The final offseason shoe drops
The Steelers acquired cornerback Jalen Ramsey, leaving few game-changing options for the Vikings left if they want to upgrade the secondary
By Matthew Coller
It never seemed particularly likely that the Minnesota Vikings would trade for Miami Dolphins cornerback Jalen Ramsey but the Pittsburgh Steelers acquiring Ramsey and tight end Jonnu Smith for Minkah Fitzpatrick on Monday made it nearly officially official that the Vikings will head into training camp with the secondary they currently have in place.
Could have pulled off such a deal had they badly wanted Ramsey?
It’s tough to put a finger on who they would have been able to deal the Dolphins that would have matched the value of Fitzpatrick. He is a five-time Pro Bowler and three-time All-Pro who is still in his prime at 28 years old.
The Vikings wouldn’t have been interested in moving Byron Murphy Jr. after they signed him to a new three-year contract this offseason and he is viewed as part of the “hub of communication” for the second. Isaiah Rodgers likely wouldn’t have been enough to intrigue Miami based on the fact he has never been a full-time starter and signed in free agency at a very reasonable price. The best guess might be multi-dimensional safety Josh Metellus and better draft capital (second-round pick?) than the late-round pick swap they made with Pittsburgh could have moved the needle. The Dolphins were seemingly destined to move Smith to the Steelers; could the Vikings have offered them Mekhi Blackmon and TJ Hockenson for Ramsey?
Giving up enough to meet Miami’s price would have been a massive shakeup to the Vikings lineup, which wouldn’t make much sense after winning 14 games and building on the same foundation with moves this offseason. Any deal the Vikings could have made for Ramsey would have also come at an additional cost: The Steelers took on “the bulk” of Ramsey’s contract, according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter. Ramsey’s deal carries a $16.6 million cap hit in 2025. That goes up to $25.0 million next year and cutting him prior to June 1 would carry $18 million in dead cap. The only option for a reasonable way out of his deal would be a June 1 designation.
The Vikings are a cap-healthy team due to JJ McCarthy playing on his rookie contract but if they had dealt for Ramsey and the move did not work out, his contract would have put them back in Dead Money Land, where they just escaped in 2025. Giving up key players or high draft capital in 2026 and taking on the risk of a 30+ year old player whose contract could become an anchor was probably too much for GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah.
Pittsburgh and Minnesota are also in very different spots in their roster building timelines. You can certainly argue that it’s go time for the Vikings when it comes to their “winning window” because McCarthy is presently cheap and the roster is filled with veterans in their late-20s and 30s like Brian O’Neill, Javon Hargrave, Jonathan Allen, TJ Hockenson, Andrew Van Ginkel, Jonathan Greenard, Blake Cashman, Ryan Kelly, Byron Murphy Jr. and Harrison Smith but the Vikings have also set themselves up to be competitive for years to come. Their biggest driving force player Justin Jefferson is mid-prime and when other players do decline in the coming years, they presumably will be able to restock because of the cap situation due to the rookie contract and environment they have created and ability to woo free agents to Minnesota. If McCarthy is good enough to win games, the “window” can stay open for several more years.
The Steelers are in 2021 Vikings mode where their front office and coaching staff are desperately flailing to win in order to save their jobs. After years and years of hovering around .500 and getting bounced out of the playoffs early, the ice seems to be quite thin for head coach Mike Tomlin. Nothing signified that more than the offseason moves that preceded the Ramsey trade i.e. acquiring DK Metcalf and giving him a ridiculous $32 million per year contract coming off his worst season since his rookie year and then signing 41-year-old Aaron Rodgers. Pittsburgh has put themselves in a position where there is no other option except winning in 2025. Why not make a crazy trade that screws over the cap in the future? There is no future unless they win.
That’s where the last few years matter so much to the Vikings’ brass. You could cynically look at 2022-2024 and say that failing to win postseason games made all of that for naught — and that’s fair considering expectations when you win 13 or 14 games — but within the last three years the head coach and general manager earned second contracts and the cache with ownership to lead the franchise in the best way they see fit. They are not leading it under the stress of having to save their bacon every offseason. That was how we got such tremendous moves as a fourth-round pick for Chris Herndon or a fifth-rounder for kicker-slash-punter Kaare Vedvik from the once-savvy Rick Spielman.
You could argue that the Vikings made all-in moves this offseason like signing Ryan Kelly, Javon Hargrave and Jonathan Allen but those players aren’t the foundation of the franchise. They are the furniture. They are there to enhance the franchise players like Greenard, Jefferson, McCarthy etc. Former Packers cap guy Andrew Brandt said on Twitter/X that the Steelers are building a 2022 All-Star team. That’s right. They have now built their foundation on stuff that others didn’t want.
Having said all that, let’s not pretend like Ramsey wouldn’t have been a great addition for the Vikings. Had they been able to pry him away from Miami at an affordable cost, Brian Flores’s defense would have been scary good on all three levels. Last season he graded as the eighth best corner in the NFL by Pro Football Focus and a top-10 tackling grade and 12 QB pressures as a blitzer. All of that screams B-Flo.
Not landing him (or Jaire Alexander) leaves them still with question marks in the secondary. Rodgers’s career high in snaps is 525 and that came in 2021 and Blackmon has 434 snaps to his name. Behind them Jeff Okudah has bounced around the league after being drafted No. 3 overall by the Lions in 2020 and Dwight McGlothern only saw 20 defensive snaps in 2024 following a strong training camp.
Something interesting about Flores, however, is that he has been comfortable making bets on players without requiring huge sample sizes. If we think about some of his previous success stories, he didn’t have to see a ton in order to believe in his evaluation. For example, safety Josh Metellus only played special teams and a handful of snaps before Flores decided to make him one of the most important players on the defense in 2023 and play him 1,000 snaps. It worked. Flores only saw UDFA Ivan Pace Jr. in training camp and decided to start him over third-round pick Brian Asamoah. That worked out well and Pace Jr. has become a key run defender and blitzer. Kevin O’Connell even showed players in rookie minicamp a highlight of Pace Jr. intercepting a pass in 2023 as evidence that UDFAs have a chance to make it in Minnesota.
If Flores’s eye is just as sharp with Rodgers and Blackmon as it was with Metellus and Pace Jr., then the secondary might just end up being a strength rather than a question mark.
The other part of the equation is that the starting corners alongside Murphy Jr. in 2024 — Shaq Griffin and Stephon Gilmore — finished last season with PFF coverage grades of 62.4 and 60.4 respectively and the defense still ended the year fifth in points allowed. With so much infrastructure around the weakest points of the defense, whether it be in the form of scheme, blitzes or the talent of the front seven, the bar for playing No. 2 and No. 3 corner in this defense may be lower than other places in order to still be elite as a team.
The silver lining of the cornerback position is also that there are always dudes on the market in the summertime. Last year they signed Gilmore only a few weeks before Week 1 and he put together a solid season. Proven players like Rasul Douglas, Asante Samuel Jr., Mike Hilton and Jalen Mills are still on the free agent market, giving the Vikings options if they are not happy with the direction of the CB group during training camp.
Bottom line: It would have been really, really good for the Vikings to land Ramsey had it been plausible. Based on the return that Miami got from the Steelers, it was not plausible. Had their hopes for a top-notch defense been resting on a single trade for a cornerback, it would be tough to miss out on Ramsey. But because of the moves they have made over several years, the defense remains in an excellent spot.
Agree they are more than likely set at this point outside of maybe a veteran depth add to the cb room depending on how they look in camp. There aren’t any really big names left out there, and there just aren’t a lot of spots on the roster you could see them clearly improving via trade. Said it on the podcast last night, though, that if McCarthy comes to camp and just blows them away I could see them making one last splash to go completely all in. No idea who that would be, but seems like Kwesi’s bigger trades (Hockenson and Mason) just come out of the blue. Maybe that’s just me trying to expect them to finally do something crazy when they’ve shown for the last few years that they just don’t do that kind of stuff.