Good News: Vikings Sit in Pole Position for Cap Space Caveat
K. Joudry
|
Kwesi Adofo-Mensah doesn’t like being boxed into a corner. Accordingly, the Vikings sit in a nice spot when it comes to leveraging some specific extension scenarios to free up cap room.
Need evidence? Look no further than the recent word from Over the Cap, a leading authority in the world of NFL finances.
Jason Fitzgerald boiled things down to an analysis of teams looking to create cap room by giving extensions to players with void years in their deals.
He suggests that there are “73 contracts that are set to automatically void in 2024” and the Vikings are in a pretty notable spot. Three of the top five most lucrative extension candidates are Kirk Cousins, Danielle Hunter, and Marcus Davenport. Think that was intentional from the GM when he constructed the deals last offseason?
Vikings Sit in Pole Position for Cap Space Caveat
First, a word about the tactic under consideration: void years.
Fitzgerald offers a succinct summary of how they work: “Basically, the void year is a fake contract year used for the sole purpose of parking salary cap charges and when the contract expires whatever cap numbers are in those void years accelerate to the current season.”
Making thing less abstract is a concrete example.
NFL contracts allow for a signing bonus to get stretched over the length of a deal. So, a 5-year deal coming with a $100 million signing bonus will see that money chopped up into equal $20 million increments. A void year functions as one of those all-important seasons to stretch out a signing bonus, thus allowing a team to get more cash in the present by catapulting more cash (so to speak) into the future.
Cousins’ deal will officially end on March 13th. If there’s no extension, then the scheduled $28.5 million in dead money will hit the books and will be set in stone. No amount of budgetary tomfoolery could lift that amount from the 2024 budget once it gets locked in.
Alternatively, the Vikings could give their QB1 a new deal, meaning the contract won’t reach an end on March 13th. In that scenario, the signing bonus money continues to get stretched out since the years that are baked into the deal become actual rather than just being an imaginary void.
If all of this is making your head spin, read on for firm clarity about the plain ol’ dollars and cents. Here’s the long and short of it: with an extension, Minnesota could clear off $18,250,000 from Cousins’ 2024 hit, $7,453,334 from Hunter’s hit, and $5,100,000 from Davenport’s hit.
Look at how Fitzgerald explains things: “No team can save more than the Vikings who can prevent over $30 million in salary cap charges from hitting the cap in 2024 by extending three players. Kirk Cousins has $28.5 million in dead money staring the Vikings in the face. If they decide to run it back with him they will only need to account for $10.25 million plus whatever other cap charges a new contract would hold.”
He goes on: “Danielle Hunter has nearly $15 million hitting the cap and the team could save $7.5 million with an extension. Finally the team could prevent $5.1 million from accelerating from Marcus Davenport’s contract.”
Tossing it all together means that Minnesota could, in theory, retain their QB1, EDGE1, and EDGE2 (sort of) while saving cap space in the short term. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
There’s a catch.
Eventually, the team’s budget will need to account for the accounting. Put differently, the locked-in cap charges that flow from a signing bonus will need to get gobbled up in a season’s cap room at some point. It’s simply a matter of when and how much is present.
The current vantage point suggests that Danielle Hunter is coming back, Marcus Davenport is a goner, and Kirk Cousins is a true flip of the coin. Like most matters within February football, we’ll have to wait and see.
Free agency’s legal tampering period begins on March 11th. The real thing arrives on the 13th. Minnesota is a near certainty to ratchet up their current budget of $25 million (give or take) by a considerable amount.
Editor’s Note: Information from Over the Cap helped with this piece.
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.