Already this week, I’ve received emails from a reader/podcast listener asking if the Vikings would consider using their franchise tag on cornerback Byron Murphy Jr. and another querying whether I’m “hearing anything about the Vikings plans for upgrading the offensive line.”
Those are good and specific questions, as is the watercooler chatter about what the Vikings might do at quarterback.
La Velle E. Neal III and I tackled that one on Thursday’s Daily Delivery podcast, agreeing generally that it is unlikely the Vikings will retain Sam Darnold as their 2025 starter while disagreeing on the degree of likelihood.
All of this early offseason hand-wringing underpins a grander and more philosophical question: Who do the Vikings want to be in 2025?
They have a greater measure of control over the answer than they have in quite some time, thanks to careful steps they have taken in the past few years to carve out roughly $60 million in salary cap space — among the most in the NFL, particularly among teams that seriously contended in 2024.
Having agency over your destiny, though, creates a certain pressure to use it wisely. Adding to that pressure, one supposes, is doing it after quite surprisingly going 14-3 in a season in which the Vikings had far less control over their roster and by many measures doubled their expected win total.
So many things went right in 2024. Now the Vikings need to decide how much of it is a repeatable product of superior roster construction and performance and how much was the confluence of unrepeatable outliers.
Their answers should be revealed in their offseason moves, culminating in a conclusion to that question I already posed about who they want to be.
