The 2025 Vikings and the Radical Departure From the Salary Cap Management of Yesteryear
Look no further than the game’s most important position, folks.
Up until recently, the Minnesota Vikings were consistently near the top of the NFL for quarterback spending. Kirk Cousins, a good NFL quarterback, is an elite contract negotiator. He therefore demanded huge amounts of cash. The 2025 Vikings (obviously) find themselves in a very different position due to their willingness to move forward with a young, highly-drafted passer. What’s wild is just how dramatic the difference is when compared to NFL quarterback spending more broadly.
The 2025 Vikings & The Spending at QB
To a certain extent, the 2024 budget already featured the massive shift.
Sam Darnold was brought to town on a single-season deal that cost just $10 million. At the time, some wondered why the journeyman commanded so much and yet the contract looked like a total bargain by the end of the year.
Look at just the 2024 cap charges for Minnesota’s quarterbacks and the team was sitting in the bottom ten in the NFL for QB spending.
The major caveat is simply that the QB budget line is a bit misleading upon first glance since Cousins was leaving behind a $28.5 million dead money charge. Add that onto the roughly $12.2 million and things look drastically different. All of the sudden, Minnesota jumps well up in the standings, surpassing $40 million for quarterback spending in 2024.
The 2025 Vikings are sitting in a much different position.
Currently, Minnesota is sitting in 30th in the NFL for quarterback spending. Adding the cap charges for J.J. McCarthy and Brett Rypien means seeing a minuscule $6,021,999 quarterback cap charge on the books. Now, let’s keep things consistent: Darnold is leaving behind $5 million in dead money, so one could argue that the real number is closer to $11 million for the QB budget. Even at that range, though, Minnesota is comfortably a bottom-ten team in the league for quarterback cap charges in 2025.
Of course, the expectation far and wide is that a veteran is going to be added following the 2025 NFL Draft. The end result will be a beefier portion of the budget going toward that position, thereby moving Minnesota up the ladder a rung or two. The thing to keep in mind is simply that other teams will be adding quarterback talent, including the pair of teams currently lower than the Vikings — the Tennessee Titans (Cam Ward?) and Pittsburgh Steelers (Aaron Rodgers?) — so Minnesota may still be coming in very low, all things considered.
Shift back in time a little bit to contrast where things were for the Vikings. With Kirk Cousins as the QB1 in 2023, the Vikings were seventh in the NFL for QB cap charges. The 2022 season had the Vikings in fourth, again due to Kirk Cousins (mostly). The 2021 season was even worse, coming in at third for quarterback cap charges.
Seeing a trend at all?
The 2025 Vikings are full steam ahead with Mr. McCarthy as the top passer. Doing so means much more cap flexibility than in recent years, allowing Adofo-Mensah to invest heavily in other areas of the team.
Editor’s Note: Information from Over the Cap helped with this piece.
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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 social media (Bluesky & Twitter). If you feel so inclined, subscribe to his Substack, The Vikings Gazette, for more great Vikings content.