In this week’s “4-Down Territory,” Doug Farrar and Kyle Madson get you ready for training camp!
In this week’s “4-Down Territory,” Kyle Madson of Niners Wire and Doug Farrar of Touchdown Wire get into a few important items as NFL teams prepare for training camp… and sooner than you may think, the 2023 NFL season!
What will be the most fascinating training camp story?
Which training camp narrative already has our guys burnt out?
Which late-round rookies might surprise as potential starters; and
Which people in new homes will do the most for their new teams?
You can watch this week’s episode of “4-Down Territory” right here.
Za’Darius Smith is the most recent player to wear No. 55, but who else has worn the number for the Minnesota Vikings?
It’s the final countdown…
Well, sort of.
The Minnesota Vikings will kick off their 2023 regular season in 55 days at home against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sept. 10.
From now until then, we will take a trip down memory lane and count each day by revisiting the players that have worn that specific jersey number.
Before his trade during the off-season, Za’Darius Smith was the most recent Viking to wear the number. Other notable players to wear the number include Anthony Barr and Scott Studwell.
With 55 days until kickoff, here’s a look at every player to wear No. 55 with the Vikings (via Pro Football Reference):
From Josh Allen to Myles Garrett, here’s Doug Farrar’s list of the top 11 edge-rushers in the NFL today.
Edge defenders aren’t just edge-rushers. That’s a big part of what they do, of course, but there’s a lot more to being a transcendent player off the edge than just pinning one’s ears back and attacking offensive tackles. You have to have a comprehensive array of pass-rush moves, you must combine power and speed together in a package that’s difficult to block, and you must be able to define your rush path early in the rep.
In last week’s episode of “The Xs and Os with Greg Cosell,” we set out to build the perfect defensive line, and Greg talked about the attributes required for the best edge guys in the league at any given time.
“One thing I’ve learned, not only from watching tape but also from talking to coaches, is that to be a good edge-rusher, you have to be able to control the high side,” Greg said. “If you cannot win off the edge, it’s very hard to be a quality pass-rusher. Because winning off the edge and being able to threaten and challenge off the edge, forces offensive tackles more often than not to break down their technique. They do not want to get beaten off the edge, and if you get them to break down their technique, then you can work with your moves and your counters. Then you can work back inside.
“And you see this with a lot of guys — they’ll take two or three steps to the edge, and they get the offensive tackle to do what we call an ‘over-set. They’re so conscious of not being beaten off the edge, because that’s a quick path to the quarterback, that they turn their bodies to the sideline, and that opens them up to the inside quick counter.”
More than that, the 11 players in this year’s list of the best edge defenders had to meet these criteria:
How often can you get to the quarterback without help — from teammates on the line, blitzes and overload fronts, and from stunts and games? High-quality solo pressures and sacks mean a ton; if you’re more a product of scheme and design and those around you, that’s fine, but not quite what we’re looking for here.
Gap versatility will serve you well on this list. If you can rush the passer from multiple gaps, you’re more indispensable to your defense.
Defending the run is important, but this is mostly about how you get to the quarterback over and over.
Sacks aren’t necessarily weighted more than quarterback hits or hurries; it’s all about how you got into the backfield.
Without further ado, let’s get into this year’s list of the NFL’s 11 best edge defenders. Also, you can read our other 2023 positional lists as we move ever closer to the top 101 players in the NFL today in late July.
If the Minnesota Vikings trade Danielle Hunter this summer, it would be the first failure by the front office under Kwesi Adofo-Mensah.
Going into the offseason, there were a lot of questions about the Minnesota Vikings’ defense, especially at the edge position. After the hiring of Brian Flores, they signed Marcus Davenport from the New Orleans Saints on the first day of free agency.
That move sent signals that either Danielle Hunter or Za’Darius Smith would be moving on from the Vikings in 2023. Days prior, Smith had requested his release from the team. He ended up getting his wish with a May trade to the Cleveland Browns.
As things currently sit, the Vikings have both Hunter and Davenport as their starting edge rushers for 2023, but the former is still in need of a new contract.
On Wednesday afternoon, NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport reported that teams are calling the Vikings about a Hunter trade. Considering how events have unfolded this offseason, that’s not a good thing for the Vikings.
Simply put, if the Vikings trade him for anything less than a major haul, trading Hunter now would be a failure by Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and the front office.
Let’s start the discussion here. In my research, there haven’t been any questions to either Adofo-Mensah or head coach Kevin O’Connell about Hunter’s future in the past six months. This quote is from the 2022 NFL combine.
They have wanted Hunter on the team from the beginning. That was shown when they converted the $18 million non-guaranteed roster bonus last March into a signing bonus, giving him the entirety of it and spreading it out over three seasons to lessen the cap hit.
In 2022, he came out and had a great season with 10.5 sacks and 78 pressures per PFF, ranking eighth in the league. He did this all while being asked to play standing up, which was visually uncomfortable for him.
The important fact for Hunter is that he stayed healthy the entire time. After missing all of 2020 with a neck injury and most of 2021 with a torn pectoral muscle, it was important that he prove that once again.
The way the contract was structured going into the offseason, the Vikings knew they needed to do something to fairly compensate Hunter. He was due just $4.9 million in base salary with a maximum cash flow of $5.5 million. For a top 10-15 pass rusher at the age of 28, that’s not nearly fair compensation.
Part of how his contract is structured is due to the significantly small contract he signed in 2018. At five years, $72 million, it was between $7-10 million below his market value at the time and aged even worse. They moved money up from the back end of the contract to get him closer, but this was all coming to a boiling point this year.
In Rapoport’s report on Wednesday, the Vikings tried a band-aid deal with Hunter, which isn’t exactly the smartest way to go. Now, you have a player who has consistently felt like he hasn’t gotten market value and you initially try a band-aid deal? Sure, go ahead and upset Hunter a little more.
Of course, this is all from an outside perspective. We can only look at things from what we currently know and what we know is this. The Vikings look to be mishandling Hunter’s contract situation in a major way. If they were to trade him, they won’t have the ability to replace him until the 2024 draft, whereas making the move in March would have given them the opportunity to take a Myles Murphy or Nolan Smith during the 2023 draft.
It also raises a major question: does Adofo-Mensah have an issue with extending a major commitment to a singular player? Only two of his non-rookie contracts have extended past two seasons and Za’Darius Smith’s was essentially funny money that was never meant to be played on. It’s a fair question to ask since he consistently talks about flexibility on the payroll and hasn’t signed anyone to a long-term contract.
Right now, Hunter is a cornerstone of the Vikings and not making him a priority after saying as such before he had a great season is an institutional failure.
After moving on from multiple players the last two seasons, the Minnesota Vikings have $31,534,662 in dead cap space.
Maneuvering the salary cap is a difficult exercise. A financial version of Tetris, it required massive amounts of planning and structuring contracts in a way to maximize the puzzle that is conducive to flexibility.
The Minnesota Vikings are currently trying to get back to a great spot with the salary cap as general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah tries to clean up the mistakes made by his predecessor Rick Spielman.
According to Over The Cap, the Vikings have the 9th-most dead salary cap space with $31,534,662 counting toward the 2023 salary cap split between 12 players.
With defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz and a posse of new pass-rushers, the Cleveland Browns could put frowns on the faces of opposing quarterbacks.
After three seasons with Joe Woods as their defensive coordinator, the Cleveland Browns made a change with the January hire of Jim Schwartz, who has a long NFL history as a head coach and defensive coach. The primary mission the Browns seemed to have this offseason was to bring more quarterback sacks, hits, and hurries from the defensive line, and that’s something that will be needed if this team is to be truly competitive. In 2022, per Pro Football Focus, Myles Garrett was responsible for 18 of the team’s 37 sacks, eight of the team’s 23 quarterback hits, and 47 of the team’s 118 quarterback hurries.
Not the ratio you want.
So, in addition to mixing things up with the Schwartz addition, the Browns got decicive in free agency, adding former Minnesota Vikings linemen Za’Darius Smith and Dalvin Tomlinson, as well as ex-Texans edge-rusher Ogbonnia Okoronkwo. They also selected Baylor defensive tackle Siaki Ika with the 98th overall pick in the third round, so this amounts to a wholesale change in the Browns’ ability to get after the quarterback with more guys than just Garrett.
“I think as you guys hear Jim talk, he’ll talk about being an attack-style front,” general manager Andrew Berry said at the scouting combine. “So, guys that really do get up the field, penetrate, really use either quickness or power to create disruption behind the line of scrimmage. So that’s the general picture that you’ll get from our defense.”
Over the first 17 months of his tenure in Minnesota, there is a commonality with the contracts he is signning players to.
Just 17 months into the job as the Minnesota Vikings general manager, we are still trying to understand the thought process he utilizes in how he is building this team. He has signed multiple free agents to contracts and only one of them received a contract longer than two years. That was outside linebacker Za’Darius Smith.
There are a lot of reasons why that is with maintaining flexibility being the biggest one, but they all share something in common.
Age and/or injury concerns.
Smith fit both of those categories and the contract ended up being a great value for the Vikings. They paid him just over $10 million in cash for 80 pressures and 9.5 sacks. That’s a great value for the Vikings. It was also structured in a way that the third year looked fake at over a $20 million cap hit. It was also structured so that the Vikings would only incur a $3.33 million dead cap hit if he didn’t play much due to his injury history.
The contracts for Marcus Davenport and Byron Murphy Jr. are both examples of Adofo-Mensah betting on high upside. They each have a concerning history of injury, but the short-term nature of their contracts make it a calculated risk without a major penalty if they don’t work out. If they show their high-end ability and stay healthy, the void years attached to the contract make them both easy to extend. He is setting them up for extensions if they prove themselves.
You could also have said the same about Smith, who they could have modified due to his success, but it worked out in a different way due to factors that we don’t completely know.
On the age front, Dean Lowry is getting older at 28 and they gave him a two-year deal, which would in theory take him through his prime. Smith was also over 30 when he signed his essentially 1-2 year contract. Quarterback Kirk Cousins also fits that same criteria with his age now 35.
Flexibility in continuing to build this roster will continue to be a priority for this franchise in building the team, but that doesn’t mean Adofo-Mensah won’t sign longer-term deals. Players like Justin Jefferson and Christain Darrisaw are going to get at least three-year extensions and they will both have age and injury history on their side and not be viewed as a negative. Look for those contracts to be filled with movable money to make the Vikings as flexible as possible.
The one thing you can count on with Adofo-Mensah is for each decision to be well thought out and be laced with context with the future in mind. He has structured his contracts like that up to this point and don’t expect that to change moving forward.
After an eventful weekend at TCO performance center, @jzulgad breaks down all the latest with the Minnesota Vikings.
The Vikings got their first look at quarterback Jaren Hall last weekend at their rookie camp, traded outside linebacker Za’Darius Smith to Cleveland and made their plans clear for free agent cornerback Byron Murphy Jr.
In other words, things are far from quiet at TCO Performance Center and they will pick up even more next week as Organized Team Activities get underway with on-the-field practices.
According to ESPN’s Field Yates, the full trade details are out and he reported that the Vikings only ate $1.177 million in the form of a signing bonus. It’s worth noting that Smith’s cap hit in 2023 will be $3.032 million, meaning he likely added void years paired with a signing bonus.
What does this mean for the Vikings? They save $10.98 million on the salary cap and got the equivalent to a fourth-round pick for Smith. That’s a huge savings for the Vikings and it brings their salary cap space to just over $12 million.
