Should the Vikings Rebuild or Go All In?
Most Vikings fans tend to think of the process of team-building as a fork in the road. To the right lies the process of rebuilding: taking a step back, overhauling the roster, prioritizing future draft capital over present wins. To the left lies the “all in” route: signing a bunch of expensive free agents and mortgaging the future for a chance at a Super Bowl run.
The reality is far more complicated. Team-building is less of a fork in the road and more of a labyrinth, full of dead ends and surprise shortcuts, without any clear path to Super Bowl glory.
The Vikings have experienced this first-hand the last two seasons. Heading into 2024, no one expected much from the Vikings. ESPN analytics notoriously simulated the season one time and found that the Vikings stumbled to the number one overall pick. The starting QB—Sam Darnold—was a journeyman bridge quarterback, and the defense was coming off a 2023 season in which they had totally collapsed, as the Brian Flores defense was solved.
Instead, the 2024 Vikings proved to be one of the best teams in the NFL, posting a 14-3 record behind excellent performances by multiple free agent signings. The team that was supposed to be in rebuild mode was instead a serious contender.
Buoyed by this success, the team spent big money in the 2025 offseason to fill holes in the offensive and defensive lines. All J.J. McCarthy has to do, we told ourselves, is to be a game manager, taking advantage of all his offensive weapons. Surely this is possible, we said, because Kevin O’Connell is a QB whisperer.
This plan never came to fruition—and it wasn’t just the QB situation. The shiny new, highly-priced offensive line couldn’t stay healthy, and when they were healthy, they still weren’t great. T.J. Hockenson and Justin Jefferson had their worst seasons in purple so far, and not simply because their QBs couldn’t throw them the ball. Drops were a serious issue, and Hockenson looked noticeably slower than he was before his ACL injury.
The defensive line signings were arguably even worse—Javon Hargrave got moved into a rotational role, and neither he nor Jonathan Allen could recapture the magic of their past Pro Bowl seasons.
Ironically, perhaps the best defensive lineman for the Vikings this season was UDFA Jalen Redmond—the sort of acquisition you might expect to see from a rebuilding team rather than a team trying to “win now.”
And herein lies the problem with the “rebuild” vs. “win now” dichotomy: there is simply too much uncertainty involved with NFL player acquisitions to know with confidence which players are going to help you win now vs. win later. The best players tend to get extensions from their own teams, which means that the most expensive, tantalizing free agents are usually either injury-prone or getting long in the tooth. Either way, they come with a hefty dose of uncertainty, with no guarantees that they will help the team “win now.”
On the other hand, the young, talented prospects targeted by “rebuilding” teams often make an immediate, short-term impact. Alternatively, they often fail to reach their full potential and become journeyman backups or bust out of the league entirely. The NFL isn’t like Major League Baseball, where top prospects may take years to progress through the minor league system and make a big-league impact. In the NFL, the difference between winning now and winning later is difficult to parse and nearly impossible to predict.
Above, I’ve plotted each NFL team’s winning percentage in 2024 against their winning percentage in 2025. The correlation coefficient between the two is only r=0.28; there is a high degree of variance in team performance from one year to the next.
Looking ahead, this means that it is going to be very difficult to figure out which teams will be good in 2026 and beyond. The Vikings might fall apart as their veteran players decline and their QBs continue to struggle, or they might solve their offensive woes and return to their 2024 form.
With this much uncertainty, it doesn’t make sense for any team—let alone the Vikings—to devote all their future assets to a 2026 Super Bowl run, nor does it make sense to waste a season trying to lose games. The Vikings should and will do what every team in the NFL is trying to do this offseason: recruit a core of talented young players who will turn us into contenders in 2026 and beyond.