Friday mailbag: What if the Vikings have a slow start?

With the schedule out, Vikings fans think the start of the year could be dicey

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By Matthew Coller

Happy summertime, friends. Hope you’re getting your first 18 holes or lawn mows in. Let’s see what’s on Vikings fans’ minds while we have a minute to breath after an eventful offseason (so far)….

@tomspeicher For your mailbag, Matthew: Best NFL coaching tirade: Denny Green after the Cardinals lost to the Bears or Jerry Burns after the Vikings beat the Rams?

With all respect to the great Jerry Burns, I think Denny’s is one of the five best rants in sports history. It’s just so memorable. That happened in like 2006 and yet I still hear, “they are who we thought they were,” a dozen times per year.

@blurm hypothetical: Player DC has $2M gtd salary and is released, but his deal has offset language. is the $2M cap hit reduced immediately when DC signs to a new team in 2023, or is that offset 'credit' applied to 2024?

Yeah, it gets credited to the following season.

@Fixin_Luecks Does Ojile supplant CJ Ham as the fullback provided he sports a neckroll? Also, I think the Vikings are sellers before the trade deadline (post week 8?), after starting 2-6 only winning against the Bucs and Panthers. How far off-base am I, and who is sold off in this case?

I checked his college photos and it does not appear that he wore a neckroll. But the NFL is all about taking steps forward. In my scouting report, “needs a neckroll” goes under his biggest areas of improvement if he’s going to make it. Funny, the Vikings have developed a couple fullbacks for other teams behind CJ Ham over the years. Maybe he’s the next one.

I think the scenario that you described is exactly what we saw in 2020. Nobody thought that team was going to start 1-5 but if you lose one bad game it can snowball pretty quickly. If they lose to Tampa Bay in Week 1, suddenly it’s the Eagles, Chargers, Panthers and Chiefs and things are out of control already. So I don’t think you’re off base about that possibility. In that scenario they’d probably play it similarly to the Lions last year. They sold off Hockenson but didn’t throw in the towel.

@dcaron28 what has better odds: they sign Kirk to an extension or get off to a bad start and trade him to contender and go full rebuild

I’m trying to think of any examples where a team started out slow and traded their quarterback before the deadline. It doesn’t happen very often. It would have to be the exact right circumstance where they were almost instantly out of the playoff race and another team had their quarterback get hurt for the year yet was still in the race.

It’s hard to put odds on an extension for Kirk. It appears that there is an impasse with the amount of commitment the Vikings want to make and I’m not sure what would change that. Kirk has made it very clear that he’s comfortable betting on himself so the odds seem pretty low. Right now neither of these scenario is particularly likely but probably an extension is more likely than them being so bad they trade him away by mid-season.

@kyleshaner The NFL dominates almost every part of the calendar. Now even the schedule release is an event. Are there any other ways the league will try to exert its dominance?

Eventually you’ll be branded by Roger Goodell at birth with the logo of your favorite team and your social security number will just be a fantasy football lineup. I would imagine the only remaining step would be for the NFL to see the success of the XFL with The Rock in charge and decide that it’s time for the NFL to buy into that league. I’ve always felt like it might be pretty interesting if No. 3 quarterbacks were allowed to play in those leagues. If Jaren Hall was starting for the St. Louis Battlehawks, would you peak in on it? Probably, right?

@mattverick Got any favorite football/sports movies that you like to put on to hold you over during the off-season?

The only fictional sports movies that I like are either comedies like Major League or Caddyshack or documentaries. There aren’t too many sports dramas that I can really get into. I definitely need to catch up on some A Football Life docs. The ‘72 Dolphins episode was surprisingly good. They did one on Rod Woodson, who was one of my favorite players growing up and maybe the best defensive back of all time. They covered Edgerrin James too. Sometimes I’ll watch old Hard Knocks, back when it was good. And you guys know that I love old games. I’m thinking of doing a weekly feature old game of the week this summer.

Drew…Does the Z trade automatically mean they want to extend Hunter? Because I’m not sure the two things are necessarily related

I’m with you, I don’t think they are connected. The Hunter situation is going to come down to the dollars and cents. A bad first contract and bad injury luck robbed him of so much money and if I’m his agent I’m trying to recoup some of that after he proved to be healthy last year. The Vikings probably have a price in their minds and if Hunter won’t take it they can move him for pretty good return. Trading him would crush the pass rush and make Brian Flores’s job quite a bit more difficult in the short term but after moving so many other key players off last year’s defense it seems like they are OK running out a bunch of young players and seeing who can play.

@DaDaMan911 Is there a Tier system in place to rank "journeyman Quarterbacks?"

Oh yeah. When Sage Rosenfels and I used to do radio we came up with categories. You have your journeyman starters like Chris Chandler, Gus Frerotte, Ryan Fitzpatrick or Vinny Testaverde. You have journeyman backups who you don’t really want starting full seasons but have lots of starts like Josh McCown, Shaun Hill, Colt McCoy. There’s your journeyman backups who never play like Chase Daniel, Sean Mannion, David Blough, Nathan Peterman etc. And your journeymen who were on the fringes and never stuck with a team but never gave up. Josh Johnson is the all-timer there.

@HollandJohnD Given the collective lack of experience from the Vikings' cornerback group, how might new DC Flores use three-safety sets on defense this year?

Seems probable that they will mix and match the safeties based on what he did with the Dolphins in 2021. Miami had three safeties who were on the field for at least 600 snaps and another that played 300 snaps. Seems like that means we could see Hicks get replaced by a safety from time to time depending on the offense’s personnel. It’s on my offseason to-do list to get together with an expert to break down Flores’ defense further, so stay tuned.

@dreski83 Mailbag Q: still pretty early in Justin Jefferson career, seems like a decent dude... will his next mega contract depend solely on money or will Cousins future in purple factor in???

I think it’s entirely on whether Justin wants to be a Viking long term. I could only speculate that the future of the QB position would weigh into how he feels about the situation. My observation about Jefferson is that winning is legitimately the most important factor to him. It’s not lost on him that they haven’t won a playoff game since he arrived and he’s watched his former LSU teammates go to the Super Bowl and AFC Championship. That’s where he wants to be and if he doesn’t believe this organization is headed there…. maybe he waits. However, the NFL set up the entire system for teams to keep their great first-round draft picks. Business wise, it makes more sense for him to sign an extension.

@BranSF52 Not rooting for it, but what is the likelihood MIN stumbles out of the gate, like 2-6? Home games are tough, road games at PHI/CHI/GB. What would Kwesi's potential moves be to salvage what he can and prepare for 2024?

I’ll go with a 25% chance of that happening. Maybe my mind will change one way or another as camp plays out but it is a potential outcome that their defense just isn’t ready and they lose some shootouts and close games. If that happens, the first players that come to mind as trade options aside from Cousins are Harrison Smith and upcoming free agents Marcus Davenport and KJ Osborn. Looking around the roster, there aren’t many others who are veterans who might have some value.

@JohnnyDrag What are the most likely uses with the freed-up cap money (w/ and w/o assuming they also free up Dalvin’s money).

They already used some of it by signing Addison. Getting the draft class under contract was the first priority. After that, I’d guess they want to give themselves some breathing room for contract extensions. If they need to push some money into 2023, particularly with Danielle Hunter, they need to have some space to do that. Otherwise, possible that they could look at some rotational pass rushers in free agency. Someone like Leonard Floyd or Melvin Ingram or try to get Marcus Peters if they aren’t thrilled with what the corners look like in OTAs. For the record, I’d rather see them play inexperienced players.

@draftguy09 Mekhi Blackmon- what do you think the Vikings see in him that made them choose him over other higher ranked (consensus-wise) options?

The thing about data of any kind is that every broad conclusion doesn’t apply to every individual situation. It’s broadly better to pass but when the Vikings ran 10 times in a row against the Cowboys a few years ago that was the right decision because they were whoopin’ them in the trenches. It’s broadly better to draft with the consensus board but when we’re talking about a guy who was the last player in the third round who the Vikings felt was a good fit for Flores and had excellent numbers in college, it’s really hard for me to question that pick. Blackmon isn’t an athletic freak and doesn’t have size/length to be an elite outside corner but the guy is good at staying in phase with receivers and is an aggressive tackler. You’re looking for guys who might fit into a role when drafting in the late third and he has nickel potential. Plus, are you telling me that enough draft analysts were breaking down 200 players in enough depth to have a sharp consensus? I don’t buy that. Top 50, sure. I buy the consensus board’s conclusions in the top two rounds.