Spielman: Tolling Teddy Bridgewater’s contract an “NFL decision”

On Thursday morning, Minnesota Vikings’ General Manager Rick Spielman answered some questions from reporters. While we don’t have the entire transcript of everything he said available to us at the present time, he did say one very interesting thing about the situation with quarterback Teddy Bridgewater and the potential “tolling” of his contract.

Thus far, pretty much everybody. . .myself included. . .figured that it was the decision of the Vikings’ front office as to whether or not they want to “toll” Bridgewater’s contract, which would mean that the Vikings would have him under team control with the same deal he had this past season. This is an option because Bridgewater was unable to provide football services to the team for the first six weeks of the season due to his being on the Physically Unable to Perform List.

It wasn’t made entirely clear what Spielman means by this, however. Does he mean that the NFL or the NFLPA is going to call the Vikings and inform them that Bridgewater is under contract to the Vikings for the 2018 season? Or does Spielman mean that the NFL or the NFLPA could put up a fight if the Vikings should decide to toll Bridgewater’s contract to keep him on the team in 2018? Based on the phraseology provided in the tweet above, I’m not entirely sure what they mean by that.

However, if that’s the case, the decision to retain Bridgewater under the terms of last year’s contract (which would only cost the Vikings around $2 million) just got a lot more interesting. There’s going to have to be a decision coming soon one way or the other, given that free agency kicks off in about six weeks or so. Hopefully the decision. . .whoever is making it. . .will be done early enough to give the team plenty of time to make plans going forward.