If the Minnesota Vikings have no intention of keeping Sam Darnold, they sure aren’t doing themselves any favors by dragging out their contract saga with the 27-year-old quarterback.
Less than a week before free agency opens, it is unclear whether Darnold will walk to free agency or if Minnesota will re-sign him.
After the Vikings declined to apply a franchise tag to Darnold, worth roughly $40 million, the buzz is that Darnold’s market isn’t nearly as lucrative as perceived internally.
New proposals have surfaced that Darnold could return to Minnesota on a multi-year deal for less than $30 million a season. With that structure, the Vikings’ quarterback spending would be similar to the 2024 season, when they spent 28.5 million in dead cap to part ways with Kirk Cousins.
It wouldn’t be the worst timeline for a team that seemed to open their contention window a year early, winning 14 games last season.
However, it could alienate the Vikings from their future with J.J. McCarthy.
Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio sounded the alarms that if the Vikings strike a multi-year deal with Darnold that McCarthy would request a trade.
“If they make a two-year commitment to Sam Donald, I predict JJ McCarthy’s going to ask to be traded,” Florio said March 5 on KFAN radio. “Maybe that’s what the Vikings would want to do. You know, before the wheels came off in Week 18 for Darnold, before the chariot went back into a pumpkin, the thinking was, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we kind of stumbled into plutonium by accident with Sam Darnold.”
Florio admitted that the potential the Vikings attempt a three-year, Aaron Rodgers-Jordan Love plan at quarterback does not thrill him.
But it is a possibility. Before Darnold struggled against the Los Angeles Rams and Detroit Lions in the final two games of the season, he was considered a dark-horse MVP candidate.
There’s reason to believe he could elevate his game another level after throwing for 4,319 yards passing and 35 touchdowns in his first year in Minnesota.
However, even if Darnold were to sign a multi-year deal, he would likely still be on a year-to-year basis with the Vikings, who selected McCarthy 10th overall for a reason. Head coach Kevin O’Connell called himself the “quarterback killer” during the 2024 draft evaluation process for his particularity in selecting the franchise quarterback he would wed himself to for the long-term.
A one-year retread with Darnold, where the Vikings hope to boost his value and get more in a trade would make more sense than foregoing the plans they hatched since parting ways with Cousins.
