Vikings’ 2024 Finances are Looking Ultra Thin, So a Move is Upcoming
For a little while, the Vikings’ 2024 finances were cruising along in the teens. Ah, those were the days. But then cuts happened and hit the budget like a ton of purple bricks.
The end result is less than $500k in cap space, which is next to nothing for the NFL. More specifically, the Vikings are working with a measly $461,690. Surprisingly, that’s not even the worst spot in the NFL, but Minnesota is still a bottom-5 team for cap space. OTC’s Jason Fitzgerald thus concludes that Minnesota has “some salary cap work to do for this season.”
The Vikings’ 2024 Finances and The Dwindling Cap Space
The dead money is operating as a major hurdle.
Currently, Minnesota is seeing a whopping $65,149,270 immobilized by dead money. That’s cap space the GM can’t access and can’t move; it simply needs to be digested in 2024. Painful.
Kirk Cousins is still the main culprit in the monstrous pile of money, gobbling up $28.5 million even though he’s nowhere to be found. More recently, though, Lewis Cine joined the fun by tossing $5,407,155 onto the pile. Cutting the safety meant losing cap space, not gaining cap space. In so many ways, the Cine pick has been tremendously costly to the Vikings.
Others, too, are tossing dead money onto the pile, such as Andrew Booth Jr., Jonah Williams, and Jeshaun Jones. But there are others.
And then there’s the seventeen-player practice squad. The current total is sitting at a bit above $4 million being paid out to those players. Not a major amount, no, but a lot given the stage of the offseason we’re in.
Plus, the recent signing of Stephon Gilmore wasn’t without some financial pain. Kwesi Adofo-Mensah leaned on void years to help keep costs down, but the cap charge is still sitting at $4,666,666.
For whatever it’s worth, there’s some disagreement out there about where the Vikings truly are for cap space. Spotrac, another cap website, puts things at a much more respectable $3,805,258 in open room. Not monstrous, no, but far less dire than the OTC number.
Regardless of which site is closer to the truth, there is a truth that arises: Adofo-Mensah is going to need to move some money around.
Adofo-Mensah is a creative thinker, someone who isn’t afraid of kicking money into the future. Simply restructuring Brian O’Neill’s deal — one that involves a 2024 cap hit that’s a hair under $23 million — could free up close to $9 million.
Moreover, there could always be an extension.
One thinks of the DT1 — Mr. Harrison Phillips — as a great example. Sitting at a $8,833,334 cap charge, Phillips could add on more years and see his ’24 hit shrink by $4,300,000.
So, too, could CB1 Byron Murphy Jr. be a candidate for an extension. The versatile corner is still only 26 and is a trusted part of the Brian Flores defense, so keeping him around makes a lot of sense. His $10,911,765 cap charge could decrease by $6,380,000 with an extension.
Otherwise, Adofo-Mensah could turn to players like Camryn Bynum, Josh Oliver, Garrett Bradbury, and others for some financial relief. Whatever the path, the underlying truth remains consistent: the budget is snug enough as to basically guarantee some sort of cap-clearing move is on the way.
Minnesota’s season gets going in a bit more than a week. On September 8th, the Vikings will try to climb to 1-0 against the New York Giants.
Editor’s Note: Information from Spotrac and 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 Twitter and as a co-host for Notes from the North, a humble Vikings podcast.
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