Vikings’ all-in on Cousins simply a head-scratcher

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/03/2018 (2933 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It all sounds so familiar: stung by an interminable championship drought, the Minnesota Vikings mortgage their entire franchise to acquire the one player they believe will finally put them over the top in their quest to win the club’s first Super Bowl.

Throwing caution and common sense to the wind, they rewrite the NFL history books with an unprecedented deal to land the impact player they are convinced is the last remaining piece that will finally end decades of frustration for the team and their long-suffering fans.

Long before the Vikings lost their collective minds this week and rewrote NFL history by offering an unprecedented US$84-million guaranteed contract for a good, but hardly great, free-agent quarterback in Kirk Cousins, they orchestrated the largest player trade in the history of the NFL — a record that stands to this day — in an 18-player/draft picks deal with the Dallas Cowboys in 1989 that brought running back Herschel Walker to Minnesota.

History has recorded it was a great trade — for the Cowboys, who went on to use the draft picks and players they acquired from Minnesota in exchange for Walker to build the Dallas juggernaut that went on to win three Super Bowls in the 1990s.

And the Vikings? Well, 29 years later they still haven’t been back to the Super Bowl, much less won one, and the Walker trade is now widely regarded as the most lopsided trade in NFL history, a deal so bad that ESPN even produced a one-hour documentary on it called The Great Trade Robbery.

You’d think an experience like that would be a cautionary tale for a franchise that spent literally decades digging itself out of the hole the Walker trade put it in.

You’d think a team like that would learn that going all-in on one position, to the detriment of every other position on the field, is not the way to build a championship contender in a consummate team game in the salary cap era.

But you’d think wrong.

Because 29 years after the Vikings blew their brains out in the Walker deal, they did it all over again this week in offering Cousins a deal that would make the former Washington Redskins pivot the highest-paid quarterback in the history of the NFL, regardless of whether Cousins ever plays a single down for Minnesota.

While ESPN reported Tuesday that Cousins would sign the deal, his agent no decision had been made.

Do you know why the NFL, until now, has been the only one of the four major professional leagues in North America that doesn’t give guaranteed contracts?

It’s because it’s a really, really bad idea to guarantee a player anything in a league that chews up players at an unprecedented rate.

Consider:

● the number of injuries in the NFL is 4.9 times the total number of injuries in MLB, the NBA and the NHL combined, according to a Harvard study released last spring;

● an NFL player is 3.8 times more likely to sustain a concussion during a regular-season game than an NHL player, according to the same study;

● and the average NFL career lasts just 2.66 years, according to a 2016 analysis by the Wall Street Journal.

Ponder that last one for a second: the three years the Vikings would be on the hook for Cousins, at US$28 million per season, is longer than the average NFL career. And Cousins would be 32 when the deal expired.

What could go wrong? Because this is Minnesota, probably everything.

If ever there was a team that could add the most coveted free-agent quarterback in years to a team that went to the NFC Championship game just a couple months ago and make a mess of it, it is a Minnesota Vikings team that hasn’t been to a Super Bowl since 1976 and lost all four of the ones it appeared in prior to that.

I say all this, of course, with love. Like a disproportionate number of Winnipeggers, I grew up a hard-core Vikings fan.

We are especially tied in this town to the Vikings, both as a function of geography — the Vikings are the closest NFL team to Winnipeg — and personality — before Bud Grant went on to become the greatest head coach in Vikings history, he was the greatest head coach in Winnipeg Blue Bombers history.

We’re invested, in other words, in the team that tortures us. And we’re not alone.

Writing on the website Deadspin, Drew Magary — another hard-core Vikings fan — summed up the informed fatalism that is being a Vikings fan with his take on the Cousins signing.

“I know he’ll eventually rip my heart out,” wrote Magary, “but I’m looking forward to seeing just how he’ll do it.”

Now, it would be one thing if the Vikings decided to make NFL history by guaranteeing Tom Brady, in his prime, US$84 million over three years. But Cousins is no Tom Brady. Or Drew Brees. Or Aaron Rodgers. Or, even, Nick Foles.

Cousins’ numbers in Washington were a mixed bag. He threw for more than 4,000 yards three seasons in a row and has a 65.5 per cent completion rating and 99 touchdown tosses. That’s fantastic.

On the other hand, he’s also got 55 interceptions to go with those 99 TDs — less than the 1:2 interception-to-TD ratio considered the minimum standard for pro quarterbacks. That’s not so fantastic.

But most worrying is Cousins’ appalling 4-19 record as a starter against winning teams. Yes, some of that is on the weak supporting cast he had in Washington, but still — 4-19 against opponents that matter is not the stuff of precedent-setting contracts.

But even leaving aside the crazy guaranteed contract and Cousins’ middling numbers, the dumbest part of this Cousins deal is that everything about the Vikings’ season in 2017 proved they could be successful without a marquee quarterback.

This is a team, remember, that made it all the way to the NFC championship with a couple of journeymen backups under centre in Sam Bradford and Case Keenum.

And, in the end, their remarkable run was ended not by their lack of a marquee QB, but by another journeyman backup QB — Foles — who shredded the Vikings defence in the NFC Championship game en route to leading the Philadelphia Eagles to a Super Bowl win over Brady and the New England Patriots.

Put it all together and the Vikings appear to be trying to fix a problem they don’t have — and betting the future of the franchise on it by guaranteeing Cousins an unprecedented payday in an age when teams that manage the NFL salary cap the best are the teams that win Super Bowls.

History has recorded that Walker lasted 2½ unremarkable seasons in Minnesota before the Vikes threw in the towel and Walker signed in Philadelphia.

The Vikings can only hope Cousins will last longer than that in Minnesota.

Because the only thing that’s guaranteed about this contract is that the Vikings would have to have to pay him an ungodly amount of money either way.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @PaulWiecek