With the Minnesota Vikings season over, the discussion has naturally turned to players the team can add through free agency and the draft. Despite free agency not beginning until March, there’s already hand-wringing over whether the Vikings will be able to add the players they need to compete in 2024.
Ed. Note: Harrison Smith is still under contract in 2024, but all of the other players are correctly identified as 2024 free agents.
Ed. Note: “Effective Cap Space” takes into account the cost of signing the Vikings’ rookie draft class. The price of Minnesota’s rookie class will vary significantly based on whether or not they stay at the 11th-overall pick. For example, the cap hit difference between the 11th pick and the third pick is about $3 million.
Ed. Note: Each of the tweets above gives a different cap figure for Minnesota’s offseason. A couple of the tweets were before the Vikings signed 11 players to futures contracts, which naturally decreased their 2024 cap space. Beyond any extensions, the Vikings are likely to reduce their cap space by $3 to $6 million more depending on whether or not they tender ERFAs and RFAs like Nick Muse, Theo Jackson, T.J. Smith, Cam Akers, and Blake Brandel. For the purposes of this article, we will consider Minnesota’s cap space to be roughly $26.6 million, which is the projected number from OverTheCap.com.
Admittedly, looking at the $26.6 million in cap space that the Vikings have and then looking at their list of needs can paint a pretty bleak picture. Starting QBs and edges are very expensive in free agency. Once you add in IDL, CB, RB, and that Minnesota is lacking a starting LG for 2024, the costs can add up quickly. Two selections in the first three rounds of the draft isn’t going to make up for everything.
However, if you dig a little deeper, you will find that the Vikings aren’t in a difficult cap position at all. They may not be able to bring back every single player hitting free agency. But if they want to, they will easily be able to retain critical free agents like Kirk Cousins and Danielle Hunter while extending key young pieces like Justin Jefferson and Christian Darrisaw. Let’s look at five ways they can help their cap space in 2024. (Note: the savings will come at the expense of the 2025 cap, where the Vikings currently have $139.5 million in space, per Over the Cap, and future 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)
Harrison Smith is an incredible football player and locker-room leader. But his $15.3 million in total compensation in 2024 is likely untenable for Minnesota’s roster. If the Vikings cut Smith outright without designating him as a post-June 1 cut, they will save $11,382,116.
However, there is also the option of restructuring Smith’s contract. The Vikings restructured with Smith last offseason, reducing his salary by about $6 million. They could look to a similar path this season. But it takes both sides to make this work. The Vikings couldn’t come to an agreement with Adam Thielen (three years, $25 million from the Carolina Panthers), Eric Kendricks (two years, $13.25 million from the Los Angeles Chargers), or Dalvin Cook (one year, $7 million from the New York Jets), likely because those players (correctly) judged that another team would pay them more in 2023 than the Vikings would.
At 34, I think the Vikings will likely offer Smith more to stay on as a veteran leader than another team would pay him to come to their team, so it will likely come down to whether pride will allow Smith to take another pay cut.
4. Convert Brian O’Neill‘s salary to a bonus (Saves Up to $8.85 million)
I’ve talked a lot above about using signing bonuses in extensions to reduce the first year of a salary cap hit. There’s another way for a team to use a signing bonus without even having to negotiate with a player. It is standard for player contracts to have language that allows the team the option to convert salary into bonus money at any point. There’s no real downside to the player. They get paid the same amount of money sooner than they otherwise would, which is a positive.
To help keep a healthy cap, teams should only really do this with centerpieces. Brian O’Neill is the best candidate the Vikings have for this. His salary is $14.4 million in 2024, and he is signed through 2026. The Vikings can convert all but $1.125 of that $14.4 million to a signing bonus without having to agree to anything with O’Neill, and that would free up $8.85 million.
To extend savings even further, the Vikings could ask O’Neill to add two void years to the end of his deal, which would require negotiation. If they did so and maximized the signing bonus, it would save them up to $10.62 million.
5. Extend Byron Murphy (Saves up to $2.175 million)
Under GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, the Vikings have liked to sign younger, mid-tier free agents to mid-market deals, hoping to get strong returns. They did so with Byron Murphy last year, giving him a two-year, $17.5 million deal. Murphy played extremely well on that contract. While he’s still under contract for 2024, it’s time to reward him with more.
I would propose a two-year, $30 million extension, adding on to his current contract; $15 million per year would slot him 10th among all CBs. He’d be right above Carlton Davis and Charvarius Ward‘s APY, who I feel fit in the mid-range of quality starters who aren’t superstars.
That two-year extension would pay Murphy the minimum salary in 2024, and we’ll give him a $20 million signing bonus to make math easy. Murphy already has three void years on his deal, so there may be an issue with the APY like Cousins’ contract above, but I can’t find what that number is. Regardless, the four total years of the deal mean that his 2024 cap hit would be $6.125 million, a savings of $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.
