As crazy as it might seem, the chorus from “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers can be applied to the situation the Minnesota Vikings faced this offseason.
“You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em. Know when to walk away, know when to run.”
You can either hold ’em and try to win with the hand you’re dealt, or you can fold ’em by initiating a rebuild. For Minnesota Vikings owner/president Mark Wilf, there is no debate. He thinks the team has the talent in place to win now and that they can be “super competitive.”
So if the goal is to be super competitive next season, that must mean they’re going all in, right? Well, not exactly. I’m sure the Wilf brothers would love for Kwesi Adofo-Mensah to push all his chips to the center of the table to try and win it all. The problem is, the Vikings don’t have many poker chips left. Rick Spielman blew through a ton of cap space trying to remain competitive, kicking the large cap-hit down the road in the process.
So if you’re the Vikings’ GM with limited cap space at your disposal, dealing with an aggressive ownership group that wants to win now, what do you do?
Win on the margins.
That’s exactly what the Vikings have been doing thus far in free agency. They kicked things off by signing former Buffalo Bills NT Harrison Phillips to a three-year, $19.5 million deal. Shortly afterward, Minnesota released veteran nose tackle Michael Pierce. Swapping out Pierce for Phillips is a good under-the-radar move for a couple of reasons.
Phillips turned 26 in January, so the Vikings are getting younger at the position. Pierce will have turned 30 midway through the regular season. To those of you worried that the Vikings are paying the same amount of money for a significantly worse player, fear not. Phillips is one of the better run-stuffing nose tackles in the league. Another way this helps the Vikings is with the salary cap. By cutting Pierce, the team saved roughly $6.2 million, and although Phillips AAV is near that amount, his cap hit for the 2022 season is only $3.8 million.
The other starting-caliber player the team signed is ILB Jordan Hicks, who agreed to a two-year, $10 million deal. He’s been quietly productive, tallying 116-plus tackles for three consecutive seasons. Hicks also has a reputation of being an iron man throughout his career. He has started 89 of 92 regular-season games, including 51 in a row. He’s also a leader in the locker room, becoming a team captain just one year after the Arizona Cardinals signed him.
Adding Phillips and Hicks may not be the flashiest moves the Vikings could have made, but they perfectly encapsulate what it means to make moves on the margins. These types of deals can impact winning the most, and none of it would’ve happened without Harrison Smith and Adam Thielen agreeing to restructured contracts. The restructured deals added $10 million in cap space for the 2022 season, and that’s before factoring in the Kirk Cousins extension, which provided the team an additional $14 million in cap relief.
It’s conventional wisdom that anything about Kirk Cousins becomes a controversial subject matter, especially when you’re talking about whether or not the Vikings should keep him. Naturally, the biggest question mark surrounding the team when Minnesota hired Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and Kevin O’Connell was how they would handle the Kirk Cousins situation.
Do you let him play on a contract year? Lock him up for the foreseeable future? Trade him for draft capital? Trade him along with other players and picks for an elite quarterback?
There were plenty of options on the table ahead of free agency. Ultimately the Vikings chose to extend him, albeit for one year. It’s a savvy move by the front office that allows them to take an adaptive approach.
If Cousins performs well enough in Kevin O’Connell’s offense, the Vikings can offer another three-year extension. If the team feels Cousins isn’t playing up to his contract, they can either roll with Kellen Mond or find Cousins’ replacement in a 2023 draft class loaded with talented quarterbacks. One mock draft predicts that seven QBs will be drafted in the first round alone. Cousins’ contract makes it easy for the Vikings to implement a succession plan, similar to how the Kansas City Chiefs had Patrick Mahomes sit behind Alex Smith for a year before taking over.
It also eliminates the risk of losing Cousins in free agency and getting nothing in return for him. Yes, his extension includes a no-trade clause, but that shouldn’t prevent the team from finding a trade partner. No matter what year it is, there will always be teams that are desperate for reliable quarterback play, and Cousins is more than capable of providing that.
Despite the Vikings being pushed up against the salary cap, the front office has not only found ways to improve the roster without cutting core players or overspending, they’re also finding ways to save money in the process.
Kwesi Adofo-Mensah summarized it best in a 2020 interview during his time with the Cleveland Browns.
“We’re trying to win on the margins, and so we’re trying to extricate every little winning possible advantage we can find across football operations and using evidence to support that.”
If “The Gambler” tells us anything, it’s that professional poker players know how to make smart bets, no matter the hand they’re dealt. For Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, that means signing high-impact players to reasonable contracts despite the lack of salary cap space at his disposal. So far this offseason, that’s exactly what Adofo-Mensah has been doing — finding ways to win on the margins.
