Once Mr. Irrelevant gets announced and the NFL Draft officially finishes, the next moments are anything but calm for the front offices of all 32 teams.

Immediately after the draft, all 32 teams start working to add additional prospects to their 90-man roster through undrafted free agents. For most of the players signed at the conclusion of the draft, the only guarantee is a spot on the training camp roster. In fact, most players won’t make their teams’ opening-day roster, instead landing in developmental leagues like the UFL or on a practice squad.

For some, though, undrafted free agency is only the beginning of a rather long career in the NFL.

After making the Seattle Seahawks’ original 53-man roster in 2024, North Dakota State center Jalen Sundell quickly saw playing time as a rotational offensive lineman. Last season, Sundell was the Seahawks’ starting center during their Super Bowl run.

While most teams will only add a handful of undrafted free agents to their 53-man roster, there’s a good chance more than a few will become reliable players, even if it takes a few years of actual development.

In the 2026 NFL Draft, 70 players in the top 300 of the Consensus Big Board went undrafted. Headlining that list were Alabama linebacker Deontae Lawson (No. 117) and Baylor tight end Michael Trigg (No. 118). However, there are plenty of players outside of that top 300 that have a strong chance of carving out roles in the NFL, and even making their team’s initial 53-man roster after cutdowns.

Toledo RB Chip Trayanum — New York Jets (306th on the Consensus Big Board)

Despite reaching the mountain top by playing at Ohio State for two seasons, it wasn’t until his fourth college and seventh season that Chip Trayanum found his groove. In one season at Toledo, Trayanum earned first-team All-MAC honors after leading the team in rushing with 1,015 yards and 12 touchdowns.

Even though Trayanum is an older prospect with average speed, it was surprising that he went undrafted. Between his contact balance and strength, Trayanum is a challenge to bring down for any defensive player, making him the perfect short-yardage back for NFL teams. He needs to work on his pass blocking, but his receiving ability gives him some third-down upside in the future.

The Jets’ running back room is crowded, especially after Breece Hall’s extension, but there’s a pathway for Trayanum to make the roster over either Isaiah Davis or Kene Nwangwu, who offers upside as a returner.

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UCLA DT Gary Smith III — Las Vegas Raiders (319th)

Gary Smith III will likely never offer much more than being a reliable run stopper in the NFL. The good news for Smith is that being a big body in the middle of a defense is a skill set that will continue to get players paid.

While Smith doesn’t offer much athletically, his 2025 film showed more explosiveness and quickness than any other season, likely a direct byproduct of him losing 20 pounds following a season-ending injury in 2024. Even with that increased quickness, Smith’s calling card is pure strength and aggressive hands, making him an intriguing space-eating nose tackle.

Although the Raiders had a reasonably good run defense last season, there isn’t a lot of talent on the Raiders’ defensive line. Players like JJ Pegues (a sixth-round pick in 2025) and Adam Butler will likely see a bulk of the playing time, but there’s a pathway for someone like Smith to crack the 53-man roster and even see playing time as a rookie if he can beat fellow rookie, seventh-round pick Brandon Cleveland, and players like former Lions, Chiefs and Steelers defensive tackle Brodric Martin.

Oregon State SAF Skyler Thomas — Chicago Bears (373rd)

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With the 18th overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft, the Minnesota Vikings selected Caleb Banks, DT out of the University of Florida. In a draft full of surprises, Banks was nevertheless one of the most surprising picks of the first round, ranked 37th by the consensus board and taken in front of two other interior defenders ranked ahead of him in Peter Woods and Kayden McDonald.

In drafting a player who was rated much lower by consensus, it makes sense to question whether the Vikings should have tried to trade back and draft Banks later to at least recoup some value if the team was going to reach. It’s reasonable to infer that the Philadelphia Eagles would have been willing to offer the trade they made with the Dallas Cowboys at 20 to go up to 18 with the Vikings. To move up, the Eagles traded 23, along with two 4th-round picks — 114 and 137 — while acquiring a 2027 7th-round pick on the way back.

Pasting that exact trade would have the Vikings losing by about a fringe 4th/5th round pick on the Jimmy Johnson chart — coincidentally exactly pick 137 — but exactly equal on the Rich Hill chart and as significant winners on the analytics-based charts. Assuming Banks would still be there at 23, and he likely would, the trade would be a huge win for the Vikings.

The Vikings faced a similar situation last year, where they reached compared to consensus on Donovan Jackson. The two teams immediately behind them, the Texans and Rams, traded back and gained capital.

Navigating the board is an important skill for a GM and a big part of the reason Kwesi Adofo-Mensah got fired, so it’s disappointing that the Vikings chose not to try that with this pick. It could be the case that the people steering the ship now, specifically Kevin O’Connell, are averse to trading down in the first round after the failure of Lewis Cine and Andrew Booth in the 2022 draft.

Table of Contents:

• Caleb Banks and the Consensus Board

• Why the Low Rank?

• Athletic Testing

• Production

• Film

  • Athletic Ability

  • Hand Usage

  • Power

  • Mental Processing

  • Effort

• Summary and Role Fit

Caleb Banks and the Consensus Board

It would be one thing if Banks were a uniquely polarizing prospect — the evidence suggests that reaches are more justified for those players — but the range of ranks across analysts for the Florida defensive tackle was about average. Ty Simpson, Malachi Lawrence and Keylan Rutledge were far more polarizing.

Banks was generally ranked between 29th and 45th among analysts, though there were extremes — three analysts ranked Banks below the 120 mark, and three analysts ranked him in the top 15, including one top-ten ranking.

Usually, with big steals or reaches, the Forecaster board — which consists of analysts who have access to insider information like Dane Brugler and Todd McShay — ranks the steal and/or reach closer to their actual NFL draft slot. That wasn’t the case this time, with the Forecaster board ranking him 40th.

Gridiron Grading was one of the analysts who ranked Banks beyond slot 120, placing him 121st overall. They don’t have a written scouting report, but they do have a card covering some production and athleticism metrics, which we’ll cover in more detail later on.

To get good context for the general regard among those skeptical of Banks, we need to find written scouting reports or recorded analysis of Banks. CBS Sports’ Mike Renner, who ranked Banks 92nd overall, has both.

Renner wrote in his big board piece, “No defensive tackle in the class has more impressive reps on film than Banks. When he puts it all together, he looks truly dominant. The problem is those reps are nowhere near consistent. That’s concerning for a player who missed most of 2025 with an ankle injury and has played fewer than 1,000 snaps in his career.”

For CBS Sports, he also recorded a video grading the pick, saying “My lowest grade yet, it’s a D for this pick for a number of different reasons. I think we’ll start with the positives though. Caleb Banks is a prodigious physical talent. He is 6’6”, 327 pounds with an over 7-ft wingspan and his get-off is special. When he gets off low into contact, he can have some dominant reps.”

He added, “Problem is we just never saw it consistently at Florida or throughout his career in college. He only had 14 career run stops over five seasons in college football. And then this past year, he breaks his foot mid-season, comes back, plays a little at the end, doesn’t look like the dominant guy he necessarily did at the end of 2024, goes to Senior Bowl, has an okay week, but then he broke his foot yet again at the NFL Combine, had to have another surgery.”

“So, a big guy with multiple surgeries in the past year who’s never been consistent is just to me too much of a risk to take at number 18 overall, even if his physical tools are at the high end for the position,” he finished.

Joe Goodberry was also a critic of the pick and ranked Banks 79th overall. His scouting report goes over many of the same elements. Impressed with Banks’ athleticism, he wrote, “Caleb Banks has flashes of a super star. He can move laterally and jump a gap at the snap in a blink or he can bull rush right through blockers with ease. The high-end plays are truly incredible.”

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“The flashes are what will sell teams, but Banks has a ways to go before he’s that player on a consistent basis. Too often, Banks plays with poor leverage and conditioning,” he adds. He called Banks “one of the worst tacklers we’ve ever seen.”

At the high end, we see Charles McDonald of Yahoo! Sports, who ranked Banks ninth overall. During the Yahoo! livestream of the draft, he said, “He’s got things that you can’t teach. 6’6” 330, and he ran a 5-second 40-yard dash with a 35-inch vertical on the broken foot. I’m a Falcons fan, so when I see that, I think Julio Jones, right? Because that’s what he did back in 2011 when he ran the 4.3 on the broken foot. And he’s got things that are really hard to teach, too, like the block recognition. When your hands and feet are supposed to be synchronized with the defense as the play goes. He’s got moves, he’s got great awareness.”

He caveated with his primary negative, adding, “It’s just the tackling, man. He’s got, what, like two tackles in three games? And I swear to god he could have had 10 TFLs in those games. But he just can’t finish.” Reasoning it out, he said, “I guess they’re probably looking at it like, ‘can Brian Flores teach this guy how to tackle? Because if he can, you’ve got an All-Pro defensive tackle because there’s just not guys that are built like this that can move like that.”

When Andrew Siciliano pushed back, suggesting it’s asking quite a lot for the 18th overall pick to be taught how to tackle, McDonald responded by adding, “But what I don’t have to do is teach him how to read a down block in real time and how to split double teams, and that’s the hard stuff. We can get the framework and the strength and the technique he already has. You can do the hard stuff, why can’t you just tackle the guy?”

Renner’s coworker at CBS, Ryan Wilson, ranked Banks 15th overall on his big board. He didn’t place Banks in his final first-round mock draft, reasoning that the injury could spook teams off of him, but the last time he placed Banks in a mock, he said, “At 6-foot-6 and 330 pounds with 35-inch arms, Banks is surprisingly explosive for his size, playing with power, juice and a nonstop motor. A foot injury sidelined him for parts of the 2025 season, but he took part in all three Senior Bowl practices and was pretty much unblockable on every rep. If he’s fully healthy, he has top-10 ability.”

One of the experts who placed Banks closer to his median outcome, Lance Zierlein for NFL.com, wrote of Banks when ranking him 33rd overall, “Big-framed, long-limbed interior defender whose play needs more polish to consistently match his traits. Banks has a quick first step. He can stun/control single blocks when his hand strikes are timely and accurate, but he needs faster disengagement to increase his tackle count. His high center of gravity allows double teams to generate displacement, so a move to odd-front end could be in his best interest as a run defender.”

“Like a grappler without submission knowledge,” Zierlein wrote, “Banks is still learning to unlock his physical advantages so he can turn them into sacks. His traits and flashes at the Senior Bowl make him an enticing prospect, but injury concerns are a potential stumbling block for him.”

It seems as though, despite his middling variance score for players ranked around 37th overall, Banks was generally regarded as an extremely boom-or-bust prospect.

Why The Low Rank?

A large part of the reason Banks was ranked so low on the consensus board was a tumultuous 2025 season and pre-draft process. Banks broke his foot in Florida’s training camp before the season. He tried to play through the injury, but reaggravated it in his first game, against LSU. He underwent surgery to repair the Jones fracture he had suffered in his fifth metatarsal.

He recovered from that injury and was able to get healthy to play the final two games of Florida’s season, when the team was 3-7. Healthy, Banks attacked the pre-draft process, competing in the Senior Bowl and testing at the Combine. However, during his athletic testing preparation, he broke his foot again, this time a fourth metatarsal fracture. He was able to put up his excellent athletic testing despite that fracture, but the repeat injuries caused his draft stock to decrease.

It’s worth noting that, before the draft, it was reported that Banks expects to fully recover from his second foot injury by June. @Skol_Doc, an actual foot surgeon, provided analysis about Banks’ injury history in this YouTube video. The broad takeaway is that Banks’ injury should not be a major concern moving forward — the Jones fracture seems to have been fully healed, and the fourth metatarsal fracture should be a very clean recovery. Skol_Doc did mention that ultimately, Banks’ weight was a factor for the injury. In athletes, size can contribute to injuries, but do not suggest recurring injury issues.

In other words, his weight may have played a role in his foot injuries this time around, but there’s little evidence to suggest that will continue to be the case.

Banks’ injury issues seemingly played a major role in his perception and consensus board ranking. It’s difficult for analysts to rank a player highly after they’ve missed significant time with injury. It’s one thing to bet on a talent who missed a season with injury — like Jermod McCoy, who fell way further than anyone expected — but Banks’ limited season combined with yet another foot injury likely spooked many analysts and dropped him down boards.

Dane Brugler from The Athletic, a plugged-in forecaster who also helps set expectations for many draftniks, provides a great example of Banks’ fluctuating stock. In an in-season top 100, Dane ranked Banks 46th on November 11th. On February 10th, post-Senior Bowl, Banks had risen all the way to 24th on Dane’s board. Then, after the Combine injury, Banks fell again, ranking 52nd overall in the Beast, Brugler’s draft guide.

It’s not difficult to think of players who have fallen down the board due to injury concerns — McCoy this year, Will Johnson last year, or even further back to players like Myles Jack, Jaylon Smith, or Maurice Hurst. Because Banks was hurt during the process, the situation could have hurt his consensus rank without really affecting his draft stock; the Vikings have very publicly stated that they believe the medicals are clean, with interim GM Rob Brzezinski calling the Vikings’ medical staff “the best in the world.”

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Without fully built-out consensus board data going back to January, it’s difficult to create one-for-one comparisons that contextualize Banks’ rankings on a theoretical consensus ranking before the NFL Combine to the one published immediately before the draft.

We do have something similar, however. Mock draft data doesn’t serve the same purpose as big board data given that they are meant more to capture predictions than player talent, but they help us here.

The former Florida lineman injured his foot during the Combine, but news of the foot injury didn’t reach the public until March 12. Given that his Combine performance marked him as a “riser” — especially when compared to fellow defensive tackle Peter Woods — Banks’ stock should have improved rather than fallen.

That’s what we see in reporting and in the data. Between the Super Bowl and the Combine, where he was cementing his perceived talent level after a successful Senior Bowl, he was projected to be selected around pick 25. After an outstanding Combine, his floor rose from the 27th pick to the 25th, while his median outcome improved to the 22nd selection. His ceiling projection improved from 19th to 13th, with the Ravens at 14 a reasonably popular pick.

But after the news of the injury broke, his stock seemingly plummeted. His median projection fell from 22nd overall to 28th, and his ceiling dropped to 22. At this point, he was beginning to drop out of the first round with some regularity. After he was seen on a scooter at the Florida Pro Day, his median dropped one more spot to 29th, but, most significantly, his range of outcomes expanded massively. His 25th percentile outcome fell from 31st to 41st, while his 75th percentile outcome dropped from 22nd to 25th.

The four box plots at different moments in the draft process help us understand what happened, but it’s made starker by a two-moment box plot.

The box plots probably tell the story best, but a weighted line chart might help as well.

Because of the ten-day delay between his Combine testing and the news of his foot injury, we can be reasonably confident that Banks’ stock was almost entirely due to the news about his reinjured foot.

Athletic Testing

That makes sense because he was an outstanding athlete at the Combine. Banks measured in at 6’6 ¼” and 327 lbs with massive 35” arms and an 85 ¾” wingspan. Despite his weight, he looks very well built on screen, and looks almost slim, which is incredible for a player who weighs 327 lbs. Based on the testing, Banks is an incredible athlete for his size.

This athleticism chart is weight-adjusted. That means all values are adjusted for the athlete’s height and weight; running a 5.04-second 40-yard dash is significantly more impressive (and meaningful) at 327 pounds than at 285 pounds. His chart is almost completely filled out. Compare that to all the first-round defensive tackles who performed the same workouts as Banks over the last three years.

What is not captured in the chart is the fact that Banks did all of this on a broken foot. He broke his foot before testing at the Combine and the news of the injury didn’t hit outlets until ten days after his 40-yard dash.

While he was listed on the consensus board as a nose tackle — something his size might suggest — he won’t play that role for the Vikings. Banks said during his introductory interview that he is expecting to play defensive end in the Vikings’ system, which is similar to the role Jonathan Allen played last year.

The Vikings took a true nose tackle in Domonique Orange in the third round, solidifying that projection. That role matches the alignment Banks played at Florida, where he spent the vast majority of his time in the B gap, per PFF. Banks’ upside case is more like Chris Jones — another tall, long interior player — than a true nose like Dexter Lawrence.

It is important to note that this is not a complete athletic profile. Any reasonably solid athletic profile that aims to project defensive tackle performance — especially for pass-rushing tackles — will need to incorporate agility scores.

The evidence suggests that three-cone times help project outcomes for three-technique tackles, four-technique defensive ends and edge rushers. Good examples include both Sheldon Richardson and Geno Atkins, who ran very quick three-cones at 7.33 seconds; Atkins did so in 2010 and Richardson did so in 2013.

Gerald McCoy posted a 7.32-second time in 2010 in the same class as Atkins and Ndamukong Suh, who ran it in an astounding 7.21 seconds. Calais Campbell ran a blazingly quick 7.19-second three-cone in 2008. Aaron Donald ran it in 7.11 seconds in 2014, Kobie Turner ran it in 7.08 seconds in 2023, Fletcher Cox ran it in 7.07 seconds in 2012 and Milton Williams ran it at 6.95 seconds in 2021.

J.J. Watt, who started his career as an interior defender, ran it in a shocking 6.88 seconds. Most of the high-level pass-rushing defensive tackles you’ve seen play have run outstanding three-cone times.

So, we don’t have that. Banks seems like he moves well and we could argue that his weight-adjusted three-cone would likely be good. But that is just speculation — many defensive players have been described as athletic who have put up mediocre athletic testing numbers.

For what it’s worth, Next Gen Stats has an athleticism score that combines proprietary information, like access to on-field tracking data, along with tested athleticism. Within those scores, he produced an “80” out of 100 for their athleticism score metric.

Production

From an analytics perspective, evaluating a player with production in mind gives us a bit more to work with to figure out what they can do and the odds of their success. Obviously, the final year of production doesn’t tell us much for Banks, who only played three games in 2025.

Those games won’t even provide very much as some of them came after he returned from injury and there seems to be evidence his explosiveness was limited by that injury — something that did not seem to be the case when he was more fully recovered when practicing at the Senior Bowl.

At first glance, Banks’ production in 2024 was pretty good. His 13.0 percent pressure rate ranked eighth among all defensive tackles in Division I college football, and his pass rush win rate ranked in the 93rd percentile. When isolating snaps without screens or play-action with true dropback passing, he retains that high-level win rate and pressure rate, ranking fifth in pressure rate in those situations.

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The Vikings might have grabbed the best value in free agency, taking a quarterback whose open-market value might be north of $30 million for the veteran’s minimum, an odd quirk of how guaranteed money works in most NFL contracts.

Many might quibble at that valuation — something worth covering in detail — but the implications of the move are clear. As much as the Vikings have refused to commit to naming a starter this early into the offseason, the expectation from the local beat and the national media is that Murray will start for the Vikings in the 2026 season without much of a real competition.

This isn’t the end of the J.J. McCarthy story, but it is a delay. The Vikings have McCarthy under a cheap contract through 2027 and have the opportunity to secure him — at a heftier price — into 2028, should they choose to. For now, he’s an unseasoned backup and may be joined by another before camp breaks in late July.

It is difficult to argue that this is anything but a good move for the franchise, assuming their goal this offseason is to maximize wins in 2026.

Wait, Did You Say $30 Million? How Good is Kyler Murray?

It might seem odd to think of Kyler Murray, a quarterback injured and then benched by his previous team, as a quarterback who could earn $30 million — Sam Darnold, after all, put together a much better season and was never cut by the Vikings before earning $33.5 million in Seattle in the offseason before winning the Super Bowl.

But we’re also not too far removed from an offseason where Derek Carr, cut by the Raiders, signed a contract with the Saints for $37.5 million per year. By percentage of cap at signing, $30 million now (10.0 percent of the cap) would be equivalent to Case Keenum’s contract with the Broncos in 2018 ($18 million AAV), Teddy Bridgewater’s 2020 contract with the Panthers ($21 million AAV) and Nick Foles’ 2019 contract with the Chicago Bears ($22 million AAV).

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If we adjust EPA per-dropback rankings for a 35-quarterback comparison set each year, Murray has ranked 23rd, 21st, 12th, 21st, 21st, 14th, and 17th in the NFL. By contrast, McCarthy’s lone season saw him rank 34th, with an unusual end-of-season stretch allowing him to place just ahead of Cam Ward after bottoming out as one of the worst quarterbacks we’ve ever seen through five starts.

When canvassing subjective quarterback rankings lists, like those from the Ringer and NFL.com, Kyler found himself ranked in the top ten a few times (seventh, eighth, or ninth at least once by at least one organization) and regularly ranked in the top fifteen.

By PFF grade, he has ranked between 3rd (2021) and 23rd (2022), averaging a rank of 15.7 since 2020.

The preseason poll of executives conducted by The Athletic reveals that NFL executives have always valued Murray — he’s consistently ranked between 12th (2021) and 17th (2024), with an average rank of 14th since 2020.

Because Murray was benched for Jacoby Brissett and missed time due to injury in 2025, it’s been easy to dismiss him as an overrated player, a process that has occurred so often in media circles that he has looped around to an underrated position.

When discussing Murray, it’s been easy for me to say he’s comfortably a top 20 quarterback who has the ability to challenge for top 12 position, but that argument has received significant pushback. Evaluating it in more detail, it doesn’t seem that far-fetched.

Of the 50 executives and coaches that Athletic author Mike Sando polled, 17 placed Murray in the second tier, a tier containing Jayden Daniels, Justin Herbert, Jared Goff, C.J. Stroud, Jalen Hurts, Baker Mayfield, Dak Prescott, Jordan Love and Brock Purdy. Ahead of the 2025 season, ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler tasked NFL personnel with completing a similar ballot, asking executives and coaches to rank their top ten at various positions. Murray received votes as a top ten player.

Given that 16 quarterbacks make at least $30 million per year heading into 2026, it’s easy to argue Murray is in that range; he is comfortably a “good” quarterback being paid backup money.

Does He Fit the Offense?

At some level, the question of whether Murray fits with what the Vikings want to do is not that relevant to whether it was a good signing. They’ve almost certainly cheaply improved their offensive production without long-term commitment.

But we’ve seen the range of Murray outcomes; are the Vikings improving by default and getting a bottom-third quarterback who can — at best — steer the ship while the defense takes over, or are they getting a quarterback who can knock on the door of top-ten consideration?

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Imagine yourself in Tua Tagovailoa’s shoes.

It’s Jan. 8, 2018. You’re on the field at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, playing in the College Football Playoff National Championship against the Georgia Bulldogs.

You weren’t supposed to be here. As Jalen Hurts’ backup, you were supposed to support from the sidelines. But Hurts struggled. After a scoreless first half with just 21 passing yards, coach put you in.

You’ve played before, but it was mop-up duty in blowout wins. This is the first meaningful action of your collegiate career. You’re down 13-0 in a hostile stadium, facing down a Georgia roster littered with NFL talent. You are 19 years old.

But you found a rhythm. You came back to tie the game and send it into overtime. Georgia scored a field goal on the first possession, so a touchdown will win it.

On first down, disaster.

It’s your fault. You could have thrown a high floater to the running back, taken a chance downfield, or just eaten the sack. Anything but running backwards. Now, even a game-tying field goal is in question.

What do you do when you screw up? How do you react? Is it easy to admit, to learn from? Does it affect the rest of your day? Do you wallow in self-pity, or ignore it and move on without skipping a beat?

For Tua, it’s familiar territory. Comfortable, even.

Greek tragedies, like those of Sophocles or Euripides, contain moments like this before the inevitable

Tagovailoa’s story is not complete. It is trending the way of these Greek tragedies, however. This victory was a long time ago. He will see more triumphs. But throughout that time, the seeds of his downfall were sown.

How To Tell A Story Like Sophocles

Classically, tragedies have three main factors: A noble, likeable protagonist, a fatal flaw in that protagonist that will inevitably lead to his downfall (often hubris), and the downfall itself. Tua’s story has all three.

Our protagonist must overcome a lot to find success. Tagovailoa started his football career at eight years old in Pop Warner, but before that, his father had dreams of his son becoming the next big football player.

College Gameday featured the Tagovailoa family in a well-intended 2018 puff piece, attempting to paint a picture of a tight-knit family breeding success in the unlikely setting of ‘Ewa Beach, Hawai’i. Instead, the segment invited scorn over Galu Tagovailoa, Tua’s father, and his training methods.

He’d take a toddling Tua to the beach for training, well before an appropriate age for any kind of work ethic to be expected. If Tua didn’t perform in his high school football games or the classroom, he’d “get it,” later explaining that “the belt was involved.” With a sigh, his mother confirms, “He means the bible and the belt,” in response to Galu’s commitment to faith and discipline in the Tagovailoa home.

Extolling corporal punishment is no new theme for the NFL. I had my fair share of that discourse during Adrian Peterson’s child abuse scandal. I do not believe it’s right, but I must acknowledge that it is common. Common enough that Tagovailoa likely had teammates and rivals who went through the same or similar experiences.

It’s an unusual case, anyway. The laid-back beaches of Oahu do not exactly inspire the sort of blood, sweat, and tears environment that forged Tua Tagovailoa. Even more uniquely, Galu taught Tua to throw left-handed. Galu was “the only lefty in the family,” so he made his son a lefty.

But Tua is only left-handed when throwing the football. He’s naturally right-handed in everything else. Aside from the grim picture we’re painting here, that makes for an interesting dynamic called “cross-dominance”. Has Tua been throwing with his non-dominant hand for his whole career? Has this held him back?

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The NFL’s content machine keeps on churning.

It’s been less than a month since the Super Bowl, but everyone has already moved on. With the NFL Combine last weekend, draft season is in full swing, but there’s another high-profile event before the NFL Draft takes place: free agency. It’s somehow almost here.

The NFL’s free agency period officially starts on March 11, but the “legal” tampering period starts two days before that on March 9, so we’ll soon be hearing about deals teams have struck. The “illegal” tampering is likely already in full swing; the NFL Scouting Combine, which doubles as a convention for team personnel and agents, sees those teams and agents interact late into the night in the back rooms of Indianapolis. Agents leave the festivities with an understanding of what their clients will command next week, and teams leave with a good idea of who they could acquire.

Minnesota Vikings interim GM Rob Brzezinski will have his work cut out for him as he tries to improve the roster. The team has several holes and is well over the salary cap for 2026. The NFL has finalized its salary cap at $301.2 million for the 2026 season, which means the Vikings are $45.5 million over the cap, per OverTheCap.

To be fair, the team can easily move money around to get cap compliant, and Wide Left has covered how the Vikings can get under the cap, which impending free agents the team should keep, and what needs the team will have heading into free agency. This piece will combine those moves and dive into available outside free agents, creating a full mock free agency for the team.

Author’s Note: I want this exercise to be as realistic as possible, but it is not necessarily a prediction. In some of these situations, I’m suggesting a move the team is unlikely to make, but it’s the better choice. There are many winding paths, and at some point, you just have to make a decision. Information on the salary cap and existing contracts comes from OTC. For contract projections, I projected the structures myself, but I used multiple resources to determine contract values, including PFF’s projections by Josh Queipo, The Athletic’s projections by Daniel Popper, and, when those were missing, player value judgments from OTC and Spotrac.

• Vikings’ Current Cap Situation

• Creating Cap Space

  • Releases

  • Extensions

  • Restructures

• Team Needs and Cap Space Check-in

• Filling Out the Roster

  • Re-Signings

  • QB Decision

  • Free Agency Additions

• Final Roster and Cap Implications

Vikings’ Current Cap Situation

As mentioned above, the Vikings are roughly $45.5 million over the cap. More specifically, OTC lists them as $45,506,353 in the hole. This is their current cap space under the top-51 rule, which is how the NFL operates in the offseason: only counting a team’s top 51 cap hits. However, there are additional cap hits the team needs to account for when considering the entire season.

Some teams have fewer than 53 players on their roster. Those teams will need to account not only for 51 total players but also for 53, because that is how many players will be on the team on roster cutdown day, all of them counting against the cap. OTC has the Vikings listed with 54 players on their roster, so they don’t necessarily have to worry about that specific issue, but a small adjustment needs to be made to OTC’s accounting.

Harrison Smith’s contract is set to void, which means he will no longer be on the roster. However, OTC’s projection includes his $4.3 million cap hit among the team’s top 51. So, to accurately account for Smith not being on the roster, you need to subtract $885,000 from the Vikings’ available cap.

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Like many, I’m expecting Smith to retire with a post-June 1 designation, which means he will count $4.3 million in dead money against the Vikings’ cap in 2026 and $9 million in dead money in 2027, matching the current OTC projection. However, the OTC projection is strange because the $4.3 million projection includes a $1.3 million salary, which is the league minimum, which the team wouldn’t owe Smith if he retires. I also have some confusion about the $9 million dead cap hit in 2027 because the prorated bonuses past 2026 sum to $7.6 million, so the Vikings may have more cap space to work with by the amount those numbers differ.

The Vikings will also need to account for the salaries of their draft picks in their salary cap projections. They technically don’t need to worry about them until the drafted players are signed, and obviously, the team can still trade picks, changing the exact totals, but the team’s draft class is expected to cost an additional $5,029,009 against the cap.

Subtracting those two numbers from the Top 51 total gets you what OTC calls “effective cap space,” but it’s still important to consider in-season operations for the team. You can add $1.77 million for the minimum salaries of two players to get the team to 53 total players, but you also have to account for the practice squad.

Practice squad salaries count against the cap, and the standard practice squad salary is $247,500 for 2026. The team can also pay two players an extra stipend of up to $411,300 to be on the practice squad in 2026. The practice squad consists of 16 players, so assuming the Vikings use the larger number to the fullest, staffing the practice squad will cost $4,287,600.

If you count all of these odds and ends, you get to what I consider to be the “operating” cap space for the team, which means that they’re currently $57,477,962 in the hole.

Author’s note: At the end of all of the moves in this piece, my goal is to get that operating cap space number above zero. The Vikings will have more costs than just the ones listed above during the season, particularly for replacing players who go on IR, but there’s no way to guess what the additional burden would be right now. They will also gain cap space by cutting or trading players that I am not predicting right now, so I think it will roughly cancel out anyway.

Creating Cap, Part 1 — Releases

There are three ways the Vikings can create cap space with an existing contract: releasing the player, signing the player to a contract extension, or restructuring the player’s contract to move cap hits into the future.

We’ll start with the most extreme option: cutting players under contract for cap relief. Let’s dive into each of the moves.

If you want to be pedantic, you could count trades and pay cuts (which I consider to be different from restructures), but I’m not projecting either in this piece because I can’t project other teams’ willingness to take a player via trade or a player’s willingness to accept a paycut. As a spoiler, I do have the Vikings adding one player via trade.

Release DT Javon Hargrave

Salary Cap Impact: -$10,955,882 mil in 2026

The biggest decision the Vikings’ front office has to make before free agency is what to do with their DT room. Hargrave, along with Jonathan Allen, are aging veterans the team added on large contracts last offseason.

Both had their moments last year, but neither lived up to the large salaries that they have in 2026. It seems as though the team has already made its choice, as Adam Schefter reported that the Vikings will release Hargrave and RB Aaron Jones if they can’t find trade partners.

I, maybe paradoxically, would choose to move on from Allen and keep Hargrave. While I think Allen is a better all-around player, Hargrave’s pass-rush ability is harder to find, especially in this year’s free agency class (as we’ll get to later).

Cutting Hargrave saves $10,955,882 in 2026, $4,422,550 more than Allen would, but it costs $18,089,118 more against the cap in 2027 because Allen will still be under contract. If the Vikings find a trade partner for Hargrave, they’d save an additional $4 million in cap space due to his guaranteed salary, which would be a nice benefit.

Running 2026 Operating Cap Space Tally: -$47,407,080

Release RB Aaron Jones

Salary Cap Impact: -$7,750,000 mil in 2026

Jones is 31, well past the age most RBs continue to produce. He’s been plagued with injuries throughout his career and missed five games last year due to them. While Jones was still effective when healthy, he is past his peak, and his $10 million salary is high for an RB, especially one with age and injury concerns.

While I decided to release him, the Vikings should strongly consider retaining Jones. I like how Jones, as the lead back, pairs with Jordan Mason. I would not want Mason to be pushed into lead duties, so even if the Vikings move on from Jones, they should bring in another back who is an explosive runner and offers value as a pass catcher and protector to split time.

Mason is a consistent between-the-tackles runner and a bigger back who can grind out additional yardage. However, he doesn’t have the speed to generate explosive runs and adds next to nothing as a pass catcher. When I watch Mason pass block, his technique and approach are good, but the results were atrocious last year in terms of allowing pressure. With CJ Ham also retiring, the Vikings need someone they trust in protection on third downs.

Therefore, I would want any RB the Vikings bring in to be an explosive player who was trusted in pass protection, severely limiting the options. Depending on who they think they can get, that might bring them right back to Jones. I’d be willing to keep Jones at his price tag in that scenario, but would also expect the team to ask Jones to take a pay cut, and hope he accepts.

Running 2026 Operating Cap Space Tally: -$40,542,080

Release C Ryan Kelly

Salary Cap Impact: -$8,347,647 mil in 2026

Kelly was good when he was on the field last year, but the multiple concussions he sustained in 2025 put his future into doubt. Kelly could easily decide to retire, which would save the Vikings just as much money as a release would.

From the Vikings’ perspective, releasing Kelly would create a need at center, but it’s worth it because the likelihood of another injury making Kelly unavailable represents a massive liability.

Running 2026 Operating Cap Space Tally: -$33,079,433

Retain and Do Not Restructure TE TJ Hockenson

As free agency is approaching, one of the biggest drumbeats around the Vikings has been that they’ll do something with Hockenson’s contract, whether that’s a release or trade.

The Athletic’s Alec Lewis (who does great work) has been throwing out the idea of lowering Hockenson’s cap hit. Lewis is plugged into the team, so I’m sure that the Vikings are strongly considering that as an option.

In the best-case scenario, Hockenson is willing to take a pay cut, and the team does not have to cut him or move money into the future on his contract. As I mentioned above, I don’t want to project pay cuts because I can’t predict whether a player will accept one. If Hockenson doesn’t, I would not cut him or release him.

The number being discussed is Hockenson’s cap hit, which is nearly $21.3 million in 2026. That’s the highest cap hit for any TE, so when Hockenson isn’t the best TE in the league, it is easy to say that number is too much.

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However, talking about the cap hit that way doesn’t make sense. Ultimately, the Vikings owe Hockenson $16 million in cash this season, not $21 million. The additional cap hit is due to pro-rated bonus money they can’t control. When looking to free up cap space, you should not look at a player’s total cap hit, only the cash they’re owed in the current year and the money that you can save.

For Hockenson, the Vikings would save only about $8.9 million against the cap if they released him, and they would then need to use that money to replace him. So why should we talk about $21.3 million?

There’s another confounding factor leading to the perception that Hockenson’s cap hit is an issue. Tight end salaries have simply not increased significantly because there have not been good players pushing the market.

When Hockenson signed his deal in 2023, his $16.5 million/year deal made him the second-highest-paid TE in the NFL, behind only Darren Waller at $17 million. Three years later, his deal ranks third, behind George Kittle and Trey McBride. The salary cap was $244.8 million in 2023. Pro-rating Hockenson’s deal to 2026 would make the deal $22.1 million per year.

Essentially, because Kittle and Kelce have been the best TEs in the NFL over the past 10-ish years, and few young players have become standouts, no one is pushing the top of the market. Prior to McBride signing an extension last April, the market had moved from Waller’s $17 million per year to Kelce’s $17.125 million per year, while the cap had risen by over $50 million.

The reason is that teams get in trouble when they push money on underperforming contracts into the future. I count Hockenson as a player underperforming his contract, even if I don’t want to move on from him. Therefore, I would look to restructure other players before moving money on Hockenson’s contract.

If we want to entertain the idea of the Vikings releasing Hockenson, I do not believe making Josh Oliver the team’s lead TE would be a good idea. Oliver is an excellent blocker, but is just a guy as a pass catcher.

Hockenson is a strong blocker (2025 may have even been his best season as a blocker, from a tape perspective) and can stretch the defense vertically as a receiver. That ability to get vertical stretch is massively important for the construction of the Vikings’ offense, and to convince me that a player is a suitable replacement for Hockenson, he would also need to provide that.

I don’t think Hockenson is the player he was at his peak, but he’s 85-90% of the player who got 960 yards before suffering a brutal knee injury in 2023. His production in 2025 was significantly hampered by QB and OL play because he was constantly asked to stay in and chip, limiting the routes he could run.

Frankly, none of the TEs available in free agency are as good as Hockenson is right now. Dallas Goedert and David Njoku could provide something close to what Hockenson does, but both are older. Why would you want to move on from Hockenson only to spend that money on an older player?

On the younger side of free agent options, Isaiah Likely is not a strong enough blocker to replace Hockenson, and Chig Okonkwo is another move TE. Cade Otton is a great blocker, but lacks the athleticism to play the role the Vikings would need him to.

Daniel Bellinger would intrigue me as a player with the size to block and the athleticism to be a passing game weapon, but there’s a reason the Giants phased him out for Theo Johnson. Beyond that, no young player has a history as a starting TE.

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In Part 1 of this series, we looked at how the Vikings can create enough salary cap space to operate in 2026. In Part 2, we looked at which of their various free agents the Vikings should bring back. With those decisions in mind, we will now look at what needs the team has heading into the offseason.

Obviously, the 2025 season did not go as planned for the Minnesota Vikings. Coming off a 14-3 season, going 9-8 and missing the playoffs was below the standard the team expected to reach.

QB issues were the main driver of the team’s regression, but that can’t be the only focus this offseason. Interim GM Rob Brzezinski and staff will evaluate the entire roster, including impending free agents, and see what they can do to put out a better team in 2026.

Let’s take a look at each position group for the Vikings and categorize it by level of need as free agency approaches. Some of the team’s needs will be personnel-based, as they will have to replace impending free agents. Others will be improvement-based, where they simply need to get better at the position than they were in 2025.

Of course, there are layers to each need: some positions simply require depth additions, while others require starters, which cost more.

To help us determine team needs, I’ve listed all Vikings players for 2025 and color-coded those who are free agents and those who might be cut. Let’s dive in.

Top Tier: Personnel and Improvement Needs

Safety

Assuming Harrison Smith retires, the Vikings are losing their second-biggest snap-taker at safety. Josh Metellus is a very good player, but he is at his best when the Vikings have three safeties on the field, as it frees him up to play a more versatile role.

With Theo Jackson disappointing after being asked to assume a larger role, and eventually losing his job, the Vikings don’t have anyone besides Metellus that I feel good about at safety.

Jay Ward did get run toward the end of the season, playing 128 snaps over the final three games, but I thought his best work was when he played outside CB and was asked to tackle in the flat — not exactly a glowing endorsement for his ability within this role.

If they want to maximize Metellus, the Vikings might need to add two playable safeties to the roster. At a minimum, they should add one, which could be Smith returning for yet another season. While it wouldn’t shock me if the Vikings did little at the position — Brian Flores has been incredible at cobbling together an elite pass defense with limited pieces in the secondary — it would be a lot more reassuring if they bolstered their safety room this offseason.

In free agency, the safety market is pretty robust. There are 18 players who played 50% or more of their teams’ snaps. I don’t love all of them, but teams like the Vikings should be able to find starting-caliber talent.

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On Friday, January 30, the Vikings announced that they had let go of their general manager, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah. Notably, Friday is an “off-day” in the all-star schedule. Media and general managers often travel from Mobile, Alabama, to their homes after watching practice all week at the Senior Bowl.

Adofo-Mensah was among them, meeting with players, scouts, members of the media and friends on other teams.

The timing was bizarre; the Vikings decided to let go of their general manager weeks after the season had ended and missed out on the traditional hiring cycle. The Falcons announced their front office hires — Matt Ryan and Ian Cunningham — on January 10 and January 26, and the Dolphins announced their new general manager, Jon-Eric Sullivan, on January 9.

There aren’t as many openings this year for a general manager as there have been for coaches, so this scheduling may not inhibit their search as much as letting go of a head coach would, but it’s still strange that the Vikings waited three weeks to let go of their GM, having him work the entire time.

As the Athletic’s Dianna Russini and Alec Lewis reported, one team source told them that the timing was more shocking than the fact of his firing. Their piece outlines a level of confusion in the organization; Mark and Zygi Wilf, the team owners, conducted a thorough review of the team following the season and, after hearing scathing reviews from various personnel inside the building, seemingly decided to wait for several weeks before letting go of their former general manager.

People in the organization thought that, without changes, Adofo-Mensah was safe for one more year. Surely, he thought the same.

It was strangely cruel to have him take a work trip to Alabama.

In this piece:

• Why Did the Vikings Fire Kwesi Adofo-Mensah

  • Quarterbacks Anonymous

  • Paternity Leave and Work-Life Balance

  • What if the GM had Bad Vibes?

  • Losing the Mandate to Lead

• Kwesi Adofo-Mensah Was an “Analytics GM” Without “Analytics”

  • Draft Stats

  • Draft Outcomes

  • Trades

  • Free Agency Bonanza

• Hey, It’s February. Why Now?

Why Did the Vikings Fire Kwesi Adofo-Mensah?

Perhaps the less interesting of the two questions is why the Wilfs decided to let Adofo-Mensah go at all. Journalism on the subject paints a broad picture, with a dizzying variety of factors contributing to the decision.

There is good reason to let go of Adofo-Mensah, but leaks from the organization suggest a lack of focus on identifying the reasons for his departure. Russini and Lewis’ report renders a short-term picture; one disappointed by the decisions Adofo-Mensah made in securing higher-quality quarterback play for the 2025 season.

Quarterbacks Anonymous

The failure to re-sign Sam Darnold, who is about to make his Super Bowl debut with the Seattle Seahawks, appears in much of the reporting we see about the Vikings’ GM decision. More prominent, however, is the inability to re-sign Daniel Jones, who left for the Colts and produced an outstanding season before his injury.

While Matthew Coller’s piece on Adofo-Mensah’s firing mentions Darnold, as does Kevin Seifert’s piece at ESPN, they and other reports focus a bit more on the Jones misstep. Though, as Coller points out, it’s kind of a difficult “misstep” to focus on. It’s been well-reported that the Vikings offered more total money and more guaranteed money than the Colts. It had been reported at the time and more recently in wake of the Adofo-Mensah news that both Kevin O’Connell and Adofo-Mensah expected to be able to retain Jones and were surprised when he informed them he was taking the Colts offer.

The reasoning is obvious; Jones was guaranteed a path to genuinely compete for the starting job in Indianapolis after Anthony Richardson fell out of favor, while there was no such guarantee for Jones in Minnesota.

Pinning Adofo-Mensah for this failure, as team sources seem all too willing to do in light of his departure, seems baffling. Jones’ issue didn’t have anything to do with contract items in the general manager’s control; only a coach like O’Connell could effectively reassure Jones that he would earn a genuine competition for the starting role. If anything, losing Jones would be O’Connell’s fault, not Adofo-Mensah’s.

On top of that, the decision not to pursue Aaron Rodgers — more a focus for Russini in her reporting than for many other journalists — doesn’t seem like one worth getting twisted into knots for. It is the case that Rodgers was a much more efficient quarterback in Pittsburgh than J.J. McCarthy was in Minnesota and it seems to be settled fact that he’d have signed a below-market deal with the Vikings.

But getting bent out of shape that the Vikings didn’t get the 23rd-ranked quarterback in EPA per play seems like poor process. Surely, the Vikings would have won more games with Rodgers at the helm rather than Wentz or McCarthy (though, notably, Wentz and Rodgers rank right next to each other in EPA per play), but likely not that many more — enough to get bounced out in the first round of the playoffs, again.

ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that the Vikings were never close to offering Rodgers, with colleague Jeremy Fowler backing up that reporting with his own report that Rodgers wanted the Vikings, but people in the building weren’t seriously considering it.

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All of these reports circle around the idea that there wasn’t reason to be sold on McCarthy heading into the season. Obviously, after the fact, the Vikings shouldn’t have been. But these reports pair with rumors swirling around that O’Connell wasn’t sold on McCarthy as the unquestioned starter.

Only one report — Russini and Lewis’ — seems to suggest that the feeling inside the building was that McCarthy was unready. Strangely, Russini herself reported at various times that the Vikings, including O’Connell, were incredibly confident in McCarthy. That matches what Wide Left had heard about the coaching staff’s enthusiasm for McCarthy back in March of 2025.

When it comes to quarterback decisions, it very much feels like O’Connell played a significant role in how the Vikings mishandled the process, and that Adofo-Mensah is being set up as the scapegoat.

These short-term reasons, which include a disappointing 2025 free-agent class and poor handling of the quarterback situation, hopefully played only a small role in the decision to let go of Adofo-Mensah.

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Should that have been the case, then Adofo-Mensah should also have been praised for the decision to let Kirk Cousins walk and the decision to sign Sam Darnold. It might even be worth arguing he was right to trade for both Nick Mullens and Joshua Dobbs. Instead, he gets blame for when the quarterback decisions go sideways, even when he’s arguably not at fault, and doesn’t get credit when those decisions go well.

But that doesn’t mean there weren’t more systemic reasons, good or bad, to let go of Adofo-Mensah.

Paternity Leave and Work-Life Balance

Russini and Lewis also reported that executives around the league were shocked that Adofo-Mensah took paternity leave in the first two weeks of training camp, something Wide Left can confirm. One source used the phrase “abusing paternity leave” to describe Adofo-Mensah’s absence in that time.

The Russini and Lewis report were careful to say it wasn’t the Vikings ownership or anyone in a hiring or firing position who expressed resentment at Adofo-Mensah’s use of parental leave. That would be dicey at best, legally. Instead, it seems as if the report was built around those around the league (“rival executives and coaches”).

Mike Sando of the Athletic, who has extensive contacts in front offices throughout the league, also suggested it may have caused internal tensions, too.

These conversations are just as much about the toxic nature of the NFL as they are about our collective inability to demand better for others when we’ve experienced hardship. Seeing executives who have had to grind through unreal working conditions resent those who have not is both understandable and not particularly useful. Kwesi’s work-life balance does not impact any one else’s across the league.

We could make this about a larger conversation — e.g., some people will never respond to the idea that it may be beneficial to forgive student loans simply because they themselves had to pay off loans — but for the moment, we can locate it inside of football.

Notably, this is clearly more about the perception of working hard than it is about actually working hard. Adofo-Mensah was working remotely during his paternity leave — not a real leave at all!

Ultimately, Lindsay Rhodes is right:

The NFL is famous for running its coaches and executives ragged. There are glowing profiles written about head coaches featuring their demonic sleep schedules — evidence of their work ethic and commitment. One of those profiles only somewhat ironically calls NFL head coaches the “hardest-working men in human history”.

For these overachievers, sleep is for the weak, and dedication is measured by how much time you put into a job. Endurance is a way for someone like the minuscule Jon Gruden to prove his masculinity. Maybe he can’t bench-press 500 pounds, but Gruden can go without sleep for a week.

Coaches are known to wake up anywhere between 3:00 AM and 5:00 AM, often going to bed just a few hours prior. Some coaches sleep in their offices, and some have had beds installed there so they don’t have to waste time going home just to sleep.

The article points out that many perennial losers have this kind of sleep schedule, not just winners. Perhaps the sleepless schedule is a baseline expectation, and the differences come from elsewhere — and coaches who take “normal” sleep schedules will fall behind.

But we have seen coaches draw back their obscene work schedules and succeed. Sean McVay, who in 2017 was the subject of a day-in-the-life article that shared he woke up at 3:45 AM, has since called his absurd sleep schedule a mistake.

Taking the advice they dispense to players about the importance of sleep and work-life balance, McVay, Dave Canales, Jonathan Gannon, Zac Taylor, Shane Steichen and others have reduced their in-facility time and implemented better sleep schedules for themselves and their staff. They might be following in the footsteps of Bruce Arians, who learned from Bear Bryant the importance of sending coaches (and themselves) home so that they can spend time with their families.

All of this is to say that Adofo-Mensah’s (sort of) parental leave genuinely rubbed many people the wrong way across the league. But there’s no evidence it actually reduced his efficacy. We would be talking about it as a positive, not a negative, had the Vikings drafted well.

What if the GM has Bad Vibes?

That said, resentment inside and outside of the organization expanded beyond elements related to the league’s toxic culture.

Based on the limited discussions Wide Left had with multiple analytics staffers across multiple teams in the NFL, there wasn’t much confidence in Kwesi Adofo-Mensah’s approach when it came to a data-forward approach to team management.

Indeed, one analytics staffer called him a “clown” for his approach to team management. These feelings among analytics staffers around the league had been growing over time, but didn’t boil over until this last season, where Adofo-Mensah’s runway had run out among a group of people dedicated to putting data at the heart of their approach. One third-party analytics consultant who has worked with multiple teams called Adofo-Mensah arrogant, a stark contrast to his public-facing personality.

Another source within another organization who has interacted with Adofo-Mensah confirmed this feeling — that his humility was a persona more than an in-built attitude. Multiple people referenced him as someone who had the need to be “the smartest in the room.”

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At least one staffer thought that Adofo-Mensah had a strong understanding of analytical principles, but didn’t have the spine to enforce them in his approach. Whether it was a lack of conviction, leadership, or some other factor that prevented him from implementing these guidelines, it was ultimately a failure by someone meant to be a general manager.

Is it unfair that all of this is coming out after he had been let go? Certainly. Some of this is the nature of reporting; it seems unnecessary for journalists to dump on a general manager who might just have poor interpersonal skills while he still has a job. It would be a story without a point. Some people don’t like him, so what?

But, with the added context of his dismissal, there’s more teeth to the story. Interpersonal conflicts, individual quirks, perception and political capital — all of that matters more when we know the end result. These might not be the reason why Adofo-Mensah was let go, not explicitly, but they provide texture to his tenure.

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In Part 1 of this series, we looked at how the Vikings can create enough salary cap space to operate in 2026. In this piece, we will determine whether or not the Vikings should bring back their various free agents.

Fortunately, the Minnesota Vikings have relatively few of their major contributors from 2025 scheduled to become free agents in 2026, but the team will still have to decide who to keep and who to let walk.

The Vikings have 21 players whose contracts are set to expire. Here’s the full list, courtesy of OverTheCap.com.

As seen in Part 1, after restructuring a number of contracts and making a few releases, the Vikings can easily create somewhere in the ballpark of $20-30 million to spend on new players. The moves I suggested in Part 1 created nearly $30 million in effective cap space, but I suggested the team reserve $10 million of that space for in-season moves.

If you look at that, and then think about the fact that you probably want to re-sign 10-15 of the players on the list below, you might get concerned about the team’s ability to add outside free agents. After all, if you wanted to split $30 million among six players, it would be just $5 million per player.

Fortunately, that’s not exactly how it works. While my salary cap primer in the previous article in this series covered a number of topics, it did not get into detail about how the NFL’s Top 51 rule works. Let’s look at that, and a few other definitions, before we dive into the Vikings’ pending free agents.

More Definitions!

• Top 51 Rule - During the NFL’s regular season, all players on the team’s roster (53), practice squad (16), and IR (variable) count against the salary cap. That’s a minimum of 69 players, but clubs obviously carry more throughout the offseason, with a 90-man roster limit. To account for this, the NFL uses a different accounting structure for the salary cap in the offseason than it does after roster cutdown day. The offseason structure is known as the “Top 51” rule — only the team’s 51 highest cap hits (plus any dead cap hits) count against the salary cap. This means that if a team has more than 51 players, every time they add another, the lowest-paid player drops off. This drastically reduces the cap impact of signing a low-cost player.

  • Example — At this moment, the Vikings have 54 players under contract. When the league year starts, it will be 53, as Harrison Smith’s contract will void before then. Right now, the lowest cap hit for any Vikings player is $885,000. There are eight players with that cap hit, and OTC shows Caleb Etienne, Joaquin Davis and Jacob Roberts as the players below the Top 51 cutoff. If another player signs, it would put Dontae Fleming below that line. If the Vikings were to ERFA tender Jalen Redmond — we’ll get to what that means in a minute — he would count for $1,075,000 against the cap. Because that move knocks Fleming off the Top 51 list, the cap impact of doing so is only $190,000. Essentially, the team will offset about $1 million against the cap on every signing they make this offseason.
    

• Exclusive-Rights Free Agent (ERFA) — The most restrictive form of free agency, ERFAs apply to players with fewer than two accrued seasons in the NFL. Players only gain an accrued season if they are on a team’s 53-man roster or IR for at least six weeks during a season. Because draft picks get four-year deals, and undrafted free agents (UDFAs) get three-year deals, ERFA status mostly applies to players who did not make an initial 53-man roster, but worked their way up from the practice squad to the active roster during a given season. If a team applies a tender to an ERFA, that player does not have the right to negotiate with other teams and automatically receives a one-year, league-minimum contract with the team. If an ERFA is not tendered, they become an unrestricted free agent.
  

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• Restricted Free Agent (RFA) — Restricted free agency is for players with three accrued seasons. This primarily consists of players who were UDFAs who played out their entire rookie contracts. Teams can tender RFAs at various levels — First Round, Second Round, Original Round, or Right of First Refusal. Other teams can offer contracts on tendered RFAs, but if they sign a deal, the original team can choose to match it or receive the draft pick benefit listed with the tender. For UDFAs, the original-round tender does not include a draft pick. The benefit of the tender for the player is that it carries a guaranteed one-year salary. For 2026, the salary for the First Round Tender is $7,983,000, Second Round is $5,658,000, and RoFR is $3,453,000. If a team chooses not to tender an RFA, they become an unrestricted free agent.

• Unrestricted Free Agent (UFA) — Unrestricted free agents are your standard free agents. When a veteran with four-plus years of experience has his contract expire, he becomes a UFA. He is free to negotiate and sign with any team, with one exception. The NFL has a rule allowing teams to Franchise or Transition Tag players. Those tags carry very high, one-year salaries. The Franchise Tag prevents any other team from negotiating with that player, while the Transition Tag means that another team can negotiate with the player, but the tagging team has the right to match the deal, and the new team would also have to give up two First Round picks to the team that tagged the player, functionally preventing outside negotiation.

• “Void” Free Agent — This technically isn’t an NFL term, but OTC uses it to denote players who will become free agents because of voided contracts. These players will become UFAs, but there is a benefit to a team if it extends a player on a voidable contract before his contract actually voids. When a player’s contract voids, the cap hit in the void years of the deal accelerates into the next season. However, if an extension is reached before the void date, the contract void date is pushed back via the extension. This means that there’s no cap acceleration.

  • Example: The Vikings have only one voidable contract, Harrison Smith. Currently, Smith is slated to count for $10.6 million in dead cap for the Vikings in 2026. However, if the team were to extend him before his contract expires, his prorated signing bonus would count only $3 million against the cap, a functional savings of $7.6 million. Obviously, they still owe the money against the cap in the future, but it provides short-term relief. If the contract is voided, there’s nothing preventing the team from re-signing the player anyway, but having a large dead cap hit and then having to pay the player more is not desirable.

Who Should the Vikings Try to Keep?

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All the Minnesota Vikings and their staff can do while the NFL playoffs proceed is sit at home and watch while planning to try to get back there next year. The NFL league year ends on March 11th, which means free agency is fast approaching.

We know teams make a ton of deals right as free agency begins, and even in the “legal tampering” window leading up to free agency. Therefore, Vikings’ GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and his staff will need to complete their internal and external evaluations and have a full-fledged plan with multiple contingencies leading up to free agency. That planning is ongoing. For the Vikings, the first step in that plan has to start with salary cap compliance.

A Sticky Situation

The Vikings have over $351 million in cap liabilities in 2026, per OverTheCap.com. OTC has a league-wide projected salary cap of $295 million (author’s note: different sources have different projections. Spotrac.com projects the 2026 cap at $304.3 million; we won’t know the true cap until about the end of February, it was released on February 27th last year), and the Vikings get a couple of benefits that provide a little extra space, including the rollover of leftover cap from 2025.

That puts the Vikings $49 million in the hole for the 2026 season. On top of that, they also need to consider the salary slots for their rookie class, which these calculations do not incorporate. Accounting for that, the Vikings’ effective cap space is -$54.2 million.

There are even further factors to account for, however. The effective cap space we see on these tables considers the offseason cap rules, counting the top 51 cap hits for the team. Obviously, an in-season roster requires 53 players, so we have to account for two additional minimum player salaries, which is roughly $1.75 million.

In addition, you need to account for the fact that the team will roster 16 practice squad players throughout the season, totalling about $4 million. Beyond that, teams like to enter the season with about $10 million in space. If you add all of that together, the Vikings need to create roughly $70 million in space to enter the season with a healthy cap next year.

The bad news is that’s a lot of cap space to create. The Vikings have the second least space in the NFL, with only the Kansas City Chiefs in a deeper hole. The good news is twofold: first, the Vikings only have to free up the $49 million before the league year gets here. That means that they can wait to pull some of the levers that will be discussed in the article until critical offseason points, like signing draft picks or before the season. That will give them extra clarity before they need to make a decision.

Second, they have a lot of flexibility to create cap space without cutting players by making salary cap conversions. They can create $105 million in cap space just by executing what OTC calls simple restructures— that’s the 5th-largest possible cap expansion via simple restructure in the NFL. What’s more, they can create up to $158 million if they use more advanced methods to restructure, second to only the Chiefs in the amount of space they can create via these more complex restructures.

A (Not So) Quick Salary Cap Primer

When an NFL player signs a contract, it’s reported as a number of years and total value. However, the money the player is paid is not evenly spread throughout the length of the deal.

Instead, there are a number of different methods by which a player gets paid. So, while Justin Jefferson’s extension with the Vikings was reported at 4 years, $140 million, or $35 million per year, he doesn’t actually get paid $35 million in each year of the deal.

Here’s the OTC page for Jefferson’s contract:

Let’s define some of the terms:

• Base Salary — This is what is paid to the player in game checks throughout the course of the season. A player’s salary counts against the cap in the same year it is owed.

• Incentives — These are contract terms where the player gets paid for achieving certain goals. Workout and per-game roster bonuses — defined in more detail below — are examples, but yardage, touchdowns, sacks, team success, and individual accolades can also be contract incentives.

  • LTBE or NLTBE — Likely-to-be-earned incentives are ones that the player achieved the season prior. These count against the salary cap in the year the incentive applies to. If a player fails to meet an LTBE incentive, the team gets a cap credit the following season. Naturally, not-likely-to-be-earned incentives are ones the player did not achieve the prior season, and do not count against the cap, but the team will receive a cap penalty the following season if the player earns the incentive.

• Workout Bonus — This is an incentive to get the player to attend offseason workouts, like minicamp and OTAs.

• Per-Game Roster Bonus — This is a bonus the player receives for each game he is active in during the season. The number shown is the total for the 17-game season, so 1/17th is paid for each game they are active. For salary cap purposes, the rules for likely-to-be-earned (LTBE) and not-likely-to-be-earned (NLTBE) incentive rules apply. This can be used to manipulate the salary cap. A great example was Za’Darius Smith’s contract with the Vikings in 2022, which featured a massive per-game roster bonus, keeping his salary cap low because he played only one game in 2021.

• Guaranteed Salary — This is the total amount of cash that the team is required to pay a player in the given season, even if the player is cut. In Jefferson’s case, his 2026 guarantees include his base salary, per-game roster bonuses, and workout bonus.

• Signing Bonus — When a player signs a contract, they often get a lump sum of money upon signing. This gives the player security because NFL contracts aren’t fully guaranteed. To prevent these large lump payments from creating cap issues, the NFL prorates the signing bonus over the first five years of the player’s deal or the life of the deal — whichever is shorter.

  • Example: If a player signs a six-year contract with a $5 million signing bonus, it will count $1 million against the cap for the first 5 years of the deal. If it’s a five-year deal with the same $5 million signing bonus, it’s also $1 million per year for the five years of the deal. With a four-year deal and $5 million signing bonus, it would count as $1.25 million per year over four years, and so on.

• Option Bonus — Option bonuses are essentially delayed signing bonuses. They spread out the total cap hit over up to five years, just like with signing bonuses, but starting in future years rather than when the contract is signed. The bonus is paid out on a specific date, so the team can avoid a cap hit if they trade the player before it’s due, and they carry a much smaller cap number in the interim than they would with the same amount of money in base salary before the trade. The Philadelphia Eagles are known for putting option bonuses instead of base salaries in all years of their large contracts.

• Void Years — These are dummy years in a contract. A void contract will have language, including even a listed salary, for a year, but then also have language that says the contract automatically voids before that year occurs. Because of NFL accounting rules, this allows teams to use bonus proration to put salary cap hits where the player will not be under contract. As you can see above, Jefferson’s 2025 option bonus put a $6 million cap hit in the 2029 season, where he is currently slated to be a free agent.

• Dead Money — This is how big of a cap hit the team takes if they cut or trade the player. This will count against the salary cap in the year the move was made (and, in some circumstances, the next year, as explained later), but the player will not be on the roster.

In addition to the components of a contract, there are a number of tricks teams use to manipulate the salary cap. Here are some common moves and terms to be aware of.

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• Signing Bonus Conversion — The CBA allows teams to automatically convert a portion of a player’s salary into a signing bonus without consulting the player. The player gets the benefit of being paid immediately rather than having to wait for game checks, and the team gets the benefit of the salary cap hit being spread out over multiple years instead of in that single year. When you do a signing bonus conversion, you have to leave a salary of at least the minimum salary for a season for that player.

  • Example: With Jefferson’s six accrued seasons, his minimum salary for 2026 is $1.215 million. If the Vikings wanted to do a maximum salary restructure with his contract, you could combine his base salary, roster bonus and workout bonus to get $25.75 million. Take out the $1.215 million from that, and you get $24.535 million. Because he has four years remaining on his deal, you divide that number by four, and the cap hit would be $6,133,750 in each of the four years, saving $18,401,250 against the 2026 cap (note: you could also add an additional void year to the deal, saving even more money, but adding a void year DOES require negotiation).

• Cap Hit Acceleration and Dead Money — What happens to the cap hits from bonuses if the team moves on from a player before the player’s contract is up? Rather than still being paid out over the course of the contract, the cap hit “accelerates” into the year the move was made. So, in the example of the $5 million signing bonus above, if you cut the player the day after he signed, he would incur a $5 million cap hit for you that season. That acceleration is added to whatever guaranteed salary the player had and counts as dead money. There are, however, a few factors that impact how much of a player’s cap hit counts as dead money

  • Cut vs. Trade vs. Retirement — How much dead money a team incurs depends on the type of transaction. If a player is cut, they owe the player all of their salary guarantees, including bonuses accrued by the time the player is cut. If a player is traded, however, the player’s new team takes on his contract, so any money that hasn’t been paid—including salary guaranteed to be paid out at a future date—is now owed by the new team. Therefore, only any existing bonus money prorated into the future but already paid counts against the cap as dead money. Finally, if a player retires, he forfeits his salary, and potentially roster bonuses and signing bonuses that he may have been owed. It’s unlikely, however, that teams will try to take money back from a retiring player unless there was an acrimonious divorce.

  • Offset Guarantees — Most contracts have what is known as “offset language.” You may hear this in the context of the deals rookies sign, as it’s one of the few things that the CBA allows teams and players to truly negotiate. Offset language essentially says that if a player with guaranteed money is cut, and then signs with another team, any money he’s paid by his new team reduces the amount of money the old team owes him. The most famous recent example is Russell Wilson, whose guaranteed salary with the Broncos was offset, so he signed a league minimum deal with the Steelers.

  • Pre/Post-June 1st Move — The timing of a roster move affects how the prorated money in a contract accelerates against the cap. If a move is made before June 1st, all of the money accelerates into that cap year. However, this could become problematic in-season if a team wants to make a trade or is forced to make some other roster move. So, the team implemented June 1st as a cutoff, and any move made after June 1st has the remaining prorated salary owed accelerate and count against the cap in the next season. So, in our $5 million signing bonus example, if a player was cut after June 1st, the bonus would count $1 million against the cap in the current year, as it always did, and then $4 million against the cap in the next season. Prior to the June 1st deadline, teams are allowed to designate two players each year as post-June 1st cuts to gain the salary cap benefit. Teams have to wait until June 1st to gain additional cap space, so honestly most of the time I don’t really see the point in making moves post-June 1st moves.

Let’s Create Cap Space

As mentioned above, the Vikings have a ton of flexibility to create space. Let’s review their current contracts and evaluate the changes they should make to create space. I have a few overarching philosophies when it comes to managing the cap.

First, I don’t mind using void years or living with some dead money at all. Because the salary cap consistently rises, pushing cap hits into future years is like borrowing at a negative interest rate.

If I gave you $500 and told you that, in a year, I wanted $445 back, you would take the money in an instant. The NFL salary cap has risen by about 11% on average each of the last four years, so that’s exactly what has happened. $100 against the cap in 2025 was roughly the same impact as $65 in 2021.

Second, however, I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket. I think that when teams mismanage void years, it’s because they're forced to restructure undesirable contracts. The Browns and Saints are good examples of this over the past few years.

The Browns are stuck with the terrible DeShaun Watson contract and have had no option but to keep pushing his cap hits into the future. The Saints had a similar situation with the Derek Carr contract and, realistically, were only bailed out when Carr decided to retire. I think this is basically exclusive to QB contracts, but some large contracts for other positions may create similar problems.

In my view, the Eagles have done a good job of avoiding this issue by quickly moving on from contracts they don’t think are working — Bryce Huff is a good example — rather than doubling down. To avoid this, I don’t want to put so much money into the future that I can’t roughly break even on a post-June 1st cut in a future year. If I have the option, I’d rather spread cap savings over two contracts than make it all up in one move.

Third, I don’t want to push money into the future for players on subprime contracts. If a player is declining or not performing up to the level of his contract, I’d consider eating a larger cap hit in the current year and increasing my flexibility for future years if I can’t easily move on from him.

For maximum restructuring savings, I’m looking at the savings if the player’s full salary is converted into a bonus and spread over five years. This would mean adding void years if necessary. For the cap savings if cut, I’m looking at a pre-June 1st cut since you need to carry the cap hit until then anyway.

All numbers are from OTC.

WR Justin Jefferson – 2026 Salary Cap Hit: $38,987,600

Maximum Restructure Savings: $19,628,000; Cap Savings if Cut: ($33,225,200)

Justin Jefferson’s contract was made to restructure. He is an elite player in his prime, and weathered the Vikings’ rocky season with grace. It’s worth noting, however, that Jefferson is paid at a level that it may not be wise to put all of your eggs in one basket by performing a maximum restructure. It’s also worth monitoring that Jefferson had a down year in 2025, and not just because of the QB play. By his (admittedly very high) standards, Jefferson had moments where he did not win on routes in critical situations, and way more issues catching the football than we’re used to.

As such, I would probably use Jefferson’s contract to create about $15 million in space, rather than the maximum of almost $20 million.

Verdict – Restructure

Cap Savings Thus Far: ~$15,000,000

DT Jonathan Allen – 2026 Salary Cap Hit: $23,866,666

Maximum Restructure Savings: $13,120,000; Cap Savings if Cut: $6,533,332

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The Minnesota Vikings had CJ Ham mic’d up for the team’s Week 18 game against the Green Bay Packers. While he hasn’t officially announced it, the video makes it clear that Ham expects the game to be his last and that he will retire this offseason.

With Ham potentially riding off into the sunset, and Harrison Smith also looking like he will hang ‘em up, the Vikings might lose their two-longest tenured players in the same offseason.

Ham joined the Vikings in 2016 as an undrafted free agent out of Augustana University in Sioux Falls, SD. A DII school, Augustana is small enough that you have to clarify it’s not Augustana College, the school in Illinois where former Bengals’ QB and NFL MVP Ken Anderson played. At Augustana, Ham was an RB and ran for over 1,000 yards and 16 TDs in his final season.

Born and raised in Duluth, MN, Ham’s local roots are likely the only reason he had an opportunity with the Vikings. Ham wasn’t notable enough to be signed by a team immediately after the draft, but he got invited to the team’s rookie minicamp.

His invite was so under-the-radar that sites like the Daily Norseman didn’t have it listed. In fact, it was hard to find Ham listed anywhere as a minicamp invite. I found this Argus Leader article that listed Ham among the local Sioux Falls minicamp invites. That website even wrote a profile on a local player invited to Vikings’ camp, but it was on University of Sioux Falls CB Solomon St. Pierre, not Ham.

Ham beat the odds to make the Vikings’ roster after minicamp, converted to FB, made the practice squad after camp, and spent 2016 as an understudy to Zach Line. He made the team proper the next season, and just kept grinding away as a dirty work player.

Lead blocking on offense and covering punts and kickoffs on special teams are not glamorous ways to live, but Ham made it work. He lasted through two GMs, two HCs, four different special teams coordinators, six different offensive play callers, and nine NFL seasons. Once he made the team, he missed just eight games in his career and just two until this past season.

Ham became a cult favorite among fans due to a combination of his Minnesota origin, food-related last name, and legitimately good play on the field.

I see Ham as having taken up the mantle of Jim Kleinsasser, another local product who played a dirty work role for the Vikings. A two-time Pro Bowler at FB and a four-time team captain, the league and his teammates recognized Ham’s excellence as a player and leader. Ham also does excellent work off the field, and the Vikings nominated him for the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award in 2025.

Vikings’ HC Kevin O’Connell made sure to get Ham involved in his probable final game. He got him a goal-line run for a rushing TD, and Ham made a great juggling catch to convert a third down late in the game. O’Connell said he had hoped to get Ham and Smith on the field for a kneeldown to end the game, but it wasn’t meant to be as the Packers held the ball until time expired. The team still put Ham up on the video board to get an ovation from the crowd during a timeout.

Fullbacks are used sparingly in the modern NFL. PFF lists just 14 players as fullbacks for the 2025 season, and most of them played small roles on their respective offenses; in total, fullbacks took 3,127 snaps in the regular season — 9.1 percent of available offensive snaps for all teams. For the 12 offenses that employed those 14 backs, it was still just 24.3 percent of available snaps.

Throughout Ham’s career, only about half of the NFL teams rostered a fullback. It speaks volumes that, upon arriving in Minnesota from a system that didn’t use an FB in Los Angeles, O’Connell modified his offense to incorporate Ham.

Ham’s usage rate on offense increased every season under O’Connell, from playing 15% of offensive snaps in 2022 to 28% in 2025. While it didn’t reach his peak under Stefanski and the two Kubiaks (he played 1,134 snaps, roughly 36% of the offensive total, from 2019-2021), Ham was a critical part of the Vikings offense this season.

To maintain relevance, however, Ham also needed to contribute on special teams. He was a core special teamer every season of his career, and it’s fitting that he likely finishes his career with an almost identical number of special teams (2,299) and offensive (2,308) snaps.

On offense, Ham totaled 84 receptions for 681 yards and two TDs, with 35 rushing attempts for 106 yards and eight TDs. He recorded 54 combined and 35 solo tackles during his special teams career, and he also blocked and recovered a punt in 2024 against the San Francisco 49ers.

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Based on his play, Ham certainly doesn’t need to retire. You could argue that 2025 was his best season since that 2019-21 peak, and I very much think he has more in the tank. I respect his likely decision to move on – he should simply do what he wants to in that regard.

But rather than being a declining player at the end of his career, Ham was playing at a level near the peak for his position. I want to honor that in the best way I can, by putting out a highlight reel of Ham’s 2025 season, featuring all phases of the game.

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As time wound down in the Minnesota Vikings’ Week 18 win against the Green Bay Packers, the Vikings called a timeout. Referee John Hussey made the announcement in a unique way, saying:

“Minnesota charged timeout to honor Harrison Smith.”

Games have certainly been paused or stopped before to recognize individual players or achievements, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an official make the announcement.

For example, when Peyton Manning broke (what was at the time) Brett Favre’s all-time touchdown record in 2013, the NBC broadcast did a great job of incorporating the stadium audio into the production, but the officials didn’t actually make an announcement, and the game continued, with the extra point happening off-screen.

The announcement was a nice touch to an emotional sendoff for Smith. The game conditions, where the Vikings were shutting out the rival Packers in a game that didn’t matter, allowed the team to celebrate its star in this fashion. The reason we don’t see this type of announcement more often is that the stars needed to align for the Vikings to play a game that didn’t matter, and one they were winning at home in, that very well could be Smith’s final game.

Can you imagine trying to honor Smith during the regular season finale or playoff game last year?

While nothing has been officially announced, it certainly feels like Smith will retire. Based on how he brought his family to the game, the in-game announcement, and his emotional post-game interviews after the game against the Detroit Lions the week prior, all the signs are there. Smith may not have made a huge impact in his final game, but that’s because the Packers simply weren’t trying. Instead, as time goes on and muddies memories, fans will likely remember his standout performance against the Lions, with a sack and an INT as the final hurrah in a legendary career.

A Vikings Legend

Whether he retires or not, Smith will go down as one of the Vikings’ franchise legends. He is one of just four Vikings to start in over 200 regular season games, and his 207 games played for the team rank fifth in history, behind Jim Marshall, Mick Tingelhoff, Fred Cox and Carl Eller.

In the history of the NFL, there are only 114 players to have recorded 200 or more starts in their career. Smith is one of them.

Smith ranks fourth in Vikings’ history in interceptions with 39. His four career Interception Return TDs are the most in team history. Versatility has been the hallmark of Smith’s game, and his effectiveness as a blitzer. His 21.5 career sacks rank 25th in team history, but are miles above the next DB (Joey Browner, with 9.5). Smith’s longevity also earned him the most tackles, at least since 1994 in Vikings history, with 859 solo tackles.

(Author’s note: Pro-Football-Reference (PFR), the source of my data, notes that tackle statistics are available since 1994 but also list tackle totals before then. That's because tackle statistics from before 1994 are not necessarily comparable to those after; that year the NFL officially started separating out solo tackles and assists. PFR lists Carl Lee, who played from 1983-1993, as having 771 tackles)

Smith certainly has an argument to be the best defensive back in Vikings’ history, and he’s at least top three, along with Hall-of-Famers Paul Krause and Joey Browner. From a longevity and production standpoint, it’s hard to argue with Smith’s resume.

The Vikings selected Smith out of Notre Dame with the 29th overall pick in 2012. Having already taken Matt Kalil with the fourth overall pick, then-GM Rick Spielman traded the 35th and 98th picks to the Baltimore Ravens to go up and get Smith. Those picks turned out to be Courtney Upshaw and Geno Gradkowski.

Smith was one of just nine players selected in the 2012 NFL Draft to play in 2025. He was the second safety selected in the 2012 Draft, behind Mark Barron, who flamed out as a safety and had the time to reinvent himself and find success as a linebacker, with an eight-year career. He’s been out of the NFL for six seasons. Luke Kuechly, also taken in the top 10 of that draft, is currently a finalist for the Hall of Fame.

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When Smith entered the league, Leslie Frazier was the Vikings’ HC, and that season, Adrian Peterson became the last non-QB to win the NFL MVP award. Smith made an immediate impact, starting all 16 games as a rookie and returning two INTs for TDs.

For his first two years, Smith was relegated to a deep safety role in Fraizer’s static, two-high scheme that ran mostly Tampa 2. It took until Smith’s third season and the arrival of Mike Zimmer to unlock Smith’s versatility, as Zimmer helped Smith develop from a very good safety into an elite safety.

In 2012, Smith played 149 snaps in the box, 44 in the slot, and a whopping 900 snaps as a deep safety, per PFF. He missed half of 2013 with an injury, but played deep on over 75% of his active snaps that season. In 2014, Smith’s role was transformed, playing 304 snaps in the box, 137 in the slot, and 614 deep, 58% of the time. Smith had rushed the passer just 19 times in his two seasons, but he rushed 41 times in 2014. He’s only dipped below 35 pass rushes once since then – in 2022, with Ed Donatell’s terrible defense.

Zimmer’s arrival brought out the best in Smith. The alignment versatility and aggressiveness in Smith’s new role allowed him to unlock his playmaking instincts, and he recorded five interceptions and three sacks in the 2014 season. PFF recognized Smith’s breakout season and named him a First-Team All-Pro, but the rest of the league lagged behind. Smith missed the Pro Bowl and did not make the AP All-Pro team

(Author’s note: Smith did receive 7 All-Pro votes in 2014, but missed the cut for Second Team. Behind Earl Thomas, voters essentially had a split opinion on safety that year, with Eric Weddle, Kam Chancellor, and Glover Quin each earning between 13 and 16 votes. Other players receiving fewer votes made it at other positions, like Tony Romo’s 3 votes at QB or Fletcher Cox’s 5 votes at DE).

In 2015, Smith continued his high level of play, the Vikings made the playoffs, and the recognition came. He made his first of five consecutive Pro Bowls, and he had people comparing him to the legendary Troy Polamalu. He helped the Vikings play as one of the league’s two best defenses and reach the NFC Championship game in 2017, and earned his lone AP First-Team All-Pro honor, reaching Second-Team in 2018. Smith got back to the Pro Bowl one last time in 2021, in his age-32 season and Zimmer’s last season as Vikings’ head coach.

At that point, it may have been perfectly reasonable for Smith to ride off into the sunset. He kept playing and recorded five interceptions under Donatell in 2022.

Then Brian Flores arrived, and he reprised his role as a do-it-all master of disguise for the last three seasons.

Smith was never a boisterous leader in the Vikings’ locker room. He was a quiet, almost reclusive player who was rarely seen outside of a football context. He was a leader nonetheless, with players and coaches raving about his football intelligence and locker room presence.

Last offseason, he had Kevin O’Connell practically begging him to come back to the team, and I expect he’ll experience the same this year.

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The people at Wide Left — myself, Alex Katson, Devin Jackson, Dante Collinelli, James Foster, Matt Fries, and, reluctantly, Luke Braun — have put together our year-end awards list, including MVP, our All-Pro teams and more.

The goal is to produce deeply positioned approaches to the awards, like we did last year. We’ll likely have different MVP picks from most of the sportswriting community every year, and our approach to every award is deeply thought out. We hope you agree!

Let’s get started.

• Awards

  • Most Valuable Player

  • Offensive Player of the Year

  • Defensive Player of the Year

  • Offensive Rookie of the Year

  • Defensive Rookie of the Year

  • Comeback Player of the Year

  • Most Improved Player of the Year

  • Head Coach of the Year

  • Coordinator of the Year

• Wide Left All-Pro First Team

• Wide Left All-Pro Second Team

Awards

Our Yearly Preface: Don’t Just Hand Them to Quarterbacks

I’ve often held that we shouldn’t just hand the MVP to quarterbacks. I’ll just repeat what I wrote last year.

In accordance with my take that we should not be automatically doling out the MVP to the best quarterback in the NFL, I’ve decided to broaden our scope and discuss who the best player in the NFL is this year. From that piece [two years ago] on the MVP award:

We do ourselves an enormous disservice by focusing on the word “valuable” in the MVP award. Historically, the award has gone to the most high-profile player in the NFL, often a quarterback but many times a running back and occasionally a defensive player (and once a kicker).

Since 2013, it’s only been given to quarterbacks. And that is tremendously boring. We already have an award for quarterbacks — it’s the All-Pro award at the position. If we need to, we can award individual positions with separate trophies like they do in college football.

But the holistic, year-end award that used to colloquially mean “the best player in the NFL” — even if it never truly meant that — now must go to one position. When no one at the position is compelling, we shy away from giving it to outstanding players at other positions.

These are much more interesting conversations that would allow us to better understand the demands of each of these positions or recognize players who separate themselves from the pack in bigger ways than passing EPA. Aaron Donald and J.J. Watt deserved multiple MVP seasons.

We have very detailed discussions about quarterbacks because of Brock Purdy’s candidacy. We did the same thing in 2012 with Griffin and 2016 with Ryan. In 2015, there was a conversation about quarterback running value or inflation of one-yard touchdown totals with Cam Newton. We added overall running value to our understanding in 2019 with Jackson.

Those rich conversations would allow us to more deeply examine questions about system fit and offensive linemen (the Evan Mathis question), supporting cast and running backs (do McCaffrey or Derrick Henry create their own production?) and the impact of late-winning pass rushers like Danielle Hunter when compared to early winners like Garrett.

Otherwise, we could be as literal as possible and award the player by dividing total quarterback EPA by salary cap impact. A literal reading of the award would only allow us to recognize high-performing quarterbacks on rookie contracts — a most-underpaid award.

A literal reading of the award forces us to debate between statistically underwhelming quarterbacks and compare them to quarterbacks whose film doesn’t astound. Let’s celebrate the best player in the NFL by giving them the award for being the best player in the NFL.

This year’s MVP candidate was easy to select for our voters, who were instructed to keep things position-blind throughout all of the words except the All-Pro voting.

MVP: Myles Garrett, EDGE Cleveland Browns

All seven voters included Garrett on their ballots, and six of them ranked him first overall. He would have likely won the award had he not broken the official NFL sack record in the final game, simply because of how dominant he was throughout the season, regardless of one sack here or there.

He leads the league in double-team plus chip rate (the rate at which he is chipped by an eligible receiver releasing into a route on pass rushes plus the rate at which he experiences a “true” double-team with two blockers fully committed to stopping him) and still ranks second in the NFL in pass-rush win rate, according to Pro Football Focus.

The fact that he saw more attention devoted to him than any other defensive player while producing league-leading statistics is nothing short of remarkable. Besides J.J. Watt, other players in record-setting sack position didn’t see this level of attention and multicapable production.

Garrett was doubled or chipped on 57 percent of his pass rush attempts this season. By comparison, T.J. Watt was doubled or chipped on 31 percent of his pass rush attempts in his historic 2021 season.

OPOY: Drake Maye, QB New England Patriots

It is difficult to fully capture how excellent Drake Maye has been this year. Criticisms of his play are only relevant when compared to other elite quarterbacks; Maye’s foibles are contextual to being the best we’ve ever seen, not among a very good crop of players this year.

Maye ranks sixth in total EPA generated on quarterback plays in the last decade, and on just passing attempts alone, ranks second. His ability to pin passes to receivers despite throwing deep downfield — even with an average receiver corps and offensive line — is among the best we’ve ever seen.

Next Gen Stats has calculated the likelihood that any particular pass will be completed, accounting for how far downfield the throw is, how close to the sideline the target is, how close the nearest coverage defender is, how much pressure there is on the snap, and more. The difference between the expected completion rate and the actual completion rate is the “Completion Percentage Over Expected,” also known as Completion Plus/Minus.

Maye, because of his accurate deep-downfield throwing, has the best Completion Percentage Over Expected in Next Gen Stats history, which goes back to 2016.

Maye led the league both in average depth of target and completion rate. I don’t think I can ever recall a season like that in NFL history.

Sure, Maye could probably stand to take fewer sacks, and he could slightly carve down his interceptable throws, but these “flaws” only exist when comparing his season to those like Patrick Mahomes’ 2018 or Peyton Manning’s 2004, not to his same-season contemporaries.

While the argument about his genuinely soft schedule is valid, a holistic correction for elements like opposition, weather, supporting cast, interception luck and so on still places Maye ahead of an impressive quarterback like Matthew Stafford.

Kevin Cole did much of that work at Unexpected Points and it makes a remarkably clear case.

He’s more than good enough to take home the title this year.

DPOY: Jeffery Simmons, DT Tennessee Titans

It’s an enormous credit to Jeffery Simmons that he earned Defensive Player of the Year in our voting over players like Will Anderson Jr. and Micah Parsons, who were in the running. And Simmons ran away with the voting in our field; he appeared on all but one ballot and earned first-place consideration in all but two ballots.

It makes sense, too. Simmons has seen nearly the same attention from opposing offenses that Garrett has received.

For years, Simmons had been flirting with nearly-elite status as a defensive tackle as bigger names like Aaron Donald and Chris Jones took the spotlight, with occasional appearances from defenders like Cameron Heyward, Quinnen Williams and Dexter Lawrence.

This year, it’s been Simmons’ time to shine. Or it would have been, had the Tennessee Titans been able to surround him with more talent.

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Like with Garrett, however, that makes his success even more impressive. In addition to seeing significantly more offensive attention than his teammates, Simmons has also had to deal with one interesting problem: he can’t easily accumulate pass-rush statistics like sacks, hits and hurries because teams are running the ball against the Titans after accumulating early leads.

Nevertheless, Simmons leads all defensive tackles in quarterback sacks and hurries, placing second in total pressures of any type. The number one player in QB pressures, Zach Allen, had 90 more pass-rushing snaps than Simmons. In fact, all of the other defensive tackles in the top five had 30 to 100 more pass-rushing snaps than the Titans tackle.

He ranked first in PFF win rate among defensive tackles and second in ESPN’s win rate metric. He also ranked first in PFF win rate when only looking at “true pass sets,” which are passing plays that include plays where the quarterback spends between two and four seconds in the pocket, when it’s a standard, non-play action or non-screen dropback and when there isn’t a rollout or two- or three-man rush.

Simmons hasn’t been as strong as some other pressure producers in the run game, but he’s still a top-15 player in run-stop win rate among defensive tackles despite the problems facing the Titans.

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The logistics involved with NFL games make it difficult to make changes on the fly. When the NFL announced the schedule for the 2025 season on May 14, they hoped for a strong Christmas Day slate to compete with the NBA and feature five playoff teams from 2024, along with the ever-present Dallas Cowboys, in the day’s three games.

With one of those games, the Detroit Lions at the Minnesota Vikings, the NFL hoped to get stakes close to what the teams saw in Week 18 of 2024, when the two met in Detroit to decide the NFC North and the NFC’s No. 1 seed. The Vikings, recognizing the importance of the matchup, tabbed the game for their Winter Warrior uniforms, announcing the decision in July.

Given the results of the 2024 season, it would have been difficult for the NFL to predict that its 2025 Christmas Day slate would be almost entirely meaningless.

Washington and Dallas were eliminated from the playoffs, Kansas City was starting Chris Oladokun against Denver with Patrick Mahomes out for the season, and Detroit’s playoff hopes were hanging by a thread against the already-eliminated Vikings. The NFL allows some games to be flexed, but the Christmas Day games did not qualify under its procedures.

Like the NFL schedulers, the Vikings were also stuck in a difficult spot for their special uniforms. Teams like to highlight special uniforms in critical, heavily watched games, so it made sense for the team to choose Christmas as that opportunity before the season, but it felt hollow when the team was eliminated.

It’s easier for teams to change the week they wear a certain uniform (you may note that the Lions are noted as wearing their primary blue uniforms in the Vikings’ announcement above, but wore their alternate blacks instead), but the schedule also left the Vikings with few good choices.

The Vikings had played four of their last five games on the road, so they would have had to showcase the uniforms early in the season, which doesn’t fit the theme. They would have looked ridiculous in all-white, winter-themed uniforms for their Week 2 prime-time game. (Oh, wait, the Packers did that?)

For the Vikings, it would have been easy to feel trapped in a meaningless game, starting your third-string rookie UDFA at QB. The whole team could have phoned it in (and, you could argue that the offense did). Instead, the team cared.

In particular, the defense stepped up.

It donned its white uniforms, walked out on the field to a rocking crowd of fans, all dressed in white. A funny note: three of the team’s standout performers — Andrew Van Ginkel (1.5 sacks, 2 fumble recoveries), Harrison Smith (1 INT, 3 PDs, 1 sack, 2 TFLs), and Blake Cashman (17 tackles, 1 sack) — from the game all happen to be white. The Vikings brought a whiteout for Christmas, and the Lions were not ready for it. Let’s break it down.

Andrew Van Ginkel

Watching Andrew Van Ginkel on tape is an interesting experience. He’s a really athletic player, but as an undersized edge, he doesn’t consistently dominate from down to down like his counterpart, Jonathan Greenard, often does.

Instead, Van Ginkel’s versatility and football intelligence show up constantly, and they’re the main reason he makes as many impact plays as he does.

Van Ginkel’s great game started with a two-play sequence. On the first, he did a good job compressing the TE’s block on the edge. He disengaged and just barely got a hand on RB David Montgomery’s leg, helping precipitate a tackle that he earned along with Cashman.

The Vikings challenged the spot, and the original first down was overturned, making the down-and-distance third-and-1. The challenge was an odd decision to say the least, but of course, it immediately paid off.

The Lions tried to quick-count the Vikings, and QB Jared Goff fumbled the snap. Van Ginkel was right there to jump on the ball for a fumble recovery:

Van Ginkel had another fumble recovery later in the game, on another botched snap. This time, Goff was in shotgun, and the Lions were running a screen, leaving him unblocked on the back side.

This meant that Van Ginkel had a free run at the ball, and as Goff tried to fall on it, Van Ginkel niftily ripped the ball from Goff as he was rolling over and recovered it:

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The NFL's decision to host multiple games on Christmas — two streamed on Netflix and the third on Amazon Prime, their traditional Thursday Night Football broadcast partner this year — was met with eyerolls from sportswriters hoping to spend time with their families instead of being forced to cover a game.

The hope, at least, was that the games would matter — that the outcomes decided rank-order among the NFL’s best and would help determine who’s jockeying for the top seed in the playoffs.

Instead, writers were forced to cover teams either mathematically or spiritually eliminated from the playoffs. The Vikings eliminated the lifeless Lions from playoff contention with their 23-10 victory over last year’s top seed.

Was it worth it? It depends on how one approaches sports.

The Vikings put together one of the best defensive performances any NFL fan of any team has seen this year. And it may not even have been the Vikings’ best.

It is astounding that one can look at the defensive performance the Vikings put together against the Lions and potentially conclude that it’s not even their best of the year —six takeaways and the best offensive field position of the year, and it doesn’t touch what the Vikings were able to do against the Cincinnati Bengals.

Arguably, it’s not even better than what they did against the New York Giants just four days prior.

It, contextually, could be the best performance they’ve put together all year after accounting for the fact that Jared Goff was bandied about as an MVP candidate at points this season, and neither Jake Browning nor Jaxson Dart were.

The other defensive performance contending for this list, their Week 14 matchup against the Washington Commanders, was against Marcus Mariota for half the game.

Either way, ambiguities like these are a testament to what Brian Flores can do when fully enabled to send chaos.

So What’s the Takeaway?

The Vikings are projected to have negative-$35 million in cap space in 2026, which means they have some decisions to make. Those decisions will likely revolve around aged veterans; the Vikings have the second-oldest snap-weighted defense using both season-long snap counts and last week’s snap counts.

They can clear up some of that space without cuts — about $20 million is available via restructure for both Justin Jefferson and Brian O’Neill, with more for T.J. Hockenson and Jonathan Greenard — but given how much they have to reserve for draft picks and theoretical re-signings, Vikings fans should be prepared to lose some key members of this year’s defense.

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That includes players likely to retire like Harrison Smith as well as older players who filled spot roles, like Eric Wilson. Both of them are free agents, as are Jeff Okudah and Fabian Moreau. Cap casualties might include Jonathan Allen and Javon Hargrave.

On offense, losses could potentially include Ryan Kelly, Josh Oliver and Aaron Jones. Next year’s team won’t look like this year’s team. So what is the worth of progress in a lost season when the most important developmental player cannot play?

It depends on what one is a fan for — the spite value of denying the Lions a playoff spot is hard to deny. It feels good. And it reminds us that there was something in the hope the fanbase had in the team at the start of the season; a validation of sorts, insulation against the idea that one was made a fool of.

Perhaps it is too little, too late, for repairing the ego it takes to have an opinion about how good a team is, but there is something fulfilling about seeing someone like Andrew Van Ginkel tear the soul out of the Lions offense — the worst performance we’ve seen for them all year.

That’s not much of an exaggeration; the Lions produced their worst total offensive yards, yards per play, success rate and EPA per play. They only scored one more point than they did in their dismal effort against the Philadelphia Eagles, a product of three consecutive conversions on third-and-long and 12 plays within the 12-yard line.

Despite those three conversions, this was their second-worst conversion rate (20.0%) on third down, beating out their zero percent rate against the Bengals — a win where they scored 37 points and only had eight third downs in the game at all.

How Did It Happen?

This was, unavoidably, the Van Ginkel game. He was in on two sacks directly, indirectly on at least one more, recovered two fumbles and caused an interception with a different pressure.

Goff may see Van Ginkel in his nightmares, his own personal Krampus.

Seeing Van Ginkel perform like he did in this game — like he has in the past three games — serves as a reminder of how drastically the defense changes with him on the field. He’s a supercharged version of the hybrid linebacker/edge rusher Flores has employed in the past, like Kyle Van Noy in 2017 or Van Ginkel himself in 2020.

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It is understandable that many fans felt that the Minnesota Vikings’ 16-13 win over the New York Giants on Sunday was hollow. To Brian Flores, however, the win had to feel great. Flores had filed a lawsuit against multiple teams, including the Giants, after allegedly learning he would not get the job before he even interviewed — former Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick texted Flores a message congratulating him on getting the job; that text was meant for a different Brian: former Giants’ head coach Brian Daboll.

Since that debacle, Flores has faced the Giants once each in both of the last two seasons. In those two games, his defense has allowed 12 points in 8 quarters. On Sunday, the Vikings’ defense allowed just two FG drives, both of which were extended by roughing the passer penalties on 3rd down sacks that would otherwise have knocked the Giants out of field goal range.

Giants’ rookie QB Jaxson Dart completed just 7 passes for 33 yards. He also took 5 sacks, losing 20 yards, meaning the Giants had a paltry 13 net passing yards in the game. The ineptitude was almost historic. The 13 net passing yards are the second-lowest total in a game this year, only outpacing the New York Jets’ -10 passing yards against the Denver Broncos in week 6. Justin Fields threw for 45 yards in that game, so sack yardage made the difference.

Dart’s seven completions were the second lowest for a team in a game this season, with another Jets game, this time a win, producing just 6 (Week 10 against the Cleveland Browns).

So, seven completions is the fewest a team has had in a loss this season. No team has had fewer than seven completions in a loss since 2023, when the Giants (sigh… WHAT is going on in New York?) lost to the Jets by playing a combination of Tommy Devito and Tyrod Taylor.

If you ignore sack yardage, the comparisons get even more bleak. Since 2020, this is one of five games where the offense has recorded 33 or fewer yards on their passing attempts. Two are extremely memorable: One is the 2020 Broncos’ game, where played receiver Kendall Hinton at quarterback due to COVID protocol shenanigans, and the other is the 2021 Monday Night game, where the New England Patriots threw just three times and won against the Buffalo Bills.

The other three are… the New York Giants (how? HOW?!?). There’s this game, the Taylor/DeVito game mentioned above, and a 2022 game against the Chicago Bears where Mike Glennon started (against Andy Dalton???).

None of those games were with the team’s intended starting QB. While it’s pretty clear the Giants intended to start Dart this year, even if Russell Wilson was technically the day one starter. There are basically no instances where a team had less than 33 yards when excluding sacks in the 2010s.

The only one is the 2010 Bengals, who started a disinterested Carson Palmer and later put in (fantastic YouTube personality) J.T. O’Sullivan. The last game I could find where a team meant to start a QB, and he ended up with fewer than 33 passing yards in a game, was another memorable one: the Patriots’ 59-0 beatdown of the Tennessee Titans in 2009.

Kerry Collins started that game and completed 2 of 12 passes for -7 yards and an INT. The Titans fell to 0-6, and Collins was benched after the game. Vince Young proceeded to go 8-2 as a starter.

I almost don’t need to provide advanced stats to make the point of how poor a passing performance this was. Arif is going to provide them anyway:

Now, let’s get to breaking down the film to find out what Flores and the Vikings’ defense did to bring Dart to such lows.

Film Study

It is important to note that the Giants ran the ball well in this game (when they weren’t collecting holding penalties). They ran 30 times for 128 yards, and got 11 of their 12 first downs on the ground. To an extent, it felt as if the Vikings defense was giving up some room on the ground to ensure a solid pass defense.

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The Minnesota Vikings beat the New York Giants 16-13 in a sloppy game that saw veteran center Ryan Kelly sustain his third concussion of the year and J.J. McCarthy suffer his third injury of any type this year.

The game contained nothing for those hoping for the Vikings to establish continued growth for their young quarterback or a winning culture. It contained even less for fans who want to see the Vikings lose in order to generate some more capital in the draft.

I type this from Burlington, Vermont, where I visit my brother for Christmas every year. He knows the deal; I have to be away from friends and family while I cover the game, something I will continue to do on Christmas Day when the Vikings unmercifully will play the Detroit Lions, probably without McCarthy.

These sacrifices are known elements of the job, ones that fans have virtually no sympathy for. It’s understandable why they wouldn’t — not only do you know about these holiday difficulties well before you dip your toes into the industry, but it’s generally considered a dream job.

Understanding how blessed I can be to do this for a living, even on Christmas, it’s still a soul-sucking experience to see a low-impact game turn suddenly meaningless when you have to turn down Christmas festivities in order to watch it in a separate room while a party is happening in the rest of the house.

Certainly, that pain is nothing compared to the pain Ryan Kelly experiences, both physically and emotionally, as he contemplates the end of his career. McCarthy’s short NFL life thus far has been its own hell.

But the pointlessness persists, permeating the process of watching a game.

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If you’re reading this, you’re probably a Vikings fan interested in quarterbacks’ capacity to improve from their rough starts. You know, for… reasons. This piece is part of a series on several quarterbacks who are playing better than they did at the beginning of their careers, and how that improvement came to be. This article isn’t about the Vikings. But it kind of is.

The spectre of potential can be an insurmountable mountain. I’ve already written breathlessly about how the “Golden Boy” reputation shaped J.J. McCarthy’s entire life. Trevor Lawrence’s story followed a similar path. Lawrence knew well before the draft that he’d be the first overall pick. He’s been blowing football minds away since he was seven years old.

So when he was tasked with saving the ever-ailing Jacksonville Jaguars, he had to know that expectations were perhaps unattainably high. The way pundits and NFL scouts hyped Lawrence, anything short of the NFL’s elite would be a disappointment.

Suffice to say, it’s been a disappointment for everyone except a dedicated group of Jacksonville fans.

Per Trumedia, Trevor Lawrence has a precisely average EPA/dropback over his NFL career: 0.00. The Jaguars have had one playoff season in his time in Jacksonville. Trevor Lawrence has never earned All-Pro honors. He has only participated in one Pro Bowl after Patrick Mahomes (Super Bowl), Joe Burrow and Josh Allen all bowed out.

But things may be turning around. For the last two weeks, Lawrence has been on fire. A five-game winning streak, capped off by two league-leading performances, would be enough to make you reconsider Trevor Lawrence’s claim to the NFL’s golden throne.

Has Liam Coen finally unlocked a hidden power here? Has the NFL’s golden boy finally found the secret sauce? To examine that, we need to understand what was wrong in the first place.

The Jaguars Make A Mess And Clean It Up

We don’t need to talk about Urban Meyer. His was one of the most disastrous tenures of all time. It was well-documented enough if you want a refresher, but suffice to say, we can give Trevor Lawrence a mulligan on his rookie season.

When Doug Pederson took over in Jacksonville, we saw a cleaner picture. Trevor Lawrence not only ranked top 10 by several metrics, including EPA/Dropback, but also led an historic comeback in the Wild Card round. The season ended with a hard-fought loss in Kansas City the next week, but it felt like Lawrence had proven something.

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The Minnesota Vikings’ Sunday Night Football win against the Dallas Cowboys marked the second positive game by EPA per play of young quarterback J.J. McCarthy’s career, a great follow-up to the first such game, which came the week prior against the Washington Commanders.

For McCarthy, the strong performances were much needed after an abysmal start to his season. He’s overtaken Cam Ward in terms of EPA per dropback, per NextGenStats, and therefore is no longer dead last in that stat. But it’s also noteworthy that McCarthy’s only two high-level performances this year came against abysmal defenses.

Dallas’ defense ranks 32nd in defensive EPA per play, and Washington’s is 30th. In just passing defense, they flip spots, with Washington last in the league and Dallas 30th (Cincinnati, the only other team the Vikings have scored 30-plus points against this season, is 31st in both categories).

The schedule luck continues for McCarthy, who has another easy matchup against the New York Giants (29th in EPA per play on defense; 21st against the pass). But how do you disentangle McCarthy’s strong performance from the defenses he’s playing? Does McCarthy simply look better because he’s facing competition anyone could succeed against, or has there been meaningful improvement?

You could look at how McCarthy performed relative to other QBs. Against Washington, McCarthy’s performance was 4th 4th-best out of their 14 opponents, while his game against Dallas was 2nd out of 14 opposing QB games. In each game, McCarthy outperformed noteworthy names like Patrick Mahomes and Jordan Love. That doesn’t necessarily mean much, however, as a player like Michael Penix Jr. outperformed what McCarthy was able to do against Washington.

What might be noteworthy is that McCarthy’s drastic improvement has come immediately after Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell decided to have him de-emphasize the mechanics the team had been drilling with him all season. To the team, it seemed that overfocusing on the mechanics was causing McCarthy to play slowly and struggle to make good in-game decisions. The hope was that, in tabling that work, McCarthy would have less cognitive load out on the field, hopefully improving his performance.

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Author’s note: There has been a seemingly infinite amount of ink spilled in the Vikings media space as it relates to QB mechanics and McCarthy’s throwing motion specifically. McCarthy’s throwing motion is obviously something that is still (generously) a work-in-progress, and I’m not going to focus on that aspect of his game in his piece. I will, however, talk about lower-body mechanics as they relate to processing and timing. I think McCarthy’s dropback footwork also still needs work, but we’ll get to that later.

Certainly, McCarthy has played better since the Vikings made the switch to stop having him worry so much about his mechanics. But, given the defenses he’d faced, a real chicken-or-the-egg question exists as to how real McCarthy’s improvement is. There’s a third complicating factor in terms of offensive play design to consider as well. I went to the tape to try to unravel all the threads and see if the improvement was real.

This is Bad Defense (Or, Good Offensive Design)

Going back through the tape, it is clear that the opposing defenses helped McCarthy out in a variety of ways over the last two weeks. It would be unfair to fully discount these plays, as no matter how good a defense is, it is going to occasionally allow open zones and easy completions. But for this analysis it’s important to take stock of how and when it happens so we can try to grade McCarthy on a bit of a curve.

Bad Defense

To me, a clear example of the defense making McCarthy’s job very easy was his first TD throw against Washington. On the play, you have Bobby Wagner imitating the “he froze” meme.

I mean, look at this play. Wagner is stuck in place. The outside cornerback is able to drive on the ball to contact Oliver, but he never really has a chance to make this play. It’s simply a coverage bust that McCarthy, to his credit, executed against.

Washington, in particular, gave McCarthy a number of easy, quick completions. McCarthy deserves a small amount of praise for hitting these plays, as it was something he needed to start doing more consistently, but executing these types of throws is a bare minimum requirement for an NFL QB.

There are certainly nice elements to the below plays from McCarthy, but here’s a compilation of throws that I would attribute more to the defensive performance than high-level QB play:

Good Offense

Kevin O’Connell also deserves significant credit for the passing game’s performance over the past couple of weeks. The Vikings have had a number of high-level designs that have led to easy gains. Over the past two weeks, the Vikings have gained 43 yards on 5 screens. He had another 9-yard completion to Jalen Nailor on a tap pass, as well as a pair of successful screens (one to Jones, one to Jefferson) that got negated by penalty in the Washington game.

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The Minnesota Vikings’ 34-26 win over the Dallas Cowboys doesn’t mean much in the standings; the Vikings were eliminated from the playoffs before the game even began and they changed draft positions by just one spot.

But for football fans, meaning does not always attach itself to standings or draft position. There are certainly Vikings fans who would rather lose the game and secure superior draft capital, but many others prefer to see the team figure out how to win games in their current configuration.

Within that framework, there’s been some hope. J.J. McCarthy, once one of the worst-performing quarterbacks we’ve seen in early quarterback play, has turned into something… positive?

Where’s McCarthy At

The national football-watching audience was introduced to J.J. McCarthy with a disastrous start on Monday Night Football against the Chicago Bears, one that was salvaged by an incredible fourth-quarter comeback.

The comeback overwhelmed the rest of his game in public perception; he even earned NFC Offensive Player of the Week honors. But it didn’t take long for his poor play to dominate the conversation. His play was so poor in just a few games that his injury was treated by some as a potential “soft benching” for a quarterback who wasn’t on an NFL roster when training camps across the league began.

His return from injury didn’t help things, and he put together some of the worst performances we’ve seen any quarterback, with any level of NFL experience, put together. Because they were, to most fans, numbers on a screen instead of a nationally televised game, there wasn’t much McCarthy could do to erase that perception, even after a dominant performance against the Washington Commanders.

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So, with a chance to reintroduce himself to a national audience with his actual play, he immediately tipped his own batted pass into a defender for an interception.

That stunning and innovative failure to begin the game wouldn’t set the tone for McCarthy, however. He would go on to have a 63 percent success rate after that, the fourth-highest of Week 15 and a 97th percentile performance this year.

This, along with his performance against the Commanders, has turned the tide on his season-long performance charting.

It would be easy to dismiss McCarthy’s performance as one against a struggling defense; the Cowboys entered the game ranked 28th in defensive EPA per play, a ranking that doesn’t change when looking solely at post-trade deadline performance.

And it would be a fair point to make if anyone were seriously arguing that McCarthy had become a top-tier quarterback on the basis of one game. That’s not the argument; McCarthy had been performing like one of the worst quarterbacks in the NFL and was often the worst-performing quarterback for the particular defense he was playing.

And, well, look:

And that includes the first-play interception. McCarthy’s performance was better than any other quarterback’s performance against Dallas — and the Cowboys have played Patrick Mahomes, Jared Goff, Jordan Love, Jalen Hurts (twice) and fellow second-year players Caleb Williams, Bo Nix and Jayden Daniels.

Playing well against two bad defenses doesn’t tell us that McCarthy is the heir apparent. But it’s such a turnaround from his previous performances, both relatively and absolutely, that it’s worth noting.

It wasn’t just in raw production numbers where McCarthy did well, either. That’s an important distinction; had he ‘produced’ primarily via screen passes where receivers and blockers did most of the work, it wouldn’t tell us much about his ability.

While McCarthy did pepper the short area of the field, he was hardly YAC or screen-dependent. Only 36 percent of his passing yardage came after the catch, and he still managed 10.4 yards per attempt, a relatively elite mark.

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His depth of target was fairly aggressive at 11.0 yards downfield, according to Pro Football Focus. Six of his 24 passes went 20 or more yards downfield, and he completed four of those passes at 21.7 yards per attempt.

In the past, the Vikings’ deep-ball tendencies with McCarthy have led to agonizingly long times-to-throw. Heading into his Week 14 matchup against Washington, McCarthy led the league in time to throw at 3.32 seconds, according to Next Gen Stats.

Unsurprisingly, he had the lowest rate of passes under 2.5 seconds at 18.5 percent. That meant he would invite pressure and put stress on the offensive line. While the benefit of this should have been deep passing — and they passed deep often; McCarthy’s deep ball rate ranked third in the NFL before Week 14, and he had the longest depth of target — it wasn’t effective.

Against the Commanders, McCarthy accelerated his internal clock and got rid of the ball quickly against a rote zone defense that was ultimately predictable. He didn’t throw deep that often, and his depth of target was a mere 7.5 yards downfield (according to PFF), which is fairly safe.

In short, the Commanders performance had significant positives but left glaring holes in our ability to evaluate McCarthy’s progress.

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Touchdown, 19 plays, 98 yards, 12:01, WSH 0 - MIN 14.

In 52 characters, ESPN’s Game Center blandly summarized one of the most dominant drives of the season, one the Minnesota Vikings put together in last Sunday’s game against the Washington Commanders.

Pro-Football-Reference offers a similar breakdown in the form of a table:

Like a picture, there are a thousand (more, if this article is worth anything) words contained within that drive. This was a journey on a scale that is rarely seen at the NFL level.

PFR tracks drive data going back to 2001. Since that time, the Vikings have never had a drive that involved more than 19 plays, although they did hit exactly 19 two other times since then (December 14th, 2003, against the Chicago Bears and September 21st, 2008, against the Carolina Panthers).

Both of those drives ended in field goals, which means they don’t quite match what we’re looking for: a field goal counts as a play. On those drives, the Vikings ran 18 offensive plays and 1 special-teams play, whereas on this drive they ran 19 offensive plays. So, by plays, this is the longest TD drive that we know of in Vikings’ history.

Across the NFL, there have been 81 drives of 19 or more plays since at least 2001, and only 31 of them have resulted in TDs, fewer than one per team. The longest drive in terms of plays was a 24-play New Orleans Saints drive in 2007, while the longest touchdown drives took 21 plays, something that has happened 4 times.

Then there’s the element of time. The Vikings started their drive with 2:42 left in the first quarter and scored with 5:41 left in the second, nearly erasing a whole quarter. That’s the most time a drive has taken up since San Francisco in 2021 (who have the longest recorded drive, taking up 13:05 on 20 plays), and ranks 8th longest among all drives. It’s third among drives that did not involve a penalty, and second among drives that ended in a TD, behind only the 2011 Miami Dolphins.

This drive didn’t quite rise to the level of the epic that was Navy’s 26-play, 14:42-minute drive against New Mexico in the 2004 Emerald Bowl, but it comes close. A first down instead of an 8-yard TD run at the end may have pushed it into that territory. As such, it’s worthy of a full breakdown. Let’s dive deep into what happened on that drive.

The Drive

Play 1 - 1st and 10 at the Minnesota 2

Play Result: Jordan Mason up the middle for 4 yards (tackle by Bobby Wagner and Von Miller)

The Vikings started off the drive backed up at their own two-yard line after forcing a turnover on downs by Washington. The Vikings run inside zone out of the I-Formation. Fullback C.J. Ham kicks outside to block the corner, and the play design may take running back Jordan Mason to Ham’s path initially, but he quickly recognizes the knockback that right tackle Brian O’Neill generates against defensive tackle Daron Payne.

Mason turns his eyes upfield, where right guard Will Fries and center Ryan Kelly have executed a great double team block, knocking nose tackle Eddie Goldman up into the air as he attempted a swim move and driving him back, climbing up to linebacker Bobby Wagner.

This leaves a wide hole for Mason, and while Kelly trips on his way to Wagner, who makes the tackle, Mason is still able to grind out a respectable 5-yard gain to give the offense some breathing room.

Play 2 - 2nd and 6 at the Minnesota 6

Play Result: Jordan Mason left guard for no gain (tackle by Bobby Wagner)

On the second play, the Vikings run a play that looks like split flow zone but also has counter elements. On the play, tight end T.J. Hockenson comes across the formation to kick out the opposing defensive end, and Ham wraps around to linebacker Frankie Luvu as a lead blocker. On normal split zone, you only have one player crossing the formation to take on the backside defender on a zone run, but typical counter plays have a lineman pulling.

Either way, this play gets messed up by a run ID issue. Both Kelly and left tackle Christian Darrisaw climb up to linebacker No. 58 Jordan McGee. I believe Darrisaw should come off of his double team with left guard Donovan Jackson and block Wagner, who ends up unblocked on the play, and makes the tackle for no gain. Ham can’t block both Wagner and Luvu.

Play 3 - 3rd and 6 at the Minnesota 6

Play Result: J.J. McCarthy scrambles up the middle for 7 yards (tackle by Frankie Luvu)

The Vikings now face 3rd down, and J.J. McCarthy has his back foot at the goal line as he lines up to take the snap against a Cover 0 look from Washington. Safety Will Harris drops to the deep middle right before the snap, and three other defenders soon drop into coverage. Where there were seven pass rush threats, now there are three against the Vikings’ six blockers.

But wait. There are actually four pass rush threats on this play. After dropping three players, Washington added slot defender Quan Martin to the rush. He’s not accounted for in the protection, and an offensive lineman doesn’t pick him up.

That leaves Ham, who was scanning the middle of the line, to get all the way to his right and make a tough block, or Martin would have a free run at McCarthy. Ham does just that, and great pass protection from him means McCarthy avoids the sack.

As far as the pass play goes, wide receiver Jordan Addison runs a curl at the top of the formation. Cornerback Mike Sainristil gives him a wide cushion, but linebacker Jacob Martin is buzzing underneath the route as he drops from the line of scrimmage.

I think you could argue that a throw the instant McCarthy hits the top of his drop might beat Martin to the spot, but I understand McCarthy not throwing it. Instead, he’s able to scramble out of the pressure and dives forward for the first down.

Play 4 - 1st and 10 at the Minnesota 13

Play Result: Jordan Mason left end for 2 yards (tackle by Javon Kinlaw and Bobby Wagner)

On the ensuing first down, the Vikings ran the ball again. Hockenson motions before the snap, then cuts back at the snap on another split zone rep. That motion, unfortunately, helps create a blocking identification issue with the front.

As Hockenson motions, Payne shifts from the A gap between Kelly and Fries to the opposite A gap, between Kelly and Jackson. In the original formation, Kelly would climb to Wagner while putting a hand on Payne to help Fries reach block him.

With the new formation, each of Darrisaw, Jackson, and Kelly has a player outside their left shoulder, meaning they each need to reach block that player and there’s no real potential for a double team. This leaves Wagner unblocked once again, and the run goes for just two yards despite Darrisaw and Jackson clearing a wide hole.

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