Cap Expert Crunches the Numbers, Lists the Price for Vikings’ Draft Class
Cap expert Jason Fitzgerald has been doing some math.
On Over the Cap, Fitzgerald has a full chart breaking down the salary cap implications of the 2024 NFL Draft. The same site lists Minnesota with having a bit below $16.7 million in open room. Tossing a QB at No. 10, an EDGE at No. 17, and then five more players into the mix is going to be taking a major bite out of the budget.
Cap Expert Jason Fitzgerald Explains the Cost of the Vikings’ Draftees
For a little while, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah has been slow playing the financial decisions.
March’s free agency offering was wild. There were marquee adds — Jonathan Greenard, Andrew Van Ginkel, Blake Cashman, Aaron Jones, Sam Darnold — and some major losses — Kirk Cousins, Danielle Hunter, Jordan Hicks, K.J. Osborn, Dalton Risner (probably). Within all of that has been some restraint when it comes to fully draining the budget.
Per OTC, the Vikings’ precise number for current cap space is $16,672,244. The same site then lists “a final estimate for rookie costs for each team this year.” Minnesota’s number is coming in at $11,175,071 for 2024. Push those numbers together and where does that leave things?
Minnesota should have roughly $5.5 million leftover.
In some ways, that’s not a ton of open room (not in the NFL, at least). Even an average starter could gobble up all of that, so the GM will need to continue showing restraint with the moves he makes and doesn’t make.
But then the basic reality is that the Vikings have several options when it comes to opening up more wiggle room in the budget.
Getting the Justin Jefferson extension done would do wonders for the 2024 cap space. OTC suggests that close to $15 million could be saved if short-term savings was prioritized. In other words, extending Jefferson comes with the benefit of potentially being able to finance other additions for the upcoming season.
And, of course, Mr. Jefferson isn’t alone. Extending or restructuring the deals for players like Brian O’Neill, T.J. Hockenson, Byron Murphy and/or Harrison Phillips can also lead to a financial windfall.
A final thought.
One of the neat parts of the aforementioned piece on Over the Cap is that Fitzgerald does his best to offer a sense of what kind of value — a critical word in Kwesi’s lexicon — teams are getting from their draft choices. The Vikings are looking pretty good.
“The other thing that is fun to look at is how teams utilized their picks. What I did was for every position calculate the expected value for the player based on his position and then calculated the expected value for a blind pick,” Fitzgerald explains. “These numbers always skew heavily towards teams that draft a QB so the top team is Chicago with a 74.7% increase over the baseline value. New England, Denver, Atlanta, and Minnesota would be the rest of the top five.”
Seeing J.J. McCarthy become the QB1 in 2025 and (more importantly) play like a QB1 in 2025 would mean Minnesota is extracting a ton of value out of the rookie contract.
The Vikings Had a No Skill Draft
K. Joudry is the Senior Editor for Vikings Territory and PurplePTSD. He has been covering the Vikings full time since the summer of 2021. He can be found on Twitter and as a co-host for Notes from the North, a humble Vikings podcast.