How does the Vikings' offseason look versus an imaginary full rebuild?
When Mike Zimmer and Rick Spielman were fired, it seemed like a pretty safe assumption that a bunch of other folks who have been in Minnesota for a long time were going to be shown the door as well. Most notably the veterans who are in their late primes and cost a lot of money i.e. Kirk Cousins, Adam Thielen, Harrison Smith etc. and maybe some other expensive veterans like Dalvin Cook, Eric Kendricks and Danielle Hunter.
It appeared the Wilfs were channeling Linkin Park: “We can't wait to burn it to the ground.”
We have seen teams tear down and rebuild enough times in the NFL that we know exactly what it looks like: Move veterans for draft picks, take swings on free agents or former top picks that might have a chance to become something in the future and aim to stack talent in the draft. Get the salary cap right and ask fans for patience.
The Vikings did none of those things this offseason except for add more picks in a draft where they were only going to have three selections in the first 155 heading into the event. However, they did so at the cost of a 12th overall pick that has historically carried some pretty impressive names.
When the dust settled, the Vikings had sacrificed future cap flexibility to keep the cupboard stocked with good players and a proven veteran quarterback and added potentially lower ceiling prospects in the draft to restock the secondary. Kwesi Adofo-Mensah called it a “competitive rebuild” but the rebuild side is still hard to find, even with the draft results in.
The post-draft projections for 2022 are not kind to the Vikings.
Per VegasInsider, the Vikings’ win total in the betting markets is 8.5. There are 13 teams with higher totals and three other clubs at 8.5 wins. NFL.com’s power rankings placed the Vikings 22nd. CBS Sports has them 20th. Bleacher Report also put the Vikings at 22nd. USA Today was closer to the betting public at 17th.
Let’s just say that the outside world is not convinced that the run-it-back method is going to yield different results.
So what would everyone be saying about the Vikings if they had dropped the “competitive” part and dropped an A-bomb on the roster and made massive changes rather than doing all of the contract restructures and making (mostly) minor free agency tweaks?
In order to figure that out, we can imagine what Team Full Rebuild’s lineup would look like after the draft. That’ll take some stretching because we don’t know which players would have agreed to sign with the Vikings or if they would have valued Player X or Y in the draft but let’s give it a shot anyway.
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At quarterback the Vikings would have had three viable options to replace Cousins had they traded him to Indy or Cleveland: Baker Mayfield, Marcus Mariota, Kenny Pickett.
The first two would have been bridge quarterbacks who could offer the Vikings a chance to still win games but wouldn’t be locked in for longer than one year. Mayfield won a playoff game for the Browns in 2020 and Mariota had three winning records in his first four seasons in Tennessee. Neither is considered as good as Cousins but they wouldn’t have fallen flat on their faces either. Both could have filled the void for 2022 at a relatively cheap price and allowed the Vikings to draft a QB n 2023 or land a disgruntled QB like the Denver Broncos did going from Teddy Bridgewater to Russell Wilson.
Had the selected Pickett, the lone first-round quarterback, the plan would have been to let him suffer the growing pains that all rookie quarterbacks endure. The risk in playing a rookie is that he might have fallen flat on his face and ended up with miserable results so they would have needed a just-in-case QB like Mitch Trubisky or Ryan Fitzpatrick. The upside, however, is that he might have had a similar season to Mac Jones in New England last season and set the Vikings up for the future, where they would be able to spend like drunken sailors in free agency next year to load up the rest of the roster.
Instead the Vikings will stay with the fourth most expensive quarterback in the NFL by cap hit and bank on the idea that new head coach Kevin O’Connell has keys to open a door that nobody else has yet unlocked.
They are especially making a bet that the scheme and play calling were to blame in electing not to improve the offensive roster outside of the impending guard competition between two cheap free agents and two recent draft picks.
In our alternate universe, there’s a world where the Vikings moved on from Adam Thielen, looked to the free agent market to fill his role in the short term and then added weapons in the draft for their new coach and future quarterback. While receivers can be tough to find cheap in free agency, Jarvis Landry still has not signed, JuJu Smith-Schuster went to the Chiefs for one year, $3.25 million and Sammy Watkins took less than $2 million. Give the Vikings one of those guys for hypothetical’s sake.
There’s all sorts of ways to debate whether the Vikings did well in their trade down with the Detroit Lions but for this exercise let’s go on the assumption that taking a swing at Jameson Williams at No. 12 is better for the rebuild because he would be replacing Thielen and pairing with Jefferson for the foreseeable future.
With draft capital acquired in Thielen/Smith/Cousins (and maybe Cook and Hunter?) trades, the Vikings could have taken swings at defensive backs and edge rushers with their other picks. With the cap space they created, they would more likely make moves on players that have potential upside or would be guaranteed to be on the roster for the next several years. So Harrison Phillips would still fit, Jordan Hicks would not.
Where does that leave us? The offensive lineup would look like this: QB - Mayfield, RB - Nwangwu, WR — Jefferson, Landry, Williams, Osborn, Smith-Marsette, OL — Same.
The defensive roster would feature development players rather than veterans like Peterson, Za’Darius Smith and the like. We would see a competition of recent draft picks like Patrick Jones, Kenny Willekes, Janarius Robinson and so forth. In the secondary, Cam Bynum would get his big chance and Cam Dantzler could lock into the top corner spot and the rest would have a proving ground.
Is this team better than the present 2022 Vikings? Probably not, especially on defense. Though if the power rankers are right, we wouldn’t pick the Mayfield or Mariota Full Rebuild Vikings to be much worse than 22nd.
What they would be is interesting. There would be many players to evaluate every game and the wonderment of what the future might hold.
With the present direction, the Real 2022 Minnesota Vikings have to be judged on their final win-loss record and their final win-loss record only.
Just because you say the words “competitive rebuild” doesn’t give a free pass to come up short again. The bar should still be set extremely high because they spent to the edge of the salary cap and kept/signed older players to compete for a Super Bowl. Otherwise they would have done some of the things from our imaginary offseason.
So which path is better?
The onus is on the Vikings’ management and coaching staff to prove that our mystical rebuild wasn’t better. If they win 12 games and put the franchise in a position to enter the playoffs with their best chance to reach The Big Game since 2017, then they were right to stick with Cousins and the older veterans and they were right that the last four years of failing to reach expectations were on the former head coach and that the struggles to keep it all together were on the ex-GM (who now has a Tik Tok, if you’re into that kind of thing.)
It’s fun to think about other ways the Vikings could have approached the offseason but it’s also a helpful tool. We can grade the results against another direction that they could have taken in the same way that we’ll be judging the trade with the Lions against the results of Jameson Williams and Lewis Cine.
Anything less than a playoff berth and seed that gives the Vikings a chance at a deep playoff run will mean the rebuild was the better way. Yes, there’s always a chance of getting stuck in the mud like the Giants or Jets but there’s just as good of a chance at having it all work and becoming the Bills or Bengals. With that route, there is a best-case scenario that we can see on the horizon rather than hoping to debunk Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity.
