Zone Coverage: Can the Vikings Meet Contract Demands For Their Three Biggest Decisions?
I tried projecting contracts for the Vikings' three biggest contract decisions using recent reporting on what these players want. Does it make for feasible roster-building?
Over at Zone Coverage, I played with the idea of meeting the structural demands of the Vikings’ three biggest free contract decisions: Kirk Cousins, Justin Jefferson and Danielle Hunter.
Given Cousins’ desire for a fully guaranteed contract and Jefferson’s hope for a contract beyond the first year, I figured it would be a good exercise to see what a contract structure might look like for those players — and to give context on what it means that Jefferson has not received an offer with “more than the first year guaranteed.”
Check out that piece here.
When Florio says the Vikings won’t guarantee the first deal of the contract, we don’t know if he means the first year of any new money in an extension or of the contract as a whole. Practically speaking, that’s the difference between guaranteeing only Jefferson’s 2024 salary or also guaranteeing his 2025 salary.
On top of that, guaranteeing a base salary doesn’t mean much. A team could hypothetically provide a signing bonus that constituted 90% of a contract’s value and functionally guarantee more than any other non-quarterback contract in history has ever done. The structure would protect the player from termination until the fifth and/or final year of their contract.
That also doesn’t include rolling guarantees, where salaries become guaranteed as the life of the contract continues. In some cases, the guarantee kicks in for the same year as the vesting deadline. As an example, $2.5 million of Josh Oliver’s $4.7 million 2024 salary becomes guaranteed on the third day of the 2024 league year, which is March 15.
In other cases, these are functionally the same as guaranteed salaries because the guarantee kicks for the year following the vesting deadline. T.J. Hockenson’s 2025 base salary of $10.9 million becomes fully guaranteed at the beginning of the 2024 league year. There’s almost no circumstance that he won’t see that 2025 salary because the Vikings would have to cut him before any games are played in 2024 to deny him that.