The Minnesota Vikings had a strange vibe in their locker room after they beat the Green Bay Packers in Week 8. Minnesota’s 24-10 win was their only double-digit win of the season, they did it at Lambeau, and it was their third win in a season-high five-game win streak. But everyone was down because Kirk Cousins had just torn his Achilles a week after throwing for 378 yards against the San Francisco 49ers.
Minnesota’s win dropped the Packers to 2-5. Jordan Love was 24/41 for 229 yards with a touchdown and an interception. He had a 19.1 QBR. He wasn’t good. Green Bay’s next five games were against both Los Angeles teams, the Pittsburgh Steelers, Detroit Lions, and Kansas City Chiefs. It looked like they were in a transition year. The Vikings had six winnable games ahead of them. They probably weren’t going to catch the 6-2 Lions, but maybe they could sneak into the playoffs as a wild card.
The Vikings won the Joshua Dobbs game in Atlanta and beat the New Orleans Saints but lost six of their last seven games. Conversely, the Packers only lost three more games and routed the Dallas Cowboys, 48-32, in the first round of the playoffs. Love looks like a worthy successor to Aaron Rodgers and Brett Favre. Detroit also won its first two games, and the Chicago Bears finished with the same record as Minnesota but own the No. 1 pick and another top-10 pick in next year’s draft.
The NFC North will be competitive next year, and Minnesota has a lot of roster uncertainty. Will they bring Cousins back? Can they extend Justin Jefferson and re-sign Danielle Hunter? How do they add enough talent to maximize Brian Flores’ defense? The Vikings are in Year 3 of their competitive rebuild. “You want to get to a point…where you can overcome the adversity we have,” Kwesi Adofo-Mensah said at his year-end press conference. “We want to get to a place where there’s no rebuild, right? It’s just competitive in a window, and I think we’re close to that.”
“Competitive rebuild” will stick with Adofo-Mensah until the Vikings win regularly. But few general managers would have torn Minnesota’s 2022 roster down. The Vikings had to go 11-0 in one-score games to finish 13-4 two years ago. But Vegas had them as favorites in every game they won, except the one in Buffalo. The Vikings won the games they were supposed to win until they lost to the New York Giants in the playoffs. Their regular-season record justified running it back with Mike Zimmer and Rick Spielman’s old core. The playoff loss called everything they did into question.
“I’ll be frank,” Adofo-Mensah told USA TODAY before the 2022 season. “The one asset where you get nervous about not burning it down is quarterback.” Adofo-Mensah has been reticent since that interview because of the backlash he got for it. Many media outlets presented Adofo-Mensah’s comments as critical of Cousins. But Adofo-Mensah was just being honest. “We don’t have Tom Brady,” he said. “We don’t have [Patrick] Mahomes.”
The Vikings don’t have a quarterback of Mahomes’ caliber, but few teams do. The San Francisco 49ers rose to the top of the NFC because of Kyle Shanahan’s running schemes. The Baltimore Ravens are the AFC’s top seed because John Harbaugh built an offense around Lamar Jackson. Both teams have stout defenses. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers had an affordable quarterback and good defense. Dan Campbell’s Lions are a cult of personality.
The rest of the teams who played this weekend have quarterbacks who drive winning: Mahomes, Josh Allen, C.J. Stroud, and Love. Unless you’re confident the Vikings would get a quarterback of that caliber, it’s hard to justify intentionally losing with a roster capable of 13 wins. It’s even more so when trying to extend Justin Jefferson long-term. Adofo-Mensah feels it’s unconscionable. He wants to rebuild while making the playoffs and maintaining cap flexibility.
“It’s a little riskier than tearing everything down and being bad for a while and coming back up,” Adofo-Mensah said in September. “I know that. I can tell you the mathematical probability of doing it that way. And that’s the way other teams may have chosen, but that’s not the way we’re trying to do it.”
The Vikings will probably re-sign Cousins and try to draft his replacement. They have to re-sign Jefferson and Hunter, and they can’t have a repeat of the 2022 draft where they didn’t give themselves enough talent to work with on defense. “It’s going to take a big offseason,” Adofo-Mensah acknowledged in his season-end press conference. One with little margin for error.
Until Cousins injured his Achilles in Week 8, it looked like they could hang around long enough to make the two late-season games against Detroit interesting. The Packers looked like they might need to reassess their quarterback situation after dropping to 2-5. Chicago was 2-6. However, the competitive balance in the division changed drastically in the second half of the season. Instead of completing their competitive rebuild in what looked like a two-team division, the Vikings must create a competitive team in the offseason or consider a full-scale rebuild in Year 4.
