Future of the Vikings, Part 8: The timeline

The "competitive rebuild" worked but can the Vikings expect to play for a Super Bowl in 2025?

© Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

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By Matthew Coller

In a press conference prior to the 2024 season, Minnesota Vikings general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah did something that he had never done before in front of the media: He asked a question.

In response to an inquiry about the things that would need to take place in order for the Vikings to be a serious contender, Adofo-Mensah responded with: “Have you ever looked at [Vegas] win totals in an NFL season? Do you know how you do that? How would you do that? How would you come up with that?”

Not many of the reporters in the room have degrees from Princeton and Stanford like the Vikings GM, so he was going to need to do some more explaining.

“You could build a Monte Carlo simulation,” Adofo-Mensah said. “These are the things where you can go through and look at, ‘hey, how good is this player going to be this season?’ That’s based on a lot of different factors. How good they were in the past, injury history, what point in their career did they start hitting that growth curve, things like that. Then you hold everybody else constant and you change that player. Now you have to do that with all 53 players, simulate that injury, things like that…I’m going through and saying, ‘hey big picture, what are the key things that we need to happen to have this team be one of those teams that I want to be and I’ve kind of identified those things.”

If you’re not quite following the 400-level, here’s the 101 version: The results of the Vikings 2024 season were going to be based on whether several vital performances hit their peak outcome. For example, if Sam Darnold plays to his draft status and not his previous statistics and Jonathan Greenard, Blake Cashman and Andrew Van Ginkel continue to ascend from their past play and Aaron Jones remains one of the 15 best running backs in the league, then the Vikings can be a legit playoff team.

If you had asked Adofo-Mensah the odds of that happening, he might have come up with a number that was somewhere between winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning. Even if we try to do back-of-the-napkin math and say that there was a 20% chance of Darnold becoming a top 10 quarterback and then the rest of those players had 50-50 odds to outplay their past, you would still only come up with 1.2%. If you then throw into the mathematical pot that the Vikings would need to remain almost completely healthy and have top players like Justin Jefferson, Jordan Addison, Byron Murphy Jr. and Josh Metellus continue to play like they had previously, the odds would be even lower.

Not to mention all the chances of random stuff happening like making key field goals, winning the turnover battle and getting game-winning drives out of the QB.

By now you have probably figured out the point. The reason nobody saw the Vikings as a 14-win season in 2024 — especially the line setters in Vegas who expected them to be around 6.5-7.6 wins — was because it seemed virtually impossible by the data. And that’s why they play the games.

When Adofo-Mensah took the stage again following the season, I followed up on how he viewed the 14-win season coming to fruition. Here was his answer:

“Going into the season, I thought we would be a really competitive playoff team,” he said. “I can't say that I sat here and said, we're going to win 14 games. I'm not going to lie to anybody and say that. But we liked the players we brought in. We thought we had a good chance with our QB room to get really good play out of that, however that shook out. We knew we had a connected group. We had players already here who were shown to be resilient and win one-score games, all those different things that we've established over the first two years. So, I wasn't surprised that we were a playoff team.”

He continued…

“But sometimes, when you're on the journey, your expectations sort of shift, and that can happen. You almost reset expectations based on how it’s going.”

Of course, he means that the expectations shifted from aiming to be a playoff team to aiming to be a Super Bowl team. That part did not get enough players to play at their peak (or even close to their average) for that to happen.

“Did we outperform, underperform expectations? You have to do that by looking at a player level, what performances you've got…and looking at the metrics,” Adofo-Mensah said. “It's hard to answer that right now, just because you're still just so stung by not being in the tournament and playing football with a great group that you think deserved more.”

The postseason failure certainly made you wonder if they actually deserved more or if it was a mirage. None of the regular season metrics point to the 2024 Vikings as “frauds” but their Expected Win-Loss record based on point differential placed them more in the range of an 11-6 team than 14-3.

So the question that the Vikings front office faces is: How do they place a 14-win season in the context of their roster timeline? The problem with winning 14 games when you had something like a 1% chance of winning 14 games is that lightning does not often strike the same spot twice.

For that question to be answered, we have to look at the entire picture.

When Adofo-Mensah and Kevin O’Connell took over, the Vikings were in NFL purgatory. They inherited an aging roster that had won 15 games combined between 2020 and 2021 and a salary cap and draft capital situation that was indicative of a team that had been managed out of desperation.

After winning 13 games with the Zimmer/Spielman team, the Vikings made the bold decision to tear that group limb for limb. You can’t overstate how rare it is for a team to reach 13 victories and then let players of the caliber of Dalvin Cook, Adam Thielen, Eric Kendricks, Za’Darius Smith and Dalvin Tomlinson all walk and then refuse to sign QB Kirk Cousins and edge rusher Danielle Hunter to long-term extensions.

The 2023 season turned out to be a transition year — which likely still would have resulted in making the playoffs if Cousins hadn’t gone down with an Achilles injury. But his injury ended up pushing the Vikings up the draft board, where they were able to take JJ McCarthy with the 10th overall pick.

The front office managed the 2024 offseason with the idea that McCarthy would be the quarterback eventually and that they would benefit from his rookie QB contract. So they signed Greenard, Cashman and Van Ginkel on Day 1 of free agency and set up their contracts to carry low cap hits in Year 1 and then get more expensive as they went along.

The rest of the roster was patchworked. Players like Jerry Tillery, Stephon Gilmore, and Shaq Griffin arrived on cheap one-year deals with hopes that they could plug holes and give the team time to either sign or draft long-term options in the future.

The Vikings had to work around the fact that the 2022 NFL draft had imploded on them. Even though they found two quality replacements for Lewis Cine via the development route in Josh Metellus and Cam Bynum, the struggles of Ed Ingram at guard left the Vikings scrambling to re-sign Dalton Risner, and Andrew Booth Jr. and Akayleb Evans’s failures to live up to expectations caused them to bring in veteran Stephon Gilmore on a one-year deal.

Those were just band-aids though. The problems along the offensive line and at cornerback will still need to be resolved because of those draft misses.

At QB, Sam Darnold, who signed for one-year, $10 million, was supposed to give the Vikings a good enough bridge to McCarthy that they could hang around in the playoff race and then make the switch to the young QB when Darnold stumbled. It just tells you how unpredictable football can be that McCarthy got hurt after one excellent preseason game (and a terrific camp) and then Darnold rocketed to 14 wins, 35 touchdowns and a 102.5 QB rating.

Now the Vikings have two routes that they can go this offseason and they both impact the timeline differently.

The first is to re-sign or franchise tag Darnold and give McCarthy more time. “The Aaron Rodgers to Jordan Love Route.”

The other is to turn the keys over to McCarthy despite the 14-win season. “The Alex Smith To Mahomes Route.”

Let’s explore them…

The Jordan Love Route would mean the Vikings would be all-in on competing for the Super Bowl in 2025. No matter how often you hear the loudest voices screaming at the top of their lungs that the Vikings can’t sign free agents if they keep Darnold, that’s just not true. Just as they did in 2018 and 2019 with Kirk Cousins’s big contract, they could structure deals to create space in the short term and then restructure other contracts like Brian O’Neill and Greenard in order to squeeze every last dime out of the cap.

If Darnold agreed to a short-term contract — even like Kirk Cousins’s 2020 extension that went for two years, $66 million and only had a $21 million cap hit in Year 1 — that could allow the Vikings even more flexibility in 2025 and then they could still trade Darnold after the 2025 season if need be.

While Darnold was disappointing in the end, it wouldn’t feel like a major stretch to suggest that he could play at a similarly high level in 2025 because all the pieces are coming back on offense and they can greatly improve the interior of the offensive line.

In this case, McCarthy could continue to develop with a full year of practice where the Vikings could assess his progress and have the best backup QB in the league if Darnold were to get hurt.

There are some challenges that come along with this path. One is that McCarthy would be using another year of his rookie contract without getting on the field. If they played Darnold for 2025 and then moved on, there would be cap implications down the road for the Vikings setting up all their contracts to have bigger hits in 2026 and 2027. That would potentially give them less flexibility when McCarthy is starting to hit his prime.

The biggest risk in running it back is not having all the things that worked in 2024 work again. If they suffer more injuries or Darnold doesn’t have the game-winning drives or the schedule is tougher (sure looks like it right now) and they only have a mediocre season then it will feel like a waste.

There is no guarantee that Darnold repeats his performance. We have seen it go both ways in the NFL. Baker Mayfield had an even better 2024 than his breakout 2023 but Geno Smith hasn’t matched his 2022 season and the Seahawks have hung around in purgatory with him.

The Vikings have to decide what the bar for success is going to be with Darnold. Would a 10-7 season and Wild Card berth be enough to call it a win? Maybe so if McCarthy came out of 2025 completely ready to be the franchise QB in 2026. Anything less than that would be a mess following a 14-win season. Not that history actually repeats itself in the NFL but the Vikings missed the playoffs every time after they won 12 games or more since 2000.

Playing McCarthy is not without risk though. Inheriting a 14-win team with huge expectations in the toughest division in football with a hellacious schedule that includes the AFC North and the two NFC Championship teams is tough sledding for a 22-year-old who has thrown all of 714 passes since he could legally vote.

While he had a terrific training camp and lone preseason game last year and proved to O’Connell that he was worthy of the “future franchise QB” title, McCarthy had to learn throwing mechanics last summer. Now he has to re-learn them while rebuilding his body from the recovery of his knee surgery. Not to mention that if there are any other injuries suffered in a league that sees QBs get sidelined regularly, then we could be talking about pushing back his timeline even further.

Of course, just like teaching a teenager to drive, eventually you have to give them the keys and pray. The Vikings may choose to do that. If they do, then Vikings fans and the organization will need to have some leeway for growing-pain moments. They have to be OK with the possibility that he isn’t ready to win double-digit games in Year 1 and they have to work out their free agent moves to reflect a longer-term build (as they did with multi-year deals for players like Cashman, Greenard and Van Ginkel).

Not that the season would be guaranteed to be a throwaway. Bo Nix and Jayden Daniels appeared in the postseason this year and CJ Stroud did last year. But not all young QBs are created equal. Those guys entered the league at 24.

That’s the short term. The long term aspect of having McCarthy and a quality salary cap situation is worth its weight in gold. They already have foundational pieces for years to come in Jefferson, Darrisaw, Greenard, Cashman and they have a culture and ownership that allows them to attract free agents en masse. We have seen other teams like the 49ers and Eagles be able to stack talent on top of rookie QB contracts through lots of avenues, including free agency and trades (i.e. Christian McCaffrey and AJ Brown).

The elephant in the room is the Vikings recent drafting. They have landed some key players like Jordan Addison, Ivan Pace Jr., TJ Hockenson (via trade) and possibly cornerback Mekhi Blackmon. But they only have three draft picks (plus comp picks) this year and it is far from clear whether their big swing at Dallas Turner is going to work.

Anyone who has studied the draft knows how random it can be. The same Eagles that once picked Jalen Reagor over Justin Jefferson have recently gone on a run for the ages nailing picks in recent years. The Vikings similarly hit on the likes of Anthony Barr, Eric Kendricks, Stefon Diggs, Trae Waynes and Danielle Hunter in a two-year span of the draft that shaped the 2017 team. Then they went ice cold drafting defensive players for nearly a decade.

Saying that the Vikings need to draft better isn’t actionable. Just, like, pick the good players, man! But it is something that will be difficult to live without because free agents (see Marcus Davenport, Dean Lowry) can be just as fickle as draft picks.

All hope is not lost when it comes to developing the next wave though. The Vikings have a group of young players who have shown some signs of having potential like Jalen Nailor, Theo Jackson, Dwight McGlother, Levi Drake Rodriguez, Walter Rouse, Gabe Murphy etc. Development projects will need to make up the difference to build a complete roster.

And that’s the main takeaway about the Vikings timeline. They worked through the competitive rebuild to a point where the playoffs are the expectation no matter what happens at quarterback. It’s easy to take that for granted but it’s quite an accomplishment considering most of the coaches from the 2022 hiring cycle have already been fired. But it raises the bar. Creating a roster that is good enough to make the playoffs but too flawed to take on the more complete teams like the Eagles is not going to be enough. Every winning team without rings is a victim of its own success. That’s life in the NFL.

It can’t go forgotten what a massive success the Vikings’ 2024 season was in comparison to where the world thought they would be — and where teams in transition normally are at this point. During the whole “competitive rebuild,” the timeline pointed to 2025 as the season to truly compete. This is a pivotal offseason toward getting there and then making sure they are there for years to come.

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