The team that brought us the phrase “we have no intent to trade Percy Harvin” (and then they did) has given us another clear, unequivocal catch phrase regarding a key receiver: “We never discussed trading Justin Jefferson.”
Now that the Vikings have signed Jefferson to a long-term deal, they have every interest in playing the “nothing to see here” card when it comes to the possibility that the Vikings might have moved on, if they’d been blown away by an offer for Jefferson and/or if they’d been able to replace him.
As recently explained, the Vikings had no urgency to get a deal done before the draft. That’s circumstantial evidence regarding the possible if not likely fact that the Vikings were waiting to see if they got blown away with a Herschel Walker-type offer.
Here’s a fact to which we previously alluded on PFT Live and that I reported unequivocally on Thursday morning’s show. At one point before the draft, Jefferson’s camp believed the Vikings were “playing games” with their most important player.
So, yes, while the Vikings have zero interest in giving those past possibilities any credence, it’s fair to think they were waiting to see if someone might have spontaneously made an offer they wouldn’t have refused.
Then there’s the fact that more than a few people have said the Vikings were trying to trade up from No. 11 to No. 5 to draft LSU receiver Malik Nabors. Too many people heard that for it to have been something that someone pulled out of thin air and/or their ass. Even though Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell got the predictable softball earlier this week regarding the question of whether the Vikings shopped Jefferson, no one aske about the Nabors rumors and reports.
If the Vikings had gotten Nabors, who knows what that would have meant for Jefferson? Maybe the Vikings would have been content to go forward with Jefferson in the fifth year of his contract, Jordan Addison under a rookie deal, and Nabers for roughly $30 million total over four years. Or maybe they would have continued to wait for the offers to come in, without technically ever discussing a potential trade of Jefferson.
Bottom line? There’s too much smoke to ignore on this one. Beat writers have plenty of reasons, driven both by access and a desire not to come off as having been scooped, to parrot the “nothing to see here” mantra.
Some would say beat writers know a given team better than anyone else. While that might be true in many circumstances, there’s a real difference between what beat writers can and will write and what they know but can’t say.
Surely, some of the people covering the Vikings heard about the frustrations from Jefferson’s perspective and/or about the potential effort to get Nabers. Even more surely, it wouldn’t have been great for the business of covering the team on a constant basis to be banging the drum about things the team would rather no one mention.
