’s what that would look like:
And a bar graph, for the visual learners:
That 2024 year might scare you some. How about we pull the restructure lever again?
Now you get three years of an exploded cap with Cousins costing no more than $33 million at worst. He would cost no more than 12.89% of the salary cap in any of these years. For perspective, Cousins cost almost 17% of the cap in 2021. It aggressively borrows from 2025 to make a three-year window with an actually tenable cap situation. That $34 million hit in 2025 will be further mitigated by an aggressively increasing salary cap.
In 2025, he walks with a gut-punching $34 million dead cap hit, creating a three-year window. If you don’t want a restructure, that’s perfectly valid. You can find a way to pay off more than $40 million in one of the years and climb out of debt. But reading the language of the Wilfs, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, and Kevin O’Connell, this seems to be closer to the direction they are heading.
Here are the full details if you’re interested. The beauty of this “plan to restructure” strategy is that we don’t have to commit to it. If 2022 is a disaster and we decide Cousins isn’t the answer, we can rip off the band-aid, trade Cousins, and start over. That flexibility allows us to make commitments elsewhere on the roster. We’ll have to make some tough decisions down the road, but having options is never a bad thing.
After these two moves, we’ve gotten a little over $21 million under the cap. That’s a decent chunk, but we have an entire defense to rebuild, so we need some more.
Making more space
Anthony Barr is in the same spot that Hunter will see in 2024. His contract is about to void, generating almost $10 million in dead cap. O’Connell also hinted that he would like to keep Barr. So if we give Barr a two-year contract, we can keep that $10 million from accelerating, and instead pay it at $5 million per year. Barr’s age and health are working against him right now, so we could probably get away with a smaller extension that still saves space on the whole.
We can do something similar with Harrison Smith. He’s going to age gracefully enough to make me comfortable, and he was O’Connell’s first response when asked about exciting defenders. The maximum restructure gets our total cap space number over $30 million, so we’ll do that. With $30 million and a flexible future, we can start on some free agency dream-chasing.
Specifics will be a conversation for another day, but take a look at what Za’Darius Smith posted when the Packers let his position coach Mike Smith go, and again when the Vikings hired Smith. Minnesota needs multiple cornerbacks and a safety in addition to that edge rusher. Thirty million dollars and cap flexibility can go a long way toward making the Vikings’ roster whole again. O’Connell might rely on scheme to help mitigate pressure, though, the rest of the offensive roster is pretty much set.
For now, this is the most sensical plan I could come up with to extend Cousins without torching the entire roster. It would be a lot easier to offload Cousins. But given that the Vikings don’t want to, this defers the punishment all the way to 2025 and gives you enough money to genuinely build a roster over the next three years. As a cost for an affordable Cousins, one bad year in 2025 seems acceptable, if a little difficult to swallow.
Think you can do better? I believe you. Follow the same rules above and let me know at @LukeBraunNFL on Twitter. Use OverTheCap’s contract constructor and their cap calculator, and if you come up with a better plan centered around Kirk Cousins, I’ll gladly adopt it. However, the true test will be to see whose plan gets closest to the actual one the Vikings use — assuming they haven’t been lying to us this whole time, that is.
