It’s Apparently Cool To Tamper With the Vikings
Credit: Jeffrey Becker-USA TODAY Sports
The Atlanta Falcons tampered with Kirk Cousins. This isn’t an accusation, it’s not baseless speculation, it’s a fact confirmed by the NFL on Thursday. The Falcons pulled off their second-biggest theft of the Minnesota Vikings in their history, wresting away their franchise leader in passer rating, No. 2 player in touchdowns, and No. 3 player in passing yards.
Time to bring that hammer down. Are the Falcons stripped of their 2025 first-round pick, denying them a shot to draft a quarterback to slot behind Cousins and Michael Penix, Jr.? Will Roger Goodell now compensate the Vikings by awarding them a two-day negotiation period with Kyle Pitts? Can the NFL just go back into the record books and rule that Gary Anderson was “close enough”?
Nope, the league had a much harsher sentence in store for Atlanta. They’ll be stripped of a fifth-round pick next year, the team will be fined about 0.00003% of his net worth, and issued general manager Terry Fontenot a $50,000 fine — or about twice as much as Justin Jefferson has had to pay for celebrating touchdowns during his career.
Look, we can argue about how much tampering with Cousins actually affected the Vikings’ plans. It’s very obvious that Minnesota was looking to draft a quarterback and move on from Cousins. In the grand scheme of things, we can look at this as the equivalent of someone taking a couch Adofo-Mensah put on the curb as he was running back into the house to grab the “FREE” sign he forgot.
The crucial difference, though, is that the world of Curbside Couches has no rules. The world of NFL free agency does, and they need to be enforced, or they’re meaningless.
Vikings fans can say now that tampering didn’t affect them, as they were able to grab JJ McCarthy in this spring’s draft. But then again, what if they weren’t? What if, say, the New York Giants liked McCarthy, then the Denver Broncos leap-frogged the Vikings to claim Bo Nix? Minnesota would be starting with Sam Darnold and grooming Spencer Rattler as their succession plan. What are the ripple effects there? Is Justin Jefferson as inclined to re-sign with the Vikings in that situation?
Obviously, we’re playing with alternate histories here to illustrate a point, but we don’t need to go to the realm of the unknown to argue that tampering hurt the Vikings. Having Cousins bolt to the Falcons forced Minnesota into a corner where they felt they had to trade fourth-and-fifth-round picks (Nos. 129 and 157) to move up one spot in the draft to take McCarthy. Minnesota may have lost more draft capital as the victims of tampering than Atlanta did by being the perpetrator.
If a fifth-round pick is the cost of tampering, then you’re free to call every GM not named “Fontenot” an idiot. Like, hey, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah? Why the heck were you not tampering like hell to get Christian Wilkins to fill in that hole you’ve got a defensive tackle? Were you afraid of losing a fifth-round pick? Did you not want to go into your pocket and drop $50K in the NFL’s tip jar for the greater good? Selfish mindset, IMO.
It’s glib to say all this, but if these are the rules the league is playing under, is any GM wrong for making this calculation going forward? If tampering is bad, then it’s bad, and it should be punished harshly.
The NFL got it right with the Miami Dolphins, laying the hammer down on owner Stephen Ross with a $1.5 million fine and stripping the Fins of a first-rounder in 2023 for tampering with Tom Brady. But now it’s suddenly cool and good to tamper with the high-end quarterback for the Vikings. The rules don’t matter anymore, and in a world like that, it’s not honorable to avoid tampering. It’s stupid, and that’s not a mindset the NFL should want 32 teams to adopt going forward.
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