RandBall: With QB options, Vikings remain 27.5 million steps ahead of Falcons

One of the best rules of decision-making, particularly in sports, is this: Don’t make one until you have to do so.

Time has a way of changing the calculus — as we have seen multiple times already this season with the Gophers men’s basketball team and how outcomes might relate to coach Ben Johnson’s job status — as does the accumulation of more information.

The Vikings are running out of the former but still gaining the latter when it comes to deciding on their quarterback situation. While I still firmly believe Sam Darnold will not be on the roster in 2025 and J.J. McCarthy and Daniel Jones will be, the Vikings can still say for now that nothing has been decided.

General Manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah continued to use words like “optionality” to talk about the quarterback situation Tuesday at the scouting combine, while behind the scenes he is almost certainly gauging Darnold’s market to possibly keep him but more likely to see whether a franchise tag-and-trade makes sense.

Coach Kevin O’Connell can continue to say things like this, as he also did Tuesday: “This process is going to play out both short-term and long-term for the Minnesota Vikings, and Sam is in a position where the NFL thinks he can play quarterback at a high level. So, that’s a really good thing, and I feel very proud to be a part of him getting to this point and we’ll see where it goes from here.”

They are probably pretty sure already what they are going to do, but they don’t have to tell us yet. And the options, as I talked about on Wednesday’s Daily Delivery podcast, are pretty good: keep a quarterback, albeit at a much higher price, who won 14 games last season; or move on with some combination of a lower-cost veteran and the highest-drafted QB in franchise history.

They stand in stark contrast, still, to the plight of the Falcons — who of course signed Kirk Cousins in free agency in 2024, leading the Vikings to Darnold.

Usually it is impossible to know how things would have played out in alternate universe, but the Vikings have the luxury of watching it unfold quite poorly in Atlanta.

It could be the Vikings sitting here right now insisting things are fine after a Cousins implosion in the back half of 2024, but instead it is the Falcons.

Atlanta GM Terry Fontenot is trying to play the waiting game, too, but he is doing it quite poorly.

First, he said at the combine that the Falcons plan to keep Cousins this year. That is pure nonsense; Cousins is guaranteed $27.5 million already for 2025, but he also has another $10 million that becomes guaranteed March 17.

That’s an expensive backup to second-year QB Michael Penix Jr., and if Fontenot thinks saying that will entice someone to trade for Cousins (and his contract) instead of just waiting for his imminent release, he is fooling himself.

Stranger still: Cousins this offseason attributed his second-half slump to a hit he took in November that caused shoulder and elbow problems.

That sounds like great cover for a GM hoping to trade Cousins. He was hurt! The Falcons were 6-3 and Cousins was having a solid year before Nov. 10! Come and get him!

But on Tuesday, Fontenot said this in regard to the decision later in the year to bench Cousins: “We talked about it when the decision was made: it was a football decision. There wasn’t anything injury related.”

So it seems as if Atlanta’s options are to either pay Cousins $27.5 million to go away or $37.5 million to stay as a backup QB.

The clock is ticking.