It's been pointed out ad nauseam around here that the Vikings had three albatrosses, of varying degrees, sitting on the roster- CB Cedric Griffin, and OGs Steve Hutchinson and Anthony Herrera. The three of the combined have suffered injuries, are in declining age, and did not perform comparatively to expectations/ contracts last season, and also combined represented more than $13 million in salary cap space. Edit: It's been pointed out here at ProFootballTalk.com that the moves only save $9.6 mil in salary cap space. Sorry for the original mistake on my part- math was never my strong point. Edit of the above edit: It's been pointed out below that I'm an idiot. The move saves a lot of cap space. Looking for Mark to just go ahead and post below what the actual number is, I give up.
Well, no longer- all three were summarily cut today by the Vikings. Griffin is by and far the least surprising- after all, as Chris pointed out the other day, his refusal to take a pay-cut was pretty much the nail in the coffin for something that was a long time coming.
I won't lie, however- cutting both Herrera and Hutch was a bit of a surprise to me. My piece on whether we should keep Hutch for the last year of his contract, with of course an assumed pay-cut, was a landslide victory for the old warrior- but then again, who knows what happened behind the scenes? While every report I ever read about him made it sound like he was resigned to the fact/ willing to accept that a pay-cut would be coming, for all we know he ended up declining it a la Griff. And while Herrera, yeah, probably didn't deserve his highly paid starting spot anymore, removing both guards all at once came as a bit of a surprise.
Of course, there is the (at least to me) obvious answer to that riddle. What does a team do when it gets rid of both of its offensive guards? Well, if it's the Minnesota Vikings, it drafts Matt Kalil, slides Charlie Johnson into a guard slot, and goes after Carl Nicks in FA for the other one. Do that, and it all adds up.
But that's just me. What do you guys think of this quick mini-roster purge?