Whenever a collective bargaining agreement gets done between the NFL and its players, one thing that will most definitely be coming back is the salary cap, which the league got a break from in 2010. While no firm figures have been released yet, obviously, there has been some speculation about where the cap is going to be and how certain teams will be affected.
According to ESPN.com's John Clayton, the word going around is that the salary cap will be somewhere around $120 million. It could be as high as $125 million, but if it goes that high the minimum that each team must spend would likely be increased to around 95% of the cap, or roughly $114 million.
If the cap stays at $120 million, Clayton says that there will be seven teams over the cap, and the Minnesota Vikings are one of them. So what would the Vikings do?
The Vikings are $5.148 million over, which will make it tough for them to keep Bernard Berrian. Releasing him would save around $3.7 million. Adrian Peterson is in the final year on his contract with a salary of $10.72 million. He wants a long-term deal, and if the Vikings accommodate it would free up a lot of cap room.
My guess is that Peterson's deal gets done sooner rather than later for just this reason. Also, there's no way that Berrian is coming back, in my opinion, and the odds are very good that the Vikings will rid themselves of Madieu Williams' $5.4 million base salary as well.
I wouldn't worry too much about the Vikings and the salary cap, though. . .as we saw on numerous occasions prior to 2010, the Vikings employ the best salary cap guy in the business in Rob Brzezinski, and if Leslie Frazier sees spots on this football team that he wants to try to get an upgrade at, I have no doubts that Brzezinski and Zygi Wilf will give him the ability to get that done.