Kwesi Adofo-Mensah is Again Going to Need to Overcome a Financial Hurdle
Thankfully for the Vikings, the number is trending in the right direction.
Kwesi Adofo-Mensah had to work around a huge amount of dead money in 2024. The issue won’t be nearly so dire in 2025, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be present. Already, the team has $3,394,488 in dead money for the current budget (the number shifts all the time). Before it’s all said and done, that number is going to grow by quite a bit.
Kwesi Adofo-Mensah & The Vikings’ Dead Money
Start off with a basic reality about the NFL: every single team deals with dead money. The issue isn’t whether a team has dead money but, rather, how much.
The current high-end is (no surprise) the New Orleans Saints, a team that has refused to get their finances in order for a long, long time. Over the Cap puts them at $48M+ in dead money, a stunning amount given that their offseason just started. Even worse, the Saints’ estimated cap space is coming in at negative $57M+.
By comparison, Adofo-Mensah and the Vikings look filthy rich.
Maybe the main culprit for Minnesota’s upcoming dead money pile is the charges that hit the books due to void years.
Players like Harrison Smith ($6,570,884), Sam Darnold ($5,000,000), Byron Murphy ($4,200,000), Aaron Jones ($3,200,000), and Stephon Gilmore ($2,333,334) could retire or walk away in free agency. The end result would involve seeing those numbers in parenthesis hit the books and become immovable, taken out of the budget in 2025.
Now, the option exists to extend these players. Murphy, for instance, seems like a top priority to keep around (read more). Giving the corner an extension would push any dead money charges into the future while having the added benefit of being able to massage the cap hit in 2025, potentially freeing a bit of cap space in the immediate.
Another factor to keep in mind is roster cuts, something that happens every offseason.
Consider, for instance, something that will not happen: showing Brian O’Neill the door. Highlighting the stud right tackle simply helps to illustrate the point since his contract is so large. Minnesota could, in theory, cut O’Neill. Doing so would involve freeing up more than $14 million in cap space. The downside — apart from losing a team captain and one of the game’s best linemen — is that Minnesota would be accepting north of $11.7 million in dead money.
Some players are going to be cut. Some of those players who get cut are going to leave behind dead money. Not as dramatic as the O’Neill example, but dead money nonetheless.
Kwesi Adofo-Mensah has proven to be quite adept at managing the finances. Minnesota has both a better team and a better budget compared to when he first took over. The reality, though, is that he’ll need to continue navigating the loss of some budgetary freedom due to dead money that has already started piling up.
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, as a co-host for Notes from the North, and as the proprietor at The Vikings Gazette, a humble Vikings Substack.
