The Finances, The Injuries, & The Vikings’ Inability to Overcome
By the end of the 2023 regular season, the Vikings were working with a whopping eleven players on injured reserve. Tossing Malik Knowles — who was technically on the Non-Football Injury List — into the mix brings things to a discouraging 12 total players. And as the players took a beating, so too did the finances.
And, of course, that’s not even accounting for the players who missed time but were back to playing by the end of the season (Jordan Hicks, Justin Jefferson, Nick Mullens, etc.).
Now, adding up the amount of players on the IR is merely one way of quantifying the extent of Minnesota’s injury troubles. Another way of understanding the magnitude of the health concern rests in seeing the kind of cap commitment that had been immobilized due to player injury.
How the Finances and Injuries Coalesced to Undermine the Vikings
Not all injuries are made equal. At least not when we look at it from a certain angle: being able to keep competing in an NFL season.
What proved to be the greater hindrance to Minnesota’s success in 2023: losing Oli Udoh in Week 2 or Kirk Cousins in Week 8? Obviously, things lean pretty heavily in the QB’s direction. And, to be sure, the finances suggest as much. Udoh was playing on a cap hit a bit beyond $1.3 million whereas Cousins was gobbling up $20.25 million in cap space (and that’s after some serious budget tomfoolery from Mr. Adofo-Mensah).
Worth noting: equating cap hit with a player’s importance isn’t an exact science. Jefferson accounted for just $4.175 million last season and he’s inarguably the team’s best player. Generally speaking, though, those two things walk hand-in-hand: a team’s most important players get paid the most money.
As a result, it’s somewhat startling to see that the Vikings had more than $42.35 million sitting on the IR by the season’s end. Per Spotrac‘s handy calculations, Minnesota was working without 19.1% of the budget in the lineup.
Kirk Cousins is the main name, but he was joined by Marcus Davenport. Once upon a time, the plan was for Davenport to function as a replacement to Za’Darius Smith. Instead, he barely played. He did, however, demand close to $6 million, a number that’s going to rise to $6.8 million in 2024 even though he’ll almost certainly be gone.
And then there was the cap space devoted to T.J. Hockenson, D.J. Wonnum, Dean Lowry, and several others. Adding it all together means close to 20% of the purple budget being inaccessible, in a sense, due to injury.
Every NFL team deals with injuries. No one in the league feels bad for the Vikings. Every single Super Bowl winner has had to wrestle with at least some level of adversity. Any future ambitions of a purple Super Bowl will need to come from within a season where adversity was not only faced, but overcome. Kwesi Adofo-Mensah spoke about this exact idea in yesterday’s press conference, noting his team’s need to progress to a point where they’re capable of succeeding even when facing strong headwinds.
Minnesota, though, will be hoping that the upcoming season doesn’t present the same degree of injury magnitude.
Simply having a healthy QB1 will do wonders, but seeing starting tight ends, edge rushers, linebackers, and receivers off of the IR could very well be the difference between another 7-10 effort or flipping the record around to 10-7.
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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.