What if job security wasn't an issue?
The Vikings have been in win-now mode for years -- would teams in their position take a long-term approach if jobs weren't on the line?
By Matthew Coller
When the Minnesota Vikings’ brass has its final meetings in front of the gigantic electronic prospect board inside TCO Performance Center, regret will linger from last year’s trade for Yannick Ngakoue.
The 2021 NFL Draft is loaded with talent and a number of players with first-round grades are expected to spill over into the second round, where the Jacksonville Jaguars will happily make the 45th overall pick — the one that the Vikings gave them for a six-game stint of Ngakoue.
In a year where opt outs and the lack of an NFL Combine have increased uncertainty in the draft, there may have never been a better time to have a second-round pick. If the Vikings want to get back into the robust second round, they’ll have to sacrifice more assets.
The Ngakoue trade especially stings with the fact that the Vikings have been more successful in the second round in recent years than the first. Eric Kendricks, Dalvin Cook, Brian O’Neill and Irv Smith Jr. were all second-round picks who have become either good players or superstars.
You might say that hindsight is 20/20 on the Ngakoue trade and you’d be right. At the time of the deal, it appeared the Vikings got a short- and long-term solution. It looked like they were getting a cohort to play across from Danielle Hunter or a rusher to fill his shoes during an injury stint. It also appeared they were going to sign Ngakoue to an extension and have a pass-rushing duo for years to come. Once the Vikings discovered Ngakoue wasn’t a good fit, they made the right choice bailing on him and recouping a third-round pick from the Baltimore Ravens.
But the bigger picture hindsight interpretation of the deal is this: They acquired Ngakoue because were desperate not to be bad in 2020.
In 2019, rumors circled heading into their playoff game against the New Orleans Saints that ownership could make a coaching change (and maybe more) if the Vikings lost to the Saints in the Wild Card round. A brutal Week 16 loss to the Packers put them in the spotlight, having failed to make the playoffs the year before in a tumultuous 2018 season. In the NFL, two seasons without a playoff win after signing a QB to the largest contract in history (at the time) is usually enough to have coaches and GMs on the unemployment line.
The Vikings beat the Saints but lost to the 49ers without much of a fight. Ultimately Mike Zimmer and Rick Spielman signed three-year contract extensions, though it took all summer in order to do so and Zimmer admitted at one point that he was growing frustrated with the process.
Prior to the Zimmer era, pulling off a first-round upset would have made for a pretty nice season. Once they took a 5-11 team in 2013 to the 2017 NFC Championship, expectations changed. When they signed Cousins, expectations in the subsequent years became be-really-good-or-bust.
With short careers and a salary cap, there’s only so long you can be really good in the NFL without Tom Brady at QB.
In 2020 the Vikings reached a crossroads with many of their players from the 2017 defense exiting due to cap casualty or free agency. They decided to push forth with Cousins, signing him to an extension, and then used the cap space from his extension to sign Michael Pierce. The Vikings franchise tagged Anthony Harris to ensure their secondary would have a veteran presence and then drafted two corners in the first three rounds with hopes they could contribute right away.
They didn’t trade any aging or expensive players for future picks as teams often do during a reboot or rebuild. Instead their big move was Ngakoue, a trade that made it 100% clear that the Vikings’ decision makers believed they could be a contender with one more piece.
Zimmer later said they “miscalculated.”
From the outside, where jobs aren’t on the line, the situation heading into 2020 was a little more clear. It wasn’t too difficult to see that the roster was thin in so many places that if anything went wrong, they were going to miss the playoffs. In fact, two Pro Football Focus analysts predicted on the Purple Insider podcast that the Vikings would go 7-9 or 6-10 in 2020 for that reason. It was also foreseeable that the Cousins contract would ultimately make things more difficult with the cap.
Many folks who have been trained by the “trust the process” 76ers or Ricky Bobby’s art of “if you ain’t first you’re last” might have figured that a wiser long game would have been to let Cousins hit free agency after 2020 and look for the golden ticket of a good QB on a rookie contract.
Had they taken the approach of stepping back in 2020, the Vikings would still have a second-round pick, $30 million more in cap space and be walking into a draft with five or six first-round quarterbacks.
None of this is to suggest that Kirk Cousins is bad or that the decision makers ruined the franchise’s future but it certainly raises a question about whether pressure concerning their job status influenced the brass to make short-term decisions last offseason.
This offseason’s moves have brought about many of the same questions.
In a piece in The Athletic by Mike Sando, anonymous executives wondered if throwing money at the problem on defense to sign players like Dalvin Tomlinson and Patrick Peterson was the right approach.
“Zimmer’s first mistake was saying he’d never had a bad defense,” an exec told Sando. “His second mistake was going for the quick fix in free agency with risky vets instead of coaching those young guys they brought in. They run that complex scheme and when it doesn’t work, it’s the execution, so they sign vets.”
“They paid an old, declining corner and they paid a nose tackle,” an exec said. “I’m not a fan, but that’s what Zimmer wants to do with his defense, and he has had great defenses. Maybe this is what stirs the drink.”
There’s a hint of Ngakoue trade in the air. A whiff of gotta-win-now. Teams that are playing the long game don’t usually restructure every contract in sight to sign a 31-year-old corner coming off his worst year.
Now, the moves may work out great and the Vikings’ defense could return to form in 2020 with the return of injured players and development of last year’s draft picks. Zimmer’s history suggests he always bounces back and the Vikings could be very good if things break right. However, the prediction experts in Vegas don’t see it that way. The Vikings opened with only a 43% chance to finish with a winning record in 2021 per DK Sportsbook.
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It’s hard not to wonder how the last two offseasons might have been different if the philosophical approach after 2019 was that the winning window closed in San Francisco.
“I can guarantee you they don’t put the franchise tag on Anthony Harris and they probably trade Riley Reiff when they’re sitting there at 1-5,” PFF’s Eric Eager said on the Purple Insider podcast. “If they do that, now we’re talking about the eighth pick in the draft, the seventh pick in the draft and you’re looking at this saying, oh my goodness we get Mac Jones or Trey Lance and if we want to get spunky we move up to the third pick and we can get Justin Fields or Zach Wilson.”
But stepping back like that is not often possible in an NFL that fires one-third of the league’s coaches and GMs every year.
What if there wasn’t pressure to either win or get fired?
What if GMs and coaches had terms like politicians instead of contracts that are basically year-to-year? What if they had five or 10 years and then got reelected or replaced at the end rather than working under the gun at all times? Would we see many teams handle things differently?
Former Eagles and Saints scout and ex-Bills director of player personnel Jim Monos, who now appears on the Go Long Podcast with former Bleacher Report writer Tyler Dunne, thinks that executives would operate differently and often smarter in a system that didn’t constantly put them in the crosshairs.
“I think in theory what you’re saying is the correct way to sustain success,” Monos said “If you don’t feel that rush to win this year, you can make more sound decisions, especially financially and drafting too.
Monos used the Raiders and Bears, who intersect at the Khalil Mack trade, as examples. One team’s top decision makers Jon Gruden has complete job security. The other, Bears GM Ryan Pace, faces constant discussion about job status.
While Gruden faced scrutiny for trading Mack at the time, his 10-year contract allowed the Raiders to look at the roster and make the decision that paying one pass rusher $141 million before they were ready to compete for a Super Bowl was not a smart move.
“People were killing [the Mack trade], they have a quarterback with Carr in place and they’re trying to build this thing….the Raiders did the right thing,” Monos said.
On the Bears’ side, their trade up to draft Mitch Trubisky blew up, so they acquired veteran journeyman quarterback Nick Foles.
“When you feel pressure, the head coach goes out and picks Nick Foles because he knows his offense even though Trubisky was clearly better than Nick Foles,” Monos said. “When you’re feeling pressure, these are the types of moves you make. Nick Foles was a desperation move.”
Though they are at different sides of the spectrum in terms of decision making, both clubs have slumped into the middle of the pack in the NFL because their draft picks did not work out. The picks acquired in the Mack trade for the Raiders, Trubisky for the Bears.
As a former scout, Monos feels that missing on draft picks can reasonably be considered a fireable offense, but history tells us that no team is consistently good at drafting over long periods of time.
“Year to year, you can have this [great] draft with the same staff and same GM and pull off a garbage draft,” Mono said.
PFF’s Timo Riske studied the matter and found drafting success or failure happened in short bursts but long term it was questionable whether any team was actually better at drafting.
Riske wrote: “…this doesn’t mean that there aren’t any differences between teams and their scouting departments when evaluating draft prospects. It does mean that the statistical evidence for the existence of significant differences is fragile, to say the least.”
Monos explained that the entire Bills staff was in agreement that Sammy Watkins was the best player in the 2014 draft so they traded up to get him, a move that did not ultimately end up changing the franchise’s trajectory even if all sorts of professional evaluators in their building believed him to be the best prospect.
“[Fans and media] think ‘I can pick better than they can’ but until you’re in it — and the other thing that’s hard is, do you know how many other people’s decisions you’re factoring in?” Monos said. “You have your scouts, you have to have your coaches involved because they throw a fit. You might have 10 damn reports on one guy in college and they could be 10 different things. That’s the problem. That’s where it gets hard.”
The Vikings have gone through this too. In 2015, they nailed the draft of the decade by picking Trae Waynes, Eric Kendricks, Danielle Hunter and Stefon Diggs. The very next year, the most valuable player picked was Mackensie Alexander, who just returned to the team on a veteran minimum deal. The lack of hits from the 2016-2019 drafts left the Vikings short on depth heading into the 2020 season.
From the outside, separating bad luck and bad process is a tricky beast. Was it bad process to pick Laquon Treadwell over Michael Thomas when the rest of the league made the same mistake of passing on Thomas?
At the same time, the Vikings have drafted for instant needs in recent years because of the pressure to win now. They may have missed opportunities because of that.
That brings us to another hypothetical: What if the Vikings’ brass had a new five or 10-year term that started in 2021. How would they have approached this offseason?
“Being more of a probabilistic guy, if I had a six-year contract for my coach and six-year contract for my GM, I probably trade Cousins to a team that’s looking for that next QB and build the thing back up,” Eric Eager said on the Purple Insider podcast.
Monos hasn’t covered the Vikings closely but he knows how he’d do things as a GM differently.
“If I’m the GM and somebody tells me you have five years and you’re getting judged on your draft picks and free agency and the GM has final say, I wouldn’t give two sh—s what the coach said about any player,” Monos said. “I’d say ‘OK listen, my job is to give you talent, you figure it out.’ I’m telling you, it’s my job on the line or I’m telling you this defensive tackle can play, I don’t care if you run a 3-4 or 4-3. You have to care a little bit with scheme but at the end of the day the great players can play in any scheme. If I had five years and I know I’m getting judged on picking talent, I’m just picking talent.”
Zimmer said last week in his pre-draft press conference that the Vikings are in position to take the “best player available” this year but in recent seasons they traded up to take Dalvin Cook to replace Adrian Peterson, selected Garrett Bradbury because they were switching running systems and picked Justin Jefferson and Jeff Gladney to replace Stefon Diggs and Xavier Rhodes. It doesn’t seem likely that with needs along the offensive and defensive line they’ll take BPA but if they had five years, maybe they would.
Obviously the five/10-year term idea will never happen. Owners would never sign off on having to sit and watch as their decision makers’ full plan either came to fruition or not. Even Monos can’t fully get behind it.
“I want to support the theory of a 10-year contract…in theory I like it because I’m a believer in stability but I think you have to be held accountable as well,” Monos said.
So here’s the question: How should owners handle GMs and coaches? Monos has two ideas: To tie both the GM and coach together and make it clear which one has final say.
“When you start mixing the ‘the coach is calling a good game but we’re not drafting good players,’ well every coach is going to tell you that they don’t have good players and every GM is going to tell you they’re not being used right,” Monos said. “When you’re an owner you have to sync those guys up and pick which one you want to have the power.”
The Vikings’ owners have checked the box of tying the GM and coach together. It has never been made clear who has final say on roster moves but the team has certainly been built in Zimmer’s vision.
We’ll never know whether they would have handled things differently over the last two years with immunity from being fired. We can only say that it might have given them the freedom to take a broader view. Then again, as Monos points out, there’s always second guessing no matter what kind of pressure exists on decision makers.
“Coaches don’t get it right all the time, we don’t get it right all the time,” Monos said. “That’s why everybody wants to work in football.”
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All the numbers, statistics, logic, reasoning, long-term game plan and so forth... all of it DOES makes sense, really... it does. But as a fan of any sports team, it feels like forcing yourself to drown submitting to the mindset of losing now for success later.
That "later" is not really guaranteed, so I believe that's the major cause for pause. You never know what players or coaches will be around, injuries can happen on and off the field, even circumstances with opponents can dramatically change... hindsight is the obvious shoulder shrug, but I'm a huge fan of giving it your all everyday, every week, every season. Rather go that route and debate mistakes later.
Like this scenario over the way their trying to rebuild the defense with guy like Patrick Peterson that has a lot of question marks. And then disregarding the offense is just not the way to build a super bowl roster. I just think there was better ways to spend their cap space. With their schedule next season I can't be see anything better than a 8-9 year.