The Minnesota Vikings want to bring Kirk Cousins back. Cousins wants to come back to Minnesota. Even with some caveats, it’s clear that both sides want to reach a deal. If there were betting odds, Cousins wearing a Vikings jersey would be the clear favorite in 2024.
With that has come an avalanche of opinions. The most popular is that the Vikings should re-sign Cousins and take a quarterback early in the draft. This sounds great for a Madden franchise but masks a bigger problem.
If the Vikings want to bring back Kirk Cousins, they must go all the way. In other words, the Vikings need to go “Full Kirk.”
Let’s define “Full Kirk.” It’s not a utopian universe where Kohl’s Cash is the preferred currency, and everyone walks around shirtless with a giant chain around their neck. Even if the Vikings bring Cousins back, you won’t see him chilling in karaoke bars with 2000s-era pop stars turned daytime talk show hosts.
To understand, we must ask ourselves why the Vikings would bring back Cousins. The 36-year-old is coming off a torn Achilles injury that has served as a death sentence in the past. However, one quarterback who’s older than Cousins has proclaimed himself a miracle of modern science on internet talk shows.
In six seasons with the Vikings, Cousins has only one playoff win and numerous moments that make Vikings fans go numb. But while the public is focused on what Cousins isn’t, the Vikings love him for what he is.
Cousins is one of the most accurate passers in the NFL, completing 65% of his throws in all six seasons in Minnesota. He’s thrown for over 4,000 yards four times and over 30 touchdowns three times since signing with the Vikings in 2018. Before this season, he had missed one game due to COVID protocols and was a model of durability.
Cousins also has the locker room in the palm of his hand. Teammates were in tears when he went down in Green Bay, and offensive tackle Brian O’Neill gave his quarterback a glowing testimonial at the end of the season.
But the decision to bring Cousins back isn’t really about Cousins. It’s about the Vikings and how they look at the 2024 season.
The Vikings have been stuck in place for years, and Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and Kevin O’Connell haven’t picked a direction since Minnesota hired them in 2021. While the Vikings have made some future-focused moves, like shedding veterans in exchange for cap space, they’ve kept their eye on the present by making win-now moves like signing Dalton Risner and trading for Cam Akers midseason.
“We faced a lot of adversity this season, but you want to get to a point in your program where you can overcome that adversity and still be playing in the tournament,” Adofo-Mensah said during Wednesday’s press conference. “Obviously, we didn’t meet that, and we’re going to spend this offseason working our butts off to get there.”
Adofo-Mensah’s words connected with some fans. The Vikings are focused on making “the tournament,” or as the fans know it, the playoffs. He wants to build a roster that can overcome any kind of adversity. But keeping one foot in the present and one foot in the future has given the Vikings only mild relevancy in the first two years of his tenure.
If we’re sticking to the phrase “competitive rebuild,” signing Cousins and trading up for a quarterback seems like the way to go. The Vikings could use the “Patrick Mahomes/Jordan Love” model to cultivate their new QB in O’Connell’s system, then turn him loose in 2025. But there are a few obstacles to overcome.
First, the Vikings need to find a trade partner. The “Big Three” of Caleb Williams, Drake Maye, or Jayden Daniels would represent an ideal target. But the first three teams in the draft – the Chicago Bears, Washington Commanders, and New England Patriots – may all take a quarterback.
If the top options are off the board, the Vikings could be looking to reach for a quarterback with the 11th-overall pick. Michael Penix Jr., Bo Nix, or J.J. McCarthy may become Minnesota’s quarterback of the future. But they would also be ignoring some of the more significant needs on the roster, setting that prospect up to fail.
Washington or New England don’t have the structure to succeed with a rookie quarterback and may trade down. Still, the price to trade up would be astronomical for a Vikings team with only two picks in the first three rounds of this year’s draft.
These are all things to consider, and we haven’t even talked about Cousins, who has established himself as a force at the negotiation table during his career. Cousins has plenty of money; he said it himself. But the bigger sticking point has been the contract structure the Vikings have presented him. “It’s not about the dollars, but it’s about what the dollars represent,” Cousins said. “There will always be some of that, but at today’s point, structure is probably more important.”
The last time the two sides went to the negotiation table, the contract structure was a sticking point. Cousins was reportedly willing to take a hometown discount somewhere south of the $40 million per season the New York Giants gave Daniel Jones last March. But the Star Tribune’s Andrew Krammer reported he wanted his 2024 and 2025 salaries guaranteed in a new deal. Therefore, the Vikings restructured his contract and pushed $28.5 million into two void years in 2026 and 2027.
To put this into context, T.J. Hockenson is the only Vikings player with a guaranteed salary in 2025, and he had to wage a lengthy hold-in during training camp to get that money. Given that Minnesota didn’t extend Justin Jefferson last offseason, the guaranteed years could be one sticking point with negotiations.
Kirk Cousins has been the Roman Reigns of contract negotiations. But his agent, Mike McCartney, has been his “Wise Man.” Chances are McCartney knows what the Vikings are trying to do here by potentially bringing in a Cousins successor in the first two rounds of the draft.
Alex Smith is one example. The Kansas City Chiefs traded him to the Commanders one year after the Chiefs took Mahomes in the 2017 draft. Accordingly, there could also be a push for a no-trade clause to ensure Cousins is in Minnesota for the foreseeable future.
Minnesota has a decision to make at this point. Do they want to sign Cousins, take a quarterback, and have him sit behind him for two or three years? Or do the Vikings want to re-sign Cousins and do everything they can to put him at the helm of a Super Bowl-winning team?
The latter option makes some of Minnesota’s offseason decisions a little easier. Danielle Hunter is a pending free agent, but they’ll need him to anchor a defense that only has Patrick Jones II under contract for next year. Risner also needs a new contract, but they’re unlikely to find a guard who will play at his level.
Minnesota could use the rest of the free-agent market to fill holes in the secondary, linebacker, and running back. Trading down from pick 11 could give the Vikings multiple swings in a draft that scouts have been excited about since last April.
However, that could be difficult to pull off because Over The Cap projects the Vikings with $22.4 million in effective cap space for next season. But with Rob Brzezinski in their corner, enough money could be pushed down the road to ensure Cousins has one final ride in the same way the New Orleans Saints pushed over $32 million into the future for Drew Brees in 2021 and 2022.
Even if the Vikings do all of this, there’s still the question of whether they can build that adversity-proof roster Adofo-Mensah has discussed. The Vikings won 13 games when everything went right in 2022 and won seven games when everything went wrong this season. If the law of averages plays out, the Vikings could be looking at a 10-win season, which is about where Cousins’ tenure in Minnesota has resided for the past six seasons.
That’s not a wise decision, and it could affect Adofo-Mensah’s plans for his competitive rebuild. But the good thing about this would be that the Vikings are making a decision. Right now, the plan is too vague, and that would be a problem when Adofo-Mensah starts negotiating his next contract in the spring of 2025.
If the Vikings want to stick with Cousins, that’s fine. But if they’re going to do this, they need to go “Full Kirk.”
