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The Vikings Core Is Set for 2025… and Far Beyond

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Last week, the Minnesota Vikings signed team captain and jack-of-all-trades safety Josh Metellus to a three-year extension that keeps him in purple through 2028. The signing was a crucial move to secure a key defensive player. If you take a step back and look at the bigger picture, it’s also indicative of the long-term strategy Minnesota’s front office has employed.

When Kwesi Adofo-Mensah took over in 2022, he was saddled with an aging roster. Stars of the golden age of the Mike Zimmer era, from 2015 to 2019, like Adam Thielen, Dalvin Cook, Anthony Barr, and Eric Kendricks, were aging on large or voiding contracts. The team was also up against the cap, as they had continually pushed their chips in to try to compete with Kirk Cousins at QB.

Since then, you can see the year-over-year progression Minnesota’s roster has made under Adofo-Mensah. In 2022 and 2023, the team was signing very short-term deals, mostly for aging players. That’s where you have to shop under cap constraints. They added a few young players in those years, but all came at a value. Harrison Phillips plays an unheralded position. A Detroit Lions regime that did not draft T.J. Hockenson pushed him out the door. Byron Murphy Jr. was coming off an injured season.

In 2024, the team became significantly more aggressive. The Vikings continued to follow the same pattern, signing undervalued players. Jonathan Greenard and Blake Cashman had major injury concerns. Andrew Van Ginkel requires a unique role and has a bit of an injury history himself. All three still got bigger deals than Adofo-Mensah had previously given out to a free agent. The team also continued to sign one-year stopgaps.

This year, Minnesota’s spending trajectory rocketed to the top of the league. Per OverTheCap, they were second in free-agent spending this offseason. The focus? Solidifying the core they’d worked so hard to assemble over the past three years. After a 14-3 season, the Vikings recognized they had a strong core of talent to stabilize the transition to a young QB in J.J. McCarthy.

Sure, the team let some talent walk. However, the Vikings seemed to have a replacement plan for all of it.

Beyond that, their moves were clear upgrades.

The most important part of all of these moves? Every player I mentioned above is under team control through 2025 and 2026. Here is the list of Minnesota’s top-five free agents in 2026, based on percentage of snaps played in 2024: Harrison Smith, Jalen Nailor, Eric Wilson, Ivan Pace, and Ryan Wright.

That’s right, the punter made the top-five list. Smith remains a critical piece, and they will likely need to replace him, assuming he retires. However, I felt like we’ve been saying that for three years, so who knows. Nailor is WR3, and the Vikings have hopefully drafted his replacement in Tai Felton. Wilson started for the Packers but will be a backup here. Pace is a critical piece, but he’s a restricted free agent, so the Vikings can easily bring him back.

To repeat, with the Metellus signing, the Vikings have all of these players under contract for 2026:

That’s 23 total players, most of whom are full-time starters, and all of whom I expect to play 400-plus snaps in 2025.

How common is this? Not very.

If you look a year further out, the Vikings have a large amount of talent under contract through 2027. If you go to OverTheCap’s cap space page and look at the 2027 tab, you’ll see the Vikings have 47 players under contract for that season, tied for the third most in the NFL. Still, that doesn’t tell the whole story.

That number includes this year’s UDFA contracts, which are slotted at three years in length. The Vikings will cut most of those players, so it doesn’t make sense to count them when projecting roster stability. It also (erroneously, in my opinion) counts voiding contracts in that total. So Van Ginkel’s contract is being counted in that 47 number, even though, as things stand, he will become a free agent after the 2026 season.

A more effective approach to evaluating long-term commitments to core players is to establish a minimum cap hit and determine the number of players under contract at that rate. Setting the cap hit to $4 million covers all first-round picks from the last two seasons, the most significant draft investments teams make. Teams expect first-round picks to become starters, and that’s not always true for players in the second round and beyond.

When examining that group, the Vikings emerge tied for second with 13 total “core” players under contract for 2027. Those players, with their ages for the 2027 season, are:

Note: The Chicago Bears lead the league with 14 players under contract through 2027, and the Buffalo Bills are the team that is tied with the Vikings at 13. Jordan Addison is also under team control for 2027, as the Vikings can pick up his fifth-year option. However, that statement is also true for most other teams, so the decision to include fifth-year options for 2023 first-round picks or not doesn’t really skew the data either way.

That’s a really impressive list of players, and all of them will still be relatively young. Players at 29 and 30 may be in the last couple of years of their prime, but only Allen would be considered over the hill at that point. The Bears are the only team with more players on the list than the Vikings. They have three players who will be 31 or older in 2027, making Minnesota’s relative youth even more notable.

You can certainly quibble with some pieces of Minnesota’s build. Not every starter on the team is a proven commodity. But the work Adofo-Mensah has done, all while turning in a 34-17 record, is impressive. Just three of the players above were on the team when Kwesi took over, and Metellus was just a special teamer at that point.

The foundation of this roster is strong and built to last. I’m looking forward to seeing how far it goes.