The Vikings’ Roster Boasts a Bubble Cut Candidate
The Vikings’ roster is going to change in the coming weeks and months, largely due to the underwhelming 2025 and the money crunch that’s here in 2026.
Plenty of speculation is out there for who could get extended, restructured, cut, or traded. What about Jonathan Allen? The defensive tackle offers a ton of experience and is a great leader. He’s nevertheless coming off a modest season and makes quite a lot, leading to questions about how Minnesota should proceed.
The Vikings’ Roster & DT Jonathan Allen
The widespread expectation is that defensive tackle Javon Hargrave is a goner.
Known as “Gravedigger” — best nickname on the team — Hargrave arrived in the Twin Cities alongside Allen. The two were supposed to combine to reinvigorate what has too often been a disappointing DT position. In particular, Allen and Hargrave were meant to create havoc as pass rushers, collapsing the pocket with regularity. Neither player fully lived up to the ideal (the Week 1 effort stands out as being a tremendous example of the potential).
Each offered up 3.5 sacks across the full season, though Allen did so within close to 300 more snaps.
Of the pair, Hargrave is more consistently disruptive. He’s unusually explosive coming out of his stance even as he climbs into his 30s.
The upside of moving on from Hargrave is that a straightforward cut gives back $10,955,882 in cap space. The same move with Allen liberates $6,533,332. Even worse, an Allen cut would see $17,333,334 burned up as dead money whereas Hargrave will see $10,497,500 tacked onto the budget as dead money.
So, the finances point toward a certain path. Moving out Hargrave means more cap space and less dead money.
Allen started all seventeen games last season. Along the way, the DT picked up 811 snaps. He offered Minnesota 68 tackles, 3.5 sacks, 11 quarterback hits, 7 tackles for loss, and had 1 fumble recovery. The basic stats don’t raise too many concerns. What was concerning, though, was a run defense that sometimes ceded too much ground and a pocket that sometimes failed to collapse.
By a wide margin, Minnesota’s best defensive tackle is Jalen Redmond. The young DT evidently boasts a great work ethic alongside some resilience; if he didn’t, then he wouldn’t have emerged in the NFL after going undrafted and then competing in the spring pro league.
Brian Flores, who is going to return in 2026, is going to build his DT spot around Mr. Redmond. So, too, will there be an effort to lean on the other youngsters: Levi Drake Rodriguez (7th in ’24), Tyrion Ingram-Dawkins (5th in ’25), and Taki Taimani (UDFA in ’24). It’s the veteran support around those young fellas that remains a mystery.
Left untouched, Jonathan Allen will have the Vikings’ second-largest cap charge in 2026 at $23,866,666. Only Justin Jefferson — currently sitting at $38,987,600 before the inevitable restructure — comes in ahead of the DT who once received praise for his “chop hump.”
For whatever it’s worth, PFF gave Jonathan Allen a 53.2 grade. The assessment puts the veteran down at 84th among the 129 DTs who qualify for the ranking. Worst of all, the run defense portion of things comes in at 45.4, sitting at 95th out of 130.
Jonathan Allen, 31, stands at 6’3″ and weighs 300 pounds. Minnesota appears very likely to adjust his deal somehow, with a restructure to kick some of that cap charge into the future as the most likely option.
Along the way, the hope will be that the Vikings’ roster gets a boost from him improving in his second season as a Viking.
