When every future Vikings QB option is risky
The Minnesota Vikings’ offseason has been more about what is still left to do than what has already happened.
It was certainly jarring when the team released two players who have a good case for the Ring of Honor someday but the complete bloodbath that some projected hasn’t come to fruition. Harrison Smith decided to stay. Za’Darius Smith and Dalvin Cook are still on the roster. There’s no buzz regarding Danielle Hunter’s future. There’s no buzz regarding contract extensions for Justin Jefferson, TJ Hockenson or Ezra Cleveland.
Week 1 of free agency also didn’t feature a big-name signing in Minnesota. With respect to Josh Oliver, Byron Murphy, Marcus Davenport and Dean Lowry, the Vikings spent zero seconds last week headlining ESPN or NFL Network for acquisitions.
The most significant decision came with just hours on the clock before the Vikings needed to officially get under the cap when they restructured quarterback Kirk Cousins’s contract to create cap space and push dead money into 2024.
Nobody knows what it means. SI’s Albert Breer wrote in a mailbag about the Vikings’ future at QB and suggested that they could still sign Cousins to an extension (shout out to PI reader Nick for asking Breer the question). A few days later, ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler dropped a bombshell rumor, suggesting that the Vikings could be a “wild card” for Lamar Jackson. Suddenly the idea of the Vikings trading up for Kentucky’s Will Levis has been floated around too. And, hey look, the 2024 draft has some intriguing QB prospects.
Barring something wild like trading Cousins for Trey Lance or the Jets offering two firsts after Aaron Rodgers decides to quit football for life coaching or Tom Brady wanting to play with Justin Jefferson, the aforementioned options seem to be the only ways the Vikings’ figure out their future. If you mention any one of them out loud, however, you are bound to get hit with a flood of reasons why they won’t work.
If you want the Vikings to extend Cousins after a 13-win season, that idea get smacked with the point that he’s about to be 35, has only one playoff win in five years and had a down year statistically.
If you’re a fan of the 2023 QB class, you’ll be told that the Vikings would have to trade too much to get Will Levis — and that Levis’s tape isn’t good enough to make him the perfect prospect.
If you got jacked up about the Lamar Jackson rumor, thieves of joy will bark about his price tag, injury history and some gobbly gook about not being good enough at passing. Oh, and it will never happen! (Did folks say that about Brett Favre playing in Minnesota back in ‘09?)
Then there’s the 2024 class. No sure things, folks. They’re never getting Caleb Williams.
Not to mention: How are they going to convince Justin Jefferson to sign an extension if he doesn’t know or isn’t happy with the quarterback decision.
Tough crowd.
The reality of the situation is that every option carries potential drawbacks.
If the Vikings extend Cousins, they risk remaining stuck in the middle even longer. Since 2018, Minnesota ranks 15th in point differential and 13th in points scored. Odds seem relatively high that the game of whack-a-mole trying to fill weaknesses on the roster around Cousins’s contract would continue. Plus with his age, it becomes difficult to project even next year’s production, much less two or three years down the road. What happens if he does fall off and they have him under contract through 2025? Maybe even worse, what if he plays just well enough to win eight or nine games and nothing more and they pass up on other QB options in the meantime?
Going after Jackson has a higher upside and downside. The Ravens won 45 games and lost 16 with him at the helm. He won MVP. His running alone is good enough to put a team in position for the playoffs and he has the same passer rating as Matthew Stafford since 2018. But the cost to get Jackson is through the roof. The best guess at what offer would keep the Ravens from matching is, what, four years, $180-$200 million guaranteed? Plus two first-round picks to go Baltimore. Talk about restrictive. And while he’s 26 years old and injuries are hard to predict, he was banged up each of the last two years.
There’s no way to answer whether he will stay healthy or how the roster will get built around him. That probably depends on hitting on late-round picks and betting on Jackson and Jefferson dominating the league. Of course, the odds of that happening are pretty decent. Still, it’s scary to go all-in.
Not that drafting a quarterback doesn’t come along with its own set of the scaries. What if you become the Jets or Bears and ruin years of your franchise chasing around unproven quarterbacks? The success rate of highly-drafted QBs is a little subjective (for example, is Daniel Jones a success?) but let’s say we eyeball it…
Since 2018, 21 quarterbacks have been picked in the first round. Six are unquestioned successes (Mahomes, Watson, Allen, Jackson, Burrow, Herbert), four were at least pretty good or are looking up (Murray, Jones, Tua, Lawrence), five are undecided (Pickett, Lance, Fields, Mac Jones, Love) and the others went bust (though Mayfield and Trubisky did make the playoffs with their teams).
That’s a pretty wide distribution of outcomes. The Vikings are also in position where they likely won’t be able to use their own draft pick to take a QB this year or next year if they’re competitive with Cousins, making it more crushing if they don’t select the right signal caller.
There’s no route that’s perfect. Some of them would appear to have better best-case scenarios than the Vikings’ last five years. Some of them definitely have worst-case scenarios worse than what Cousins has been to the Vikings over the last five years. Such is life in the NFL. The Chiefs took a risk by trading up for Mahomes. The Bills swung big with Josh Allen, who wasn’t loved by the accuracy-valuing draftniks. The Rams took a risk trading for Stafford. The Eagles took a risk drafting Jalen Hurts. And a lot of teams got burned to the ground by risks they took in the draft as well.
If this was easy, every team would have rings. The Vikings must decide if they want to push their chips to the middle of the table and go all out for Jackson hell or high water or if they want to bet on a prospect from this year or wait until next year’s draft when they have more capital. But they have to keep in mind that just because they have a known quantity in house doesn’t make it less risky, it only makes it more predictable.
Where this goes next, nobody knows. They might not know. A decision might be right around the corner or well down the road. It’s apropos in a way because nearly every offseason of Cousins’s career has left fans wondering if another extension or the risky QB behind Door Number 2 was on the way.
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