Minnesota Vikings Salary Cap: Still Plenty Of Room To Work With

Early on in the NFL’s free agency period, the Minnesota Vikings made two significant signings to attempt to fix their issues at the offensive tackle positions, inking Riley Reiff and Mike Remmers to five-year contracts. Even after those two signings, Rick Spielman and company still have plenty of cap space to play around with going forward.

According to the folks from Over the Cap, the Vikings are still sitting on just a shade under $27 million in available cap space. That’s because the hits for both Reiff and Remmers aren’t all that significant, and appear to be fairly low-risk for the Vikings.

We’ll start with Reiff’s contract, which was reported to be a five-year, $58.75 million deal with $26.3 million guaranteed and a signing bonus of $11 million.

The signing bonus is spread out over the five years of the contract, and you can see that the “dead money” hit for Reiff decreases significantly after the 2018 season. His $8.5 million cap number for this season is now the second-largest on the team (behind only quarterback Sam Bradford), but if the Vikings are expecting him to play left tackle. . .and it appears as though they are. . .then that number isn’t terribly surprising. The only guaranteed money Reiff has after 2018 is the remainder of the signing bonus, which would be accelerated if the Vikings chose to cut ties with him. That’s the “dead money” figure for 2019, 2020, and 2021.

Now, let’s move on to Remmers’ deal, which is a five-year, $30 million contract with $10.5 million guaranteed.

Remmers’ $5.1 million cap hit for 2017 puts him outside of the ten largest cap hits on the Vikings’ roster right now, and with the way the deal is structured, the Vikings can essentially cut him after one season (if they choose) with minimal damage. I don’t think anyone’s hoping for that to happen, but it wouldn’t be too painful for the Vikings if it did.

Whatever the plan is that the Vikings have for free agency, they still have plenty of money to execute whatever that plan is, given that the biggest signings of the free agency period are over and done with.