Should the Vikings have seen this coming?

With the benefit of hindsight, some of the pitfalls of a 'retooling' were there but other issues with the Vikings have been bad luck

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The best way to describe the Minnesota Vikings’ offseason might be this: They went to the fork in the road and went straight.

After being defeated by the San Francisco 49ers in the divisional playoff game, it appeared the Vikings had two options: Either tear it down and rebuild or keep the band together for one more run at eclipsing the 2017 peak of the Mike Zimmer era in Minnesota.

They did neither.

Instead the Vikings made some moves that looked like they believed 2020 could result in an NFC North championship like signing Kirk Cousins to a contract extension, franchise tagging Anthony Harris, extending Dalvin Cook, keeping Riley Reiff and trading for Yannick Ngakoue. The Vikings also reportedly tried to get Everson Griffen to return for another bite at the apple.

At the same time, they made some other moves that looked like they believed 2021 or 2022 was their target date like letting veteran cornerbacks Xavier Rhodes, Mackensie Alexander and Trae Waynes go, cutting Linval Joseph and most notably trading Stefon Diggs to the Buffalo Bills.

While confusing, when the dust settled the Vikings still came across like they expected to unseat the Green Bay Packers.

When asked about a completely revamped cornerback group this offseason, Harrison Smith said, “I didn’t know we were supposed to be bad.”

Neither did most people around the NFL.

Prognosticators routinely picked the Vikings to win the North and reporters (including this one) went game-by-game on the night the schedule was announced and landed mostly between 8-8 and 10-6.

What few seemed to factor was just how thin the tightrope was that they were trying to walk.

In order to win the North, they would need a clean bill of health and rookies to immediately shine. Instead, in the first two weeks Danielle Hunter hasn’t stepped on the field yet, Anthony Barr is out for the season, Pat Elflein may be out awhile and none of the first three draft picks have made an impact. Both rookie corners got smoked — as rookie corners do — in their starting debuts, Justin Jefferson has five inconsequential catches and second-round pick tackle (guard?) Ezra Cleveland might not actually exist.

It isn’t just this year’s rookies who were needed in order to cross from one side of the canyon to the playoffs on the other side. It was previous draft picks too.

After Michael Pierce’s opt out, co-defensive coordinator Andre Patterson expressed confidence the Vikings’ interior defensive line would be fine with inexperienced players getting a chance. He harkened back to a game against the Cowboys last year in which 2017 fourth-round pick Johnson, veteran Shamar Stephen and 2019 sixth-rounder Armon Watts played their hearts out. But so far, Johnson is 142nd and Watts ranks 149th out of 154 defensive tackles who have played in the NFL this year by Pro Football Focus’s grades.

There are plenty of other examples.

Bisi Johnson, a seventh-round success story from 2019, took over the No. 2 receiver role. He has four catches for 80 yards in two games, most of which came after the game was decided against Green Bay.

Dru Samia, a fourth-rounder from Oklahoma, took Elflein’s spot at right guard and produced the second worst PFF grade of Week 2.

Fourth-rounder Jalyn Holmes has zero pressures in two games and Ifeadi Odenigbo, Griffen’s once-assumed replacement, has two pressures.

First-rounder Mike Hughes had a rough opener and now is injured. Undrafted free agent Holton Hill has allowed 11 catches on 15 targets for 144 yards.

Nearly every player the Vikings figured could fill the shoes of a staple from the previous five years has flopped in the first two weeks.

Two things need to be said at this point: 1) That could all change in a hurry because things change quickly in the NFL and young players can make progress 2) It might not be a bad thing that everything has gone awry because it gives the Vikings a chance to possibly draft high next year and to understand how far they have to go.

In fact, you could paint this thing pretty rosy. Go through one tough season to bounce back in 2021 and you’ll never regret the hard times.

But here’s the snag: Kirk Cousins’s extension.

Everything else is a work-around. If the Ngakoue trade doesn’t look good after 2020, that’s not crushing to the Vikings’ future. If Johnson and Watts don’t improve, sign a three-tech or draft one. If Cleveland can’t play tackle, keep Reiff or draft somebody else.

There aren’t many options with Cousins’s contract.

Here’s how it works: The Vikings have to make a decision by the third day of the league year in 2021 whether to keep or cut Cousins. If they cut him, they take on his entire dead cap hit for 2021. If they keep him, he’s set to make $45 million on the cap in 2022. The only way to move Cousins is to trade him.

If Cousins was not signed to an extension, the Vikings would have all the options in the world. They could wait and see how he handles this adversity and then sign him to an extension. They could let him play the deal out. They could trade him to a team with an injured QB (i.e. Denver) on an expiring contract. And they could potentially be in line for picking Trevor Lawrence, Justin Fields or Trey Lance, the three top QB prospects in the 2021 draft.

Now that’s all much trickier. Not just from a cap perspective or trade perspective but from a why-did-you-make-this-move perspective. When the Vikings signed him, they envisioned still being good this year and then being great next year. They did it in part to create cap space to sign someone like Pierce. They figured all Cousins needed was a few more playmakers, another offensive lineman and a little bit of good fortune. It seems they figured his 2019 season in which he set career highs in PFF grade and QB rating was the norm and not the outlier — that they found the perfect system for him and things would fall into place from there.

Kirk Cousins has proven he can win with a good team but it appears they might need a lot of work to get back to being good. Photo courtesy of the Minnesota Vikings

But in Cousins’s career he’s been every bit as good as the team around him. He ranked 18th by PFF in 2017 when Washington was rebuilding and eighth in 2016 when they had DeSean Jackson, Pierre Garcon and a healthy O-line.

So now that everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, Cousins has struggled in the first two weeks. You can debate how much of it is his fault until you suck the air out of US Bank Stadium but Cousins’s history suggests that he is like many other quarterback whose circumstances play a big role in his success. See Jared Goff, Carson Wentz, probably Jimmy Garoppolo, Matt Stafford etc.

Cousins’s extension puts a few things in play here: Even with a rebuild, it’s not certain that the timelines match up between him being in Minnesota and the roster peaking. If we consider 2013 as similar to this year, it wasn’t until four years later in 2017 they went 13-3.

The other part is that he’s probably too good to land Trevor Lawrence or Justin Fields. Cousins’s worst year as a full-time starter saw him go 7-9 on a team whose defense ranked 27th in yards allowed. If we compare him to recent Wentz, Goff and Stafford, last year Wentz’s receivers all got hurt and he went 9-7, Goff’s O-line was awful and he went 9-7 and Stafford had Matt Patricia’s abysmal coaching for in 2018 and went 6-10.

Over the last five years, all five teams that drafted No. 1 overall had a bottom five quarterback rating. Nothing in Cousins’s past says he can get to that level of bad. The only way the Vikings could have gotten there is — you guessed it — trade Cousins. And it’s hard to see any team making that phone call to the Vikings at this point.

They’re in a spot where they can only reasonably root for him to turn it around and make a late-season push for the postseason. And that very well may happen and change the outlook on everything — though teams that go 0-3 have about a 4% chance of making the playoffs so Sunday’s game could determine how we feel about that possibility.

If they go 7-9, the Vikings will have few choices other than to build the roster back up around Cousins and pray that they hit on more draft picks from the 2020 group than in the previous couple years.

So that’s the spot they’re in. It isn’t time to fold the franchise but it’s not an easy place to be.

The question is: If it doesn’t change course on a dime this year and if it all plays out the way that the worst fears of Vikings fans can see it playing out (say, with a few more seasons of being good-not-great and then resetting a few years down the road) should we look back and say that they should have known it would all go this way?

Assuming the team understood the notion of Cousins being as good as the supporting cast and saw him as a Wentz/Goff/Jimmy G type, the area you could question is the front office believing that their number would keep coming up.

Someone with time on their hands could take a day and go back and see how many times they name dropped Danielle Hunter when drafting a lanky defensive end (spoiler: it’s a lot) but none of them have turned into the next Danielle Hunter.

They found good guards in Nick Easton and Joe Berger off the scrap heap. That hasn’t happened again.

They found Stefon Diggs in the fifth and Adam Thielen on a tryout. That hasn’t happened again despite bringing in oodles of UDFA receivers and picking guys like Rodney Adams and Stacy Coley in the late rounds.

The 2015 draft in which they got Waynes, Eric Kendricks, Hunter and Diggs was a stroke of wonderful luck that gets repeated once every decade at best.

Blaming them for drafts is rough though. Every study ever done on the subject has found that no team is consistently excellent at drafting. But the reality is that they had no safety net for poor drafts. Cousins’s contract (among a number of others like Kyle Rudolph and Anthony Barr etc.) forced them into a situation where they had to rely on young players working out. They no longer could afford to have a Jarius Wright hanging around on a decent veteran receiver contract. They could no longer afford to add a veteran corner or defensive tackle or guard if they were going to trade for someone like Ngakoue.

If the salary cap was actually a myth, you can be sure they would have stocked up on more depth.

Could they have known the cap thing would get them eventually? Sure. Preventing it is a different story.

Though that debate might depend on how far you want to go back in time. If they never sign Cousins, maybe things are quite different. But at that point we’re winding the clock back to the team fully and rightfully believing they could be Super Bowl contenders. That feels like a long time ago.

If we get down to brass tacks, the Vikings’ sudden decline probably falls under the category of being inevitable. Even franchises with great quarterbacks have rises and falls. The New Orleans Saints dipped to three straight 7-9 seasons from 2014 to 2016. The Seattle Seahawks saw their defense corrode and they have been much more of a first-round out team than Super Bowl contender in recent years. The Atlanta Falcons slid after they reached the Super Bowl in 2016. The Philadelphia Eagles are 0-2 after back-to-back mediocre seasons since 2017. That’s the nature of the beast.

So could the Vikings have looked into their crystal ball and seen that coming? Yes. Does any successful franchise ever believe their downfall is right around the corner? Probably not.

The question now is what comes next. A 7-9 season that puts them in purgatory? A 3-13 season that puts them in a spot to draft the next franchise quarterback? Well, with the Vikings, they might somehow go to that fork in the road and go straight too.

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