Ngakoue trade is another example of the Vikings always paying the highest price
Ngakoue trade is another example of the Vikings always paying the highest price
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We all have a friend who does exactly what the Minnesota Vikings have done over the past three years.
That pal who spends extra on the impractical car that’s out of their price range. They don’t just re-do the floors in their house, they add an entire new wing. Everyone knows someone who takes everyone out for steak when ordering pizza would have done the trick. They buy their kids brand new hockey skates instead of going to Play It Again Sports.
Since 2017, the Vikings have always paid top dollar for everything. While it’s a credit to their ownership, it’s not a sign of a savvy shopper. And just like the overly-generous friend, the bill eventually comes and then they have to scramble to pay it.
The Vikings’ trade of Yannick Ngakoue to the Baltimore Ravens was the team paying the latest bill to come.
When they acquired for Ngakoue in August, he was sitting out of Jacksonville training camp. He was coming off a season in which he produced a solid eight sacks and PFF graded him as the 25th best defensive end in the NFL.
Now they didn’t exactly move heaven and earth to get him like Chicago did when they sent two first-round picks to the Raiders for Khalil Mack but it wasn’t a bargain either. The Ravens acquired fellow Jag D-linemen Calais Campbell for a fifth-round pick.
Just six games later, the Vikings clearly decided that Ngakoue wasn’t going to be worth signing a long-term mega deal and they moved him to Baltimore for a third-round pick.
They paid the bill with interest in the form of dropping approximately 50 spots in the draft and — as Jason Fitzgerald of OverTheCap wrote — potentially alienating the locker room by forcing Riley Reiff to take a pay cut for a deal that blew up before the clocks changed.
While GM Rick Spielman said on Thursday that the team envisioned Ngakoue being paired with Danielle Hunter — who is on injured reserve and will have season-ending surgery per NFL Network — the trade for Ngakoue was either knee-jerk reaction to his injury or they expected Ngakoue to be better and eventually sign him long term.
If the Ngakoue trade was the only time the Vikings recently overpaid for something that didn’t return its value, maybe you shrug your shoulders. Everyone splurges sometimes. But recent history has seen the Vikings pay a premium mark for everyone and it’s put them in a difficult cap situation and left plenty of holes to be filled with hopes and dreams of rookies or developing players rising to the occasion (which has rarely happened this year outside of Justin Jefferson).
Everyone believes Dalvin Cook is a top running back in the NFL but a team that was realistic about rebuilding probably trades him before the season rather than signing him to a contract that carries a $12 million cap hit in 2022 and $6 million in dead money if they cut him after that. Cook has been marvelous and the Vikings are 1-5, which speaks to the overall impact of the position.
Rather than going into the season with future flexibility at quarterback, the Vikings signed Kirk Cousins to a massive contract extension that carries a $31 million cap hit next year and $45 million hit in 2022. In fact, Cousins has a higher cap hit in 2020, 2021 and 2022 than Patrick Mahomes. And it’s a deal that’s very difficult to get out from under if they aren’t pleased with the results.
Why did they pay him on the first day of free agency? To sign an expensive nose tackle when nose tackles often come on the cheap.
“Kirk coming off what he did last year, he had his best year in the NFL, and coming back in the same system and us being able to renegotiate and extend that contract gave us some flexibility from a cap standpoint to go out and get a Mike Pierce, to do an extension with a Dalvin Cook and some of the other things we were able to do in the offseason,” Spielman said.
In 2018, it was understandable to sign the shiny thing in Cousins. They were coming off an NFC Championship appearance and felt that an upgrade at quarterback was needed to get back. But they paid literally the largest contract in NFL history in guaranteed money to get a QB with zero previous playoff wins. The price was, as we discovered via a Cousins documentary, jacked up by the New York Jets.
Savvy cap management helped the Vikings keep signing expensive things but Cousins’s initial $84 million deal forced them to paper over some holes that came back to bite them — a la the No. 3 receiver and guard positions in 2018 and 2019.
Other money was spent on re-signing Anthony Barr to a deal worth $13.5 million per year. Again, a good player but they didn’t him on the cheap. Over the last two years, Barr has ranked 24th and 30th of 50 linebackers by PFF. Even if his value to the defense is greater than that as Zimmer often argues, Barr has a $12.7 million cap hit this year and over $15 million next year. It was not exactly a Moneyball decision.
In no particular order — the Vikings could have traded Anthony Harris but instead elected to pay him on the franchise tag, a cost of $11.4 million this year, fifth most in the NFL this year. They gave a contract extension to Kyle Rudolph worth the seventh highest cap number this year. They kept Everson Griffen before 2019 on a deal that carried a $8 million cap hit. More good players at high prices.
Another way to look at the Ngakoue trade is that the bill came last offseason when they saw Griffen, Xavier Rhodes, Trae Waynes, Mackensie Alexander and Linval Joseph exit and Ngakoue was your friend trying one more swipe on a maxed out credit card. They made the move while carrying $21 million in dead cap space.
If we go back through all the moves one by one, there are reasonable justifications for all of them — the same way your friend has good reason to get the big truck that can carry their outdoor gear in the back. But the accumulation of always paying top dollar for everything in a sports world that is focusing heavily on efficiency has put the Vikings in a position to take a big hit when one of their big buys doesn’t pan out.
One of the issues in terms of team building philosophy is that things like defense and offensive line play are more about the holes than they are the shiny toys. You are only as good as your weakest link and when you can’t afford to renovate the weak links, the holes cause the entire thing to fall apart.
And when you miss on the players considered the “one last piece to the puzzle,” you end up at the bottom of the division, looking up.
The coincidence here is that the Vikings didn’t build the NFC Championship team this way. When Zimmer arrived, they built it on the back of draft picks and found a handful of really good small-time buys on the free agent market like Linval Joseph, Captain Munnerlyn and Terence Newman. They had some really nice bargain-bin finds like Nick Easton in a trade with San Francisco, Joe Berger in free agency, even reasonably-priced right tackle Mike Remmers was solid in 2017. The plan at quarterback was initially Teddy Bridgewater on a rookie deal.
Now that they have acknowledged with the Ngakoue trade (though they have not said it out loud) that rebuilding in some capacity needs to happen, the Vikings have an opportunity to shop wisely in the future. The question is whether the current administration will get the chance to make the shopping list again after maxing out the credit cards with little to show for it.
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I agree with some of this a LOT, but some of this feels a bit reactionary, as if we should have been able to predict that Hunter would be out for the year, Pierce would be out for the year, Barr would be out for the year, not a single one of our corners could stay healthy, a pandemic would strip away our substantial home field advantage, etc. I agree very strongly with the Barr and Cook contracts being over-buys that were immediately identifiable as such, and I agree with the Cousins extension being immediately aggravating and that it was predictable that it could fall apart, but I don't agree with the insinuation that the Vikings are some out-of-control team like the Jets or Texans that hands out completely unworkable and clearly awful contracts to their players.
We can't call the Linval Joseph some great contract and then call the Michael Pierce contract a terrible contract. Prorated against their respective salary caps Linval actually made MORE per year than Pierce (Linval made 4.7% of the salary cap per year, while Pierce makes 4.5% of the salary cap per year). Also it is worth noting that right before the Vikings signed Linval they handed out big money to Everson in what most people said was a massive overpay. They also handed out bonkers money to Adrian Peterson during that era, and kept around veterans that were completely not worth their cap hits like Chad Greenway. They didn't change their philosophy. It has remained the same, for better or worse. When you have young players you let them play and surround them with older players that know your scheme like Terence Newman and Anthony Harris. When those players get into their 3rd and 4th years (which will happen in two years or so on this cycle) you bring in some vets where they didn't pan out. It doesn't make sense to bring in vets when your team is young that don't let your young players play.
The evaluation of this team's front office basically hinges upon whether or not you take them at their word, and whether or not you think they are able to identify sunk costs when they are confronted with them. If you believe that Rick is 100% honest now when he said that they have complete faith in Kirk, if you believed Rick and Zim back in 2018 when they said all of their glowing praise about Kirk, and if you think that this team is not capable or willing to cut bait when the time calls for it, then we need to move on from both, as they have clearly failed. However, I think that Zim and Rick lied then, and that they lied now, as that makes more sense to me. I think that in 2018 they honestly talked to themselves and talked to ownership and collectively decided and agreed that there is about a 60% chance that Kirk will be exactly who he was in Washington, which is good enough to win if the team is truly elite around him, with a 40% chance that Kirk will take a substantial step forward when moving away from a dysfunctional system, as many QBs have been (e.g., Carson Palmer, Goff, Tannehill, etc.). Frankly, I think we undersell how often zebras do in fact change their stripes, when the zebra is a QB who is moving from a dysfunctional regime to a good regime.
Beyond this, if you think that before the year Zim and Rick told ownership something along the lines of "we are absolutely going to be in the playoffs in 2020, and we have seen enough from Kirk Cousins that we know that he is the absolute best option that we can ever have to win a superbowl in the next two years," then we should be moving away from Zim and Rick. However, I don't think that they said this, and I don't think that they believe this. I think that they saw that Kirk was, in fact, the same player that he was in Washington, such that he needed elite talent around them. I think that Rick and Zim told ownership, "if we get some health and some luck then we can make the playoffs in 2020 and maybe be a hard out like in 2015, otherwise our general talent trajectory should peak in 2021-2023, and while Kirk has not been as good as we were hoping, he is still a borderline top 10 QB that we can win with, and if we do not extend him now we will have to pay 5-10MM more per year if we wait until after 2020 to extend him, given how consistent his play has been."
If Zim and Rick said the latter, which I personally think that they did, then you can argue that they deserve a chance to see if they can right this ship. And I do not agree that the Vikings can't move on from Cousins, or that they won't because doing so admits a mistake. The Vikings currently have nearly zero dead cap money for 2021, and if they cut Cousins they would have a similar amount of dead cap as what the Ravens/Steelers/Rams have had the last three years (e.g., they would have enough to still be able to field a roster, and would be below the lowered cap if they made a single move such as moving on from Reiff). Beyond this, the Vikings are actually pretty dang good at ignoring a sunk cost rather than doubling down at too high a price, whether that is moving on from Ngakoue, moving on from Linval/Rhodes/Trae, moving on from Vedvik, moving on from Teddy (which turned out to be wrong, but still they moved boldly to let their 1st round QB pick walk), or the like. Arguably the best skill of the Vikings brain trust is realizing a sunk cost and moving past.
Maybe things are different because Kirk is a QB that they gave a second contract to? That could be, and it certainly has been historically true with some teams. But, while less common, other brain trusts have boldly decided to admit they made a mistake with their QB on a big money contract when they were on a hot seat and successfully moved in a different direction, such as the Ravens with Flacco just two years ago. Back in 2017 John Harbaugh's seat was extremely hot (such that the owner was publicly discussing firing him), and if you look back at the criticisms they were remarkably similar to criticism against Zim now (boring and predictable offenses, a tendency to lose bad stinkers, an inability to turn talent into playoff victories, etc.). Despite that, the Ravens decided to go for a new QB by drafting Lamar, and deciding to rebuild on the fly by letting Flacco go (a big chunk of why they have so much dead cap right now). While I completely understand why many think that the Vikings won't move on from Kirk following the season, I don't buy the idea that moving on is impossible and/or unprecedented.
Good article and good observations.
If I am the Wilfs, Spielman just signed his walking papers by trading Ngakoue. It was the right thing to do now, but it underscores just how misguided they were in thinking that 2020 had the potential to be a "Win Now" year. There was no reason to think that was a likely outcome. And had they just evaluated that decision correctly, they would have realized they should have been a pure rebuild year and acted accordingly.
No KFC extension -- make him earn it and give yourself flexibility in 2021
No signing Pierce this year -- he seems like a weight gamble to me anyway, so why overpay him for 2020? And then it backfired due to COVID...
No Cook mega-extension
Look to reduce contracts, trade or cut: Reiff, Rhodes, Rudolph, Barr, etc...
Stockpile draft picks, play young talent in 2020, and groom the team to be exciting in 2021.
Instead, due to Spielman's poor decisions, Vikings fans have seen us lose good players (Diggs) in favor or riding with KFC through 2022. That decision alone (choosing KFC over Diggs) is fireable.
But add it all up, and the ledger isn't close. Spielman needs to be fired after the season.
And we need to get rid of KFC ASAP -- trade (but who would trade for him?) or just cut him in the offseason. I know everyone thinks that is insane, but it would be worse letting him leverage the Vikings for any more years beyond this one.
I have had enough of KFC, and I blame Spielman for this predicament!