Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - Can Justin Jefferson surpass Randy Moss? PFF's Sam Monson answers

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

Matthew Coller talks with PFF's Sam Monson about where Justin Jefferson can ultimately land in Vikings history and whether his contract will restrict the Vikings in the future Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Purple Insider. Matthew Collar here and joining the show for the 100th time, Sam Monson of Pro Football Focus. How do you feel about your 100th appearance on the show, Sam? How are you? Nice, yeah, it's a good milestone. I assume you've brought some kind of gift to commemorate such an occasion. Yeah, I got some Justin Jefferson Oakley sunglasses that I was wearing on the podcast. So I could send you a pair of those to commemorate his giganto contract. And I want to get your take on that. All things Minnesota Vikings and just the direction of the team. But I want to ask you a hotter question to begin that you would be able to connect the dots here with

the receivers of the Minnesota Vikings history. Where do you think Justin Jefferson will rank on that list when he retires and his jersey is raised into the Vikings ring of honor? Will people say the greatest Viking receiver, second, third, third fourth what do you think it's a crazy high bar i mean this kind of happens every offseason right as you eventually somewhere along the offseason you get into like uh looking at teams histories at specific position groups right like the bears have been in existence for like 187 years and have never had a quarterback or have had one, but it was back in, you know, before black and white TV, the Vikings receivers have been their thing. Like they, they've got what, three, four now, if you include Jefferson, four of say the

top 15 wide receivers to ever play the game, which is crazy for one individual franchise. So, you know, usually with most teams, you would be saying, well, Jefferson's on track to be the greatest receiver this team's ever had, not even close. For Minnesota, for that to be the case, he needs to be one of the top five wide receivers to ever play the game because Randy Moss is absolutely in that conversation. I mean he he could be the best receiver ever depending on how you value longevity versus simply you know peak devastating impact and then i think chris carter gets kind of undervalued now with this explosion of you know receiving numbers passing yardage all these kinds of things Carter when he retired was number two to Jerry

Rice and the longer we go the further down that list he's going to slide and the more we're just kind of going to forget what he was but Chris Carter I think has a legitimate case to be one of the top sort of five wide receivers to ever play the game so Jefferson's got to exceed those guys to be the top guy I mean mean, he's on that track. He's in the conversation. It's not unreasonable at this point in his career, but he's definitely got a long way to go before you're willing to give him that kind of credit. Right.

What we've already seen is a peak that is completely dominant. I mean, there are very few times that a wide receiver ever in history has been talked about, even discussed in the MVP conversation like he was in 2022. And what's crazy about just football in general is somebody has a down year or even misses half the year with an injury. It wasn't a down year for Jefferson by the metrics of his PFF grade or whether it was his yards per game or yards per touch or target or whatever. It was just that he was dealing with an injury for a part of the season.

But if you go back one year, I don't know where they are in the 2022 season without Justin Jefferson's performance. Instead of 13 and four, it might've been like seven and 10 without the way that he played. And it's one of the best wide receiver seasons of all time the thing about trying to reach the bar of Randy Moss is there is mythology with Randy Moss that's different you know coming from Marshall dropping in the draft the whole the whole thing the 98 season where he explodes on the scene the Thanksgiving game like what Randy Moss had is these iconic moments that everybody remembers from that era that also took a franchise that was just sort of flopping around in the wind. It was just middling and average and mediocre and took them to being one of the best and most exciting teams of all time.

It's kind of different with Justin Jefferson. It was a good team, but they didn't win anything in the playoffs. They didn't have a 15 of one season where they were the greatest offense of all time or something like that. So that's going to be pretty tough to top. There's going to be a lot that has to come for him if he's going to get into that conversation. Yeah, and there's also an added layer of legend when a guy has physical traits that are, you know, completely different to everybody else. So, you know, Tyreek Hill is like the best comp for Randy Moss at the moment because he has that speed and that explosion that nobody else in the NFL can match. Even fast guys look ridiculously slow compared to Tyreek Hill.

Like he has these plays where, you know, where he makes up five yards on a fast guy just to celebrate with him in the end zone. And he's not going full speed. He's just running along with him. Randy Moss has those plays on his highlight reel where he would just blow past people that could run 4-3, 4-3-5 and just make them look ridiculous. And then if the ball arrived in the end zone and you were all over him,

he'd still go up and make the catch. And, you know, he, he literally became a verb, you know, to moss somebody is a thing. There's not many players that get that right in, in NFL history, the number of players that became a verb because of how good they were or how dominant they were at a specific thing is very, very few. So for Jefferson to get to that level, he's not going to do it by, you know, the same way. It's not going to go the same way. He's going to do it by the kind of, you know, Jerry Rice type of route, which is at some point the numbers and the production and everything just becomes overwhelming and you can't argue with it anymore. But yeah, the Randy Moss thing is a very unusual pathway to immortality. Well, and the way that the game was played at the time, there was just a lot more downfield passing than there is in the NFL now. I remember looking this

up when we were talking about JJ McCarthy's deep ball and things like that, and how important is that? And a lot of quarterbacks, 10, 12% of their passes are traveling more than 20 yards, where even if you go back to the nineties, a lot of it was run the football, run the football, play action,

throw it, you know, 20 yards down the field that the explosive plays were what they were looking for in that era. And then you have a guy who was so much better physically than anyone else. He would just run by everyone. And I'm not saying that now they would have an answer necessarily for Randy Moss. Maybe the gap of athleticism would be closed between him and the corners and the plans

would be a little better, but they get after the quarterback so fast now that I don't know that you can run as many routes that were going down the field like that. So the best wide receivers most of the time have to do their work in the intermediate areas. We saw this from Devontae Adams for so many years with Aaron Rodgers, where the guy's running a 12-yard out or something, and that's, hey, look at this domination from Devontae Adams. And Jefferson kind of has that same thing, where it's not like they're just dropping back, heaving the ball 40 yards up in the air, and he's just jumping over people. It's a lot more of a precision type of thing, his route running, his ability to catch anything in the vicinity. And I think that's just a product of kind of how things have changed, where teams have tried to

play much more two deep safeties and offenses have responded by scheming with shorter stuff. So maybe there's more of a conversation with him and Chris Carter, who was not necessarily the deep bomb type of guy. Right. Yeah, it would look different, I think, if Randy Moss came into the NFL today, because as you say, certainly in the last couple of years, you know, teams have really, really gone after those explosive plays, those vertical plays. But it's been a trend, you know, for years moving in that direction. And I think Randy Moss was actually a part of that. Like, you know, teams had to figure

out different coverages because you couldn't just leave him one-on-one on the outside with a safety in the middle of the field. Like you needed help over the top for Randy Moss. Otherwise it was a touchdown. There was nothing you could do about it because nobody existed that could run with him you know so you needed those kind of coverage shells to to bracket randy moss to take him away i think if if moss came into the nfl now it would look more like sort of 2004 randy moss right it would be more of that higher volume um where he did work the middle of the field. He did work intermediate. He did work short a lot more and showed that like that. I think that's one thing that he probably doesn't get fair credit for is he could do that as well. It's just earlier

in his career, you didn't need to because nobody was prepared for what he could do. So every other catch was a 50 yard bomb and you know, you didn't need the rest of the stuff Chris Carter and Jake Reed or whatever could do that just let Randy Moss run for 50 yards and score um so I think if he came into the league now it would look more like that late Vikings career late Vikings era of of Moss but yeah that that gets into the kind of Chris Carter range um you know I think it's amazing that Jefferson at this point has already exceeded, you know, other amazing receivers that the Vikings have had like Adam Thielen,

like Stefan Diggs, like Anthony Carter, who himself is another guy that gets wildly underrated. Like Jefferson at this point, I think has already eclipsed those guys. And the only ones sort of left on the list are chris carter and randy moss who are not just you know two of the greatest receivers to ever play but obviously played you know a full career that put them at hall of fame level like simple longevity is is what's separating them

from uh jefferson as much as anything else at this point now let's get into the other part of the conversation with Jefferson here, the more newsworthy, which is the contract extension that he signs. I have used all the snark I've got about the rumors and everything else. And when we're talking about a player that the only comps we have in history of the Vikings are Moss and Carter, they weren't going to trade that player because you don't trade that player. And it didn't exactly work out trading Randy Moss either. So when it comes to this

contract with Justin Jefferson, though, it resets the market by kind of a ton, especially when it comes to that fully guaranteed money, which he just blew everybody else out of the water with what he has there. Looking at the contract from your perspective, how do you think that they can work around this? Do you feel like it's restrictive? Is it approaching quarterback money? Or do you look at it as this shouldn't be a huge problem for their team building going forward?

Yeah, well, I'm with you generally in that when you find a player that good, that transcendent, don't trade them away ever. And specifically the Vikings, because they did it already with Randy Moss. the ass you know and they had to navigate you know some manufactured controversy or other every year every other year and they eventually got tired of it but you traded them away and it went terribly right and it went terribly for everybody like nobody benefited from trading away randy moss at any point in his career um you don't get better by doing that and teams have done it you know other teams like the kansas city chiefs traded away tyree kill it is the type of move that nfl teams will still make but i think the vikings of all teams would very much not have made that move uh because of the randy moss history um and i think generally it's the right approach like you're the whole purpose

of the draft and of you know doing this is to find guys like that that are so special they change the rules and they change games. And yeah, at some point there's a sort of value proposition of what you can get back for them. But when they're that good, the chances of you ever actually achieving that and even being better in the aggregate when you add up all the draft picks and all the players that it became they're so small i mean look at the you know the raiders trading away khalil mac like theoretically the analytics would say that was the right move right they were on the right side of that trade but it didn't come it didn't turn out that way they made a complete mess of the the draft picks that they got and even if you say okay that was you know a particularly special Raiders front office in terms of blowing draft picks I don't know that like the even the average would have ended up better than Khalil Mack because he was that good at the time so I

think you find a way to keep him um and in particular I think the Vikings are well positioned to do so because they just got away from the Kirk Cousins contract. Right. That's the flexibility that you get back from having a rookie quarterback contract. And they're going to kind of coincide relatively neatly. Right. So that the majority of the pain for Justin Jefferson's contract is going to come with the cheaper deal, the cheaper years of J.J. McCarthy's deal. It's now sort of done early enough that even when the years are painful, you know, if they re-up J.J. McCarthy for a big money second contract, they've got such a far runway to plan for that, that it's doable. And in today's sort of salary cap era, I think you have space for one of those deals, right?

You have space for the big money quarterback deal, one other market resetting monster contract, and then everything else, you know, is done relatively cheaply or like that. But you're not, you know, there's enough flexibility in the NFL salary cap that you can actually put quite a lot in there and still be fine. Right. And still, yeah, you're never, it's going to condition what you do with the rest of the roster. You're going to have to make some tough decisions somewhere down the line and the will be players that you would like to have kept in normal circumstances that you're going to have to say, sorry, we're going to try and find, you know, a number two corner in the draft instead of paying you, you know, $20 million a year or whatever, but it's worth it, right? Because you kept Justin

Jefferson, because you kept one of the top five players in all of football on your team and have him, you know, supporting the young quarterback and all those things. Yeah. And I think about just in general, overall overall with football every situation has its own context so we like to try to find these blanket things that we can apply to everything like don't pay anybody just keep getting draft picks and so forth but when you're talking about a team that doesn't have too many expensive players that doesn't have too many old players at this point because they made a concerted effort to fix the salary cap before they had to do this including moving on from kirk cousins and then next year even the way they set up his deal his

dead money is going to be off the books for next year so it opens up all this extra space to have jj mccarthy as the cheap guy and one expensive, super expensive wide receiver. But the rest of the team, it's not like they're losing a bunch of free agents after next year. There's a couple of guys who are hitting free agency, but they have set themselves up with a window, even with the structure of Jefferson's deal, where the first year, this year is, I think, around 8 million. Then they can

carry over some of that cap then it goes up to 15 not very restrictive and then there's a pretty clear restructure situation in the third year of it and so eventually you go wait is he ever going to have a salary cap hit of 35 million the answer is probably not actually and it's like AJ Brown's deal where he's making $32 million a year, and there's nothing on there that says he'll ever have $32 million because if you do it a certain way, it's not like you can completely get around it, but you can make it manageable through these years, especially while McCarthy is young.

Right. And even if, you know, I tend to think of it, we always sort of think of these deals and the roster management part of football in abstractions. But even in abstractions, I think it makes sense. If you wipe the thing clean and you said, right, we're starting a franchise from scratch, how would you allocate your resources around the roster? What would it look like? Obviously, your biggest money, your first priority is quarterback. That's the most important thing. If we don't have that, almost nothing else matters. That's what you focus on first. So whether it's the draft, whether it's your big money guy that

you've already settled on, the free agent, whatever, you get your quarterback, that's where the majority of your resources goes. And then you've got like four or five or six other big money contracts to invest, depending on exactly how big they are. And I give Detroit a ton of respect right now. Like, look at what they're doing with all these extensions. They are literally going through and saying, we've got the quarterback on his big money contract. Now we want his number one wide receiver locked down. We want our best offensive lineman locked down. We want our best defensive lineman locked down. We want our best defensive lineman locked down. That'll be Aiden Hutchinson, you know, up next

down the line. They're literally going through exactly what we're talking about. They're finding the most important positions and they're giving those guys the biggest long-term contract and locking them down. That's exactly what you would want to do. And you know, that's what the Vikings have done. Like Jefferson is literally the first player that you would want outside of the quarterback tied down, locked up, given the big money to keep him in the building. So it makes perfect sense. So just in general, the wide receiver market exploded this off season, which helped Jefferson get to 35 million because he could look at the other wide receivers who signed for big money uh is wide receiver if you were ranking all the positions by positional value is that number one outside of

quarterback to you i think so yeah like pff data has suggested that for a while intuitively it makes sense you know when you think about it a bit it's the one position i think that is most able to dictate the impact that they have on the game and is less dependent on, you know, everything other than the quarterback. But like everyone used to see it as the top tier pass rusher. I think that's probably next, but top tier pass rushers we've seen not last year, the year before, look, look at the difference between 2022 miles Garrett and 2023 miles Garrett. Same guy, but less help around him. You could take him out of the game, right? He was still a problem, but you could minimize the impact that Myles Garrett had on the game.

2023, you get Zedaria Smith in the building. You get Dalvin Tomlinson. You get more help around him. You get Jim Schwartz with a better scheme. And suddenly, Myles Garrett is defensive player of the year. I don't know that he played significantly better. It's just that the help around him suddenly turbocharged the impact that he could have on the game.

Corner is a similar thing, right? You can have an elite corner, but if you have nothing up front, that guy is going to get annihilated. Look at Patrick Sertan last year. Denver's defense was historically inept for the first half of the season, so Sertan gave up some catches and gave up some yardage. And, you know, Devontae Adams says Sertan is the best corner in the game, but you didn't see it because everything else around him was bad.

Wide receiver, I think, is the least dependent position where if that guy's just amazing, he's going to have production, right? Tyree Kill can go anywhere and put up ridiculous yardage because you can't cover him, whether it's deep, whether it's intermediate, underneath, gimmick plays, design catches. Even if the offensive line stinks, you can get the ball in his hands quickly. He can make plays. He can make an impact on the game. So I think it makes sense for wide receiver. Quarterback is the most valuable position in the game. most valuable is his favorite target i think we all understand that circumstances around a quarterback will dictate a lot of quarterbacks

production if it's patrick mahomes yes you can move on from tyreek hill would not suggest though for anybody else and on the other side of that that's one of those situations where whoever wants to make whatever argument can use tyreek Hill because you could say, now, wait a minute, wasn't Tua just pretty mediocre in Miami and then suddenly amazing last year? Who was that because of? Maybe Tyreek Hill? It is a chicken and the egg thing when it comes to a wide receiver and a quarterback and how much they affect each other.

The Brock Purdy arguing people, bless them. They got a lot of content out of debating whether Brock Purdy was actually good or not. I think there's no debating though, whether Devo Samuel, Brandon Ayuk, George Kittle and Trent Williams helped that. So you want to be in that situation if you're the Vikings. But the question is, if they're going to start Sam Darnold,

how much does Justin Jefferson make Sam Darnold, how much does Justin Jefferson make Sam Darnold potentially a starting caliber quarterback, which he has not been in the past? And how much does he weigh the odds that JJ McCarthy could become very good? Yeah. And even the Tyreek Hill thing, by the way, it's not like that worked for Kansas City. They almost didn't win Super Bowls because they didn't have receivers like they you know they came up just big enough right at the end that the best

quarterback in the NFL and one of the best of all time already paired with a great offensive line and one of the best head coaches of all time almost didn't win Super Bowls because they didn't have a reliable wide receiver you know and they got bailed out late last season by, you know, Rasheed Rice's emergence and all those kinds of things. So on the one hand, he clearly made Tua and the Miami Dolphins a much better offense. And I don't think you can sort of look at the other side and say, well, it's a win-win, you know, everybody did well at that. Like Kansas City didn't, they are still trying to recover. It's why they've gone and got Marquise Brown and Xavier Worthy this off season. Like they are trying to recover. It's why they've gone and got Marquise Brown and Xavier Worthy this offseason. Like they are trying to recover from the loss of Tyreek Hill still.

And okay, it allowed them to have the money to, you know, lock other guys down. But, you know, you still very clearly saw the impact of losing a receiver like Tyreek Hill in the offense. Yeah, look, Jefferson obviously is amazing. They've got Addison as well. Like this is a good receiving core. If Hawkinson comes back healthy, it should be a good offense again, and it's probably the best situation, obviously, outside of San Francisco,

where he didn't really get an opportunity, certainly long-term, that Darnold has had. It's a good offensive scheme. It's a good system. It's a good support structure across the board. It's as good a situation as he's ever been in the NFL now whether or not he has it whether or not he has the ability to play at that level consistently I think it's still entirely up for debate even in his college career you know the thing that kind of made him the prospect it was still wildly inconsistent like

I think people overlook that element of Sam Darnold that it's not like the USC career was just one constant dominant ride. Like even then it was streaky and patchy and had some bad in it as well. So yeah, I think we've seen the last couple of years, the impact that support system has on a quarterback, you know, and if it's terrible, like Chicago with Justin Fields, like Carolina with Bryce Young last year, it can ruin the guy and there's just no shot. And similarly, if you make it really, really good, you can prop up, you know, a lot of

quarterbacks. And in today's NFL, not, you know, there's, there's one Patrick Mahomes and there's two or three other guys that are amazing and incredible and going to drag whatever team to the playoffs almost regardless of what's around them. But you can get quite a long way to bridging the gap towards that guy if you take a reasonable quarterback, of which I think there have never been more, right? Like there've never been more Baker Mayfields or Kirk Cousins or, you know, those guys in the nfl if you take one of those guys and surround them with as much talent as possible i think you can get pretty close to the level of josh allen you know with with a worse supporting cast all right so i'm gonna play a little game

with you here do you like the price is right any price is right guy well i mean like is is a you're familiar with it you understand what it is here's what i'm going to do i'm going to start raising the potential pff grade of sam darnold starting with what he's been in his career and i'm going to move it up and you tell me when to stop what you think he would have if he played the entire season with Jefferson Addison, Hockinson comes back. So where he's been most of his career is about 60, which is being generous to say it's a mediocre replacement level. Maybe he could be a 65 if he's playing with these guys.

He could potentially even be a 70 out of 100 here pff grade if he plays pretty well maybe even if justin jefferson's really great fully healthy 75 now what vikings fans think he's good okay all right there it is then we're then we tap out i i think 75 is a realistic target for somebody like sam darnold in that offense with those receivers, you know, with all the things we just mentioned. I would be reluctant to go higher than that. You know, I think higher than that, you're getting into high level, pretty high level NFL play. You're getting into like my baseline would be where is he relative to Kirk Cousins, you know, with a similar environment. Right. He's nowhere near the caliber of quarterback Kirk Cousins, you know, with a similar environment, right? He's, he's nowhere near the caliber of quarterback Kirk Cousins. Kirk Cousins has been the kind of high seventies, low eighties, you know,

and, and higher than that, depending on his best season, um, you know, up to kind of 85 and threatening the best quarterbacks in the NFL. Darn light. I don't think he's ever going to get there. Um, but I think you could get him somewhere, you know, in the mid seventies, which is the sort of decent, you know, half decent year of Baker Mayfield type of play. Like I think Baker last year was 76, something like that for the Bucs. That's, that's a reasonable target. I think. I think so too. And if there was some combination of games where he graded a 40 and games

where he graded an 85 or something. I wouldn't really be terribly shocked having watched the last few games that he played in Carolina where one of them he was downright spectacular. Another one, I think he had a quarterback rating of five or something like that. So I think it's going to be a bit of a wild ride with him. Regardless, there's some Jameis Winston element to him where I don't think it can be contained that he's going to do crazy stuff. But the high end of it, having watched him thrown a football in OTAs a few times, you could tell there's no secret why he was drafted as high as he was picked. And with this offense that will, I think, work well for him with Kevin O'Connell in his ear. And, you know, we'll see where it goes from there but

would you uh want J.J. McCarthy to play sooner than later or later than sooner um to me it's always it's always just what is is it going to do him harm right like I think that there I generally believe that there you need development on the field. You know, there's obviously, there's a school of thought now with this sort of Jordan Love, Aaron Rodgers transition plan, where maybe you can teach them everything they need over like two, three years on the sideline. Maybe that's true, but I don't think it necessarily works for like, you know, half a season or three quarters of the season. Like, I think at that point, if that's the timeline you're working with, all within one kind of calendar year, one cycle, you need him on the field to get that development going. You need the live reps.

You need the first team reps. You need him to be the guy. And the only time I think you would change that is if you think it's actually going to do him harm being put out there. Like Carolina last year, I don't know that that helped Bryce Young at all. That was bad. It didn't get any better we never sort of saw him you know pull himself through the other side of that and start improving that was just suffering through a bad season and maybe that's fine maybe it's not going to do him any harm but there's definitely a risk that that was irreparable damage to whatever Bryce Young's NFL career is going to be.

So that would be my determining factor. Like if you think, and this is a good situation. So if you think he's ready enough to go out there and not, you know, embarrass himself, not just get stuck in quicksand and start seeing ghosts like Sam Darnold way back when, if you think he's capable of doing that, then throw him out there. And even if he struggles, even with some bad plays, there's some bad games bad games in there ultimately that's what he needs to become the player he's going to be um and and it's really you know darnel is there if you need him not like because he like i don't think you use that as you know mccarthy's start date depends on what darnel is doing like darnel is just there if you need him to play for

an indeterminate length of time, but McCarthy is the variable. Right. Yeah. And that's why you get Sam Darnold to take the pressure off of JJ McCarthy to feel like he's ready. The biggest thing for me is that if the quarterback can throw the ball on time with the way the offense is designed. I don't really care if he flies some balls into the stands because his accuracy isn't there yet, or if he underthrows some deep balls and gets a picked, but if he's holding on to the ball too long, cause he can't see where he's supposed to throw it yet, or doesn't understand the offense, or he's not setting the protections. And this is where with Bryce Young, I was like gobsmacked that

Harrison Smith walks up to the line of scrimmage and is right there. They don't send anybody over to try to shift the protection to him. And he just walks in and smashes Bryce Young and Sack. Like this is not working. He's not ready to be able to do this yet or something about that offense is in. That's the risk of confidence confidence that's the risk of injury that you take I think Justin Fields got beat up a ton early on and his confidence was harmed because he didn't know what he was doing out there and couldn't see the field so they have to be ready for him to be able to throw on time and get rid of the football and then the rest the results don't matter quite as much in that first year if he's going to play on the bigger picture matter,

as long as you and I have known each other, we talked about, ah, you know, this franchise kind of stuck in the mud and just said their history is them being middling. And how do they escape the Kirk cousins contract? What can they do?

Sign a nose tackle. Uh, and, uh, now we are in a different place. Maybe this changes our friendship, Sam, maybe we're different now because of this. It's such, it is such a different place. Maybe this changes our friendship, Sam. Maybe we're different now because of this.

It is such a different place though where this franchise stands right now. We're in a post-Kurt Cousins landscape for the first time. Yeah, look, it's a new world. They might not be any better this year, but for the first time since the Kirk Cousins signing, there's a different level of hope because now you've at least gone.

And like Kirk Cousins put a fairly clear ceiling on what this team was going to be. Unless you could assemble a championship caliber roster around him, Cousins was unlikely to ever take you to a Super Bowl. Maybe you would catch lightning in a bottle and you would get like that five-game sequence where Cousins was unlikely to ever take you to a Super Bowl. Maybe you would catch lightning in a bottle and you would get like that five game sequence where Cousins plays like an all pro. And that was the way you were going to make it happen, but that never materialized. So ultimately you were always stuck at this level of being too good to ever get a great draft pick,

but not good enough to really contend because Cousins was your quarterback. Now you've gone in a different direction. J.J. McCarthy comes in. The chances, like it's a very high bar to be as good as Kirk Cousins. Like let's make that clear. He's a really good quarterback. It's like there's a reason Atlanta gave him that kind of money because they just had Desmond Ritter. Like they just saw how hard it is to have a Kirk Cousins-caliber quarterback.

But for the first time, the ceiling is higher now, right, because you might get a quarterback that's better than Kirk Cousins caliber quarterback. But for the first time, the ceiling is higher now, right? Because you might get a quarterback that's better than Kirk Cousins and you're not paying them the same money as you had before. So you can do things like lock up Justin Jefferson long-term. So, you know, for the first time in years, there is a different level of hope attached to the Vikings because we no longer know where the ceiling is of this team and maybe it is lower uh than than what it was with Kirk Cousins but it might be higher as well and that's the first time that that has been an unknown variable for years yeah and there's I think a recognition of that with the fans that this year might not result in a deep playoff run

but it could be kind of a transition into something that is a totally different era how would you evaluate quesadilla fomenta now that we've seen his plan come to fruition because when the analytics gm gets hired you go what's he gonna do is he gonna just do some crazy stuff like is he gonna analytics the football what's gonna happen here and uh i don't think that he analytics to the football and did a bunch of stuff that was way off of the beaten trail of what normal teams do so much as he followed the path of teams that have succeeded in the NFC, which is the Philadelphia, San Francisco are the two best in recent years, quarterbacks on rookie contracts, stacking up rosters,

acquiring playmakers in drafting Jordan Addison and getting TJ Hawkinson. It hasn't been something insane. It's kind of been exactly what he said it was going to be. We're going to go from point A to point B to turn over this roster to get it to a good place. But how would you look at that operation over the last three years? I've always thought that he was sort of labeled incorrectly, you know, as this analytics GM. It's not like he doesn't have an analytics background, but his deeper background is finance, right? Like he's a Wall Street guy at heart. He's a finance GM. And when you start looking at what he values and what he's done, it sort of makes more sense almost in financial terms. He places a real value in blue chip stocks. He goes after locking down

Justin Jefferson long term, but also the way that they aggressively traded up for Dallas Turner. They view Dallas Turner as this blue chip stock. He's Apple. He's Microsoft. You want to go and get that when it's available or when you think you have a shot at it, even if you have to overpay slightly, because you know, that's the thing that's going to return bigger dividends down the line. Right. And then also sort of, you know, spreading out the risk and combating that by, by doing some other things that are a little bit more on the analytic side of things. So I think overall, you see a guy who isn't going to stick with, you know, what the analytics book would say every single time. He's not going to do, you know, a religious slave to that

because the sort of financial side of him also ties, like it's kind of closer in nature, I think, to that old school football guy mentality, which is, you know, really plays value in these important players, these guys that are amazing. It's sort of there's a natural synergy there. So I think ultimately it's going to shake out as a guy that, you know, has some old school attitudes towards things, but also has enough you know new age analytics uh approach to kind of modify that and still not not necessarily the best of both worlds but there

will be elements of both in his strategy kind of at all times where the finance thing has really come up big for him is in moving on from certain players that weren't worth it even if you really liked them uh daniel hunter is an example nobody is more loved than Daniel Hunter, but a fully guaranteed two-year contract for somebody who's got neck issues and you have a lot of weaknesses on defense. It's not really a good play. It doesn't give you a lot of flexibility on the salary cap like Jonathan Grenard's deal does. And Dalvin Tomlinson is another one where they just went, yeah, we love you at defensive tackle. We don't love you at that price. So we're going to move on. And then Kirk Cousins

as well. Although I think that was always the plan was to move on during this year where there was a lot of good draft pick quarterbacks, but even then it was line in the sand. This is what we would pay for Kirk Cousins. This is what we would not pay for Kirk Cousins. And they ended up, I think, better off because of it. What is your hottest June? We're recording this on June 4th. June 4th NFL take. What is it when you're doing the podcast, you're arguing with Steve, what could you get heated about on June 4th?

June nothing. We've reached a point where there is nothing in today's NFL in June the 4th that I can get. I can get actually know what was I ranting about yesterday? I was gonna say I listened to the show. I think there's any time this is possible. Trayvon Walker. People are claiming that Trayvon Walker is actually a phenomenal player now because he got double digit sacks and somebody claimed he was elite against the run. Only one of those two things is true. And it's the one that doesn't necessarily mean he's good. You know, Vic Beasley had double digit sacks one year and it was like, oh, Vic Beasley's he's arrived. And then he bounced out of the NFL within a couple of years.

Like Trayvon Walker has not become anything like the player that you would say justifies, not just justifies the number one overall pick, but even justifies taking him over Aiden Hutchinson, which seemed ridiculous at the time. And the longer it goes on looks even more ridiculous. caliber and Trayvon Walker is marginally better if any than the player they drafted at number one overall who was just a collection of unique physical tools yet to become a football player okay so there a Jaguars defensive end you're like I don't know I couldn't get upset about anything and then you just threw a chair over uh Trayvon Walker uh I'll give you a real quick one before you go for me that I I've been talking so much, Justin Jefferson contract,

everything else haven't brought it up. One narrative that I see out there all the time, this off season is what are the Cowboys doing? What are the Cowboys doing? They're just letting this all slip through their fingers and everything else. Missing a lot of perspective. I think on how good that roster is.

And the fact that they added Mike Zimmer as their defensive coordinator, which having had an up-close look at Mike Zimmer and his mind of defense, I think is a pretty darn good move for them. And it just seems like people desperate to talk about the Cowboys in some way, but they didn't do anything exciting, so they're mad at them. Like, oh, you guys were supposed to do some crazy move in the offseason, and you didn't, so now I have nothing to talk about. That team is a behemoth, and I still think they should be a favorite

despite the fact that they choke in the playoffs. Yeah, but it's also conditioned on two things. Number one, that Jerry Jones immediately after failing again was like, we're all in this year. They're like, well, okay, if you're all in, then what is this? This is not all in. I don't know if you know what that term means, but this is not all in. This is something completely different.

So that's number one. And number two, it's also conditioned by the fact that as good as they have been, they do keep failing at the same hurdle every single year. So if you're not doing something dramatically different, like I don't generally, I think I'm a reasonable advocate for like, if you're good enough at a certain level, just keep knocking on the door and eventually it'll open. Right. I think Buffalo, you can make that case for, but I think it's different for Dallas because this is not like they're not failing because they've just been unlucky in these games. Like they're getting

there and the weight of history is crushing them and they're choking right this is it's a different outcome um so it feels like you need to do something dramatically different and instead what they've sort of done is relied on the other element i think that i have concerns with is yeah it's a great roster um and they let a lot of guys leave and they've replaced them with draft picks which is generally not a bad strategy but they actually need the rookies to replace those guys now right and step in immediately and replace good players like tyrant smith is going to be replaced by a rookie left tackle who was drafted not in the top 10 who's you know seen as a

something of a project and it's going to need to be like a high level left tackle right out of the gate otherwise they downgraded tyra beattish the center is probably going to need to be replaced by the rookie maybe cooper bb who comes in like either way that offensive line is going to have to shuffle and have a rookie in there again chances of that guy hitting the ground running and being as good as beattish right away not not great. You're probably downgraded there. So they've done that at like multiple spots across the team. And, you know, to their credit, they've been one of the better drafting teams in recent years, but they're really testing that this year. Like they need to have serious contributions from like three or four draft picks to just be as good as they were a year ago, which let's remember

wasn't good enough. So I think that is the driving force behind the narrative is like, clearly where you were has not been good enough to do what you need to do. And it's not immediately obvious that you're any better than you were this time a year ago. No, yeah, I totally agree with that. I think that the baseline that they've put up, if they even do it again, you go into the playoffs again as a favorite. And then I can't control it from there if they just completely fall apart. But I think that Zimmer does give them a better chance not to do that

defensively, at least in the first round of the playoffs. But it might be a fun game for us sometime in the, in the summertime to just give you a random position group from every team, no notes. And you have to give a take on it. Because I was just like, yeah, I don't know about these Cowboys. And you covered everything. So anyway, that's what you do.

Sam Monson, PFF NFL show. Everybody already knows it with Steve Palazzolo. We will get together again soon, man. But always great to now have these conversations in the post kirk era it's it's fresh that now you don't have to roll your eyes when i send you an email and say you want to come on the show you know now i got to talk about how they're going to fill out the left guard again not anymore it's interesting here new world thanks sam anytime