The Vikings expect to hear from Kirk Cousins tonight regarding free agency

We’ll know the plan this evening, hopefully

The biggest question of the Minnesota Vikings’ 2024 offseason looks like it’s coming this evening.

Dianna Russini, the senior NFL insider at The Athletic, is reporting that the Vikings are expecting to hear from Cousins tonight regarding his decision about whether or not he’ll be testing the free agent market this offseason. This comes one day ahead of the NFL’s “legal tampering” period, which begins on Monday at 11:00 AM Central time, and three days before the start of the new league year at 3:00 PM Central on Wednesday.

As we’ve mentioned numerous times in this space, if the Vikings want to avoid the $28.5 million dead salary cap hit that will result if Cousins hits free agency, they will have to have a deal worked out before the start of the new league year. If they do not, the odds of the Vikings bringing Cousins back would be just about zero since they likely wouldn’t want to pay that dead money hit and a salary on top of it.

The Vikings and Cousins are taking this right down to the wire, which could end up backfiring on the team. If Cousins does decide that he’s going to pursue free agency, it pretty much spells his end with the team for the reasons described in the previous paragraph. It also means that the price for the Vikings potentially trading up in the 2024 NFL Draft for a quarterback is going to go up significantly because. . .well, teams are going to know that the Vikings probably don’t want to go into the 2024 season with Nick Mullens at the top of the quarterback depth chart.

Sure, there are some options in free agency that the Vikings could look at, but they’d all obviously be a significant downgrade from Cousins’ level of production and, in some cases, the price probably wouldn’t be significantly less.

At this point, even with all of the rumors and conjecture that have been floating around for the past couple of weeks, the most important thing to know is that nobody outside of Cousins and the Vikings’ front office actually knows anything about anything at this point. The team will have plans in place based on what Cousins chooses to do, and whatever road they need to go down they’ll execute their plan in a way that aligns with their vision. They’ve known that this scenario is possible since they didn’t do a longer-term extension with Cousins last season, so they’ll be prepared whatever the scenario is.

But we’ll apparently all know what the scenario is sometime this evening. Once any sort of announcement comes down, we’ll have it to you as soon as we can.