Brian Robison takes hefty pay cut to come back to the Vikings

Last week, Brian Robison announced that he was coming back to the Minnesota Vikings for one more season. The longest-tenured member of the Vikings, having spent his entire career in purple since he was drafted in 2007, Robison has seen his role diminish a bit in recent years, and we now know that he took a pretty significant pay cut to come back this year.

According to Ben Goessling of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Robison’s pay cut will give the Vikings nearly $2.4 million in cap space. He was scheduled to make $3.5 million in 2018, but will instead play for the veteran minimum of $1.015 million, along with a $90,000 workout bonus.

The fact that Robison took a cut of two-thirds of his salary to come back to Minnesota says a lot about him. At this point, Robison is every bit as valuable as a mentor to the team’s young defensive linemen as he is as a part of the Vikings’ defensive line rotation, and he likely knows that his role is going to diminish even more this season with the Vikings’ addition of Sheldon Richardson on the inside (where Robison has rotated as a pass rusher in recent years) and the continued emergence of Danielle Hunter as a force at defensive end.

Robison told Goessling that he contemplated a release by the Vikings so that he could test the free agent market, but from the sounds of it, he couldn’t see himself playing anywhere else.

“But for me, one of my morals is being loyal,” Robison said. “I wanted to be loyal to this organization, but I also had to do what was right for me and my family. What was right for me and my family was coming back here.”

If this really is going to be Robison’s last season, it certainly would be nice for the Vikings to send him out on top.