At some point in the next two and a half months, the Minnesota Vikings will have to make a decision on the fifth-year option on the rookie contract of wide receiver Jordan Addison. Picking up that option is never cheap for any player, but for Addison it isn’t quite as bad as it potentially could have been.
The folks over at Spotrac have their estimates for the fifth-year option cost for each player selected in the first round of the 2023 NFL Draft, and have projected Addison’s price tag to come in at $17.579 million. If the Vikings were to pick up that option, that salary would be fully guaranteed for the 2027 season. The team has until 1 May to make their decision.
Addison qualifies as a “Tier 3” player when it comes to how the fifth-year options are priced, because he has played at least 50% of the team’s snaps in each of his first three seasons. Tier 1 players are those who are selected to two or more Pro Bowls in their first three seasons, while Tier 2 players are those with at least one Pro Bowl selection. As a Tier 3 player, the price for Addison’s fifth-year option is equal to the average salary of the third through twentieth-highest paid players at his position, which is how Spotrac arrived at the figure that they did.
If the Vikings were simply paying for Addison’s on-field production, the debate probably wouldn’t be a very long one. Addison has shown himself to be highly productive when he’s been on the field, even as a clear second option to Justin Jefferson when Jefferson is healthy. However, he has shown a propensity for getting himself into bad situations off the field, including having to serve a three-game suspension to start the 2025 season for one off-season incident and being benched for part of the team’s game in London this season for missing a walkthrough. If Addison were to run afoul of the law again, he could wind up missing an even larger chunk of time, depending on the circumstances.
A guarantee of over $17 million is nothing to sneeze at, and while I have a feeling that the Vikings will ultimately wind up picking up Jordan Addison’s fifth-year option, I think there’s going to be a lot more discussion on the topic over in Eagan than there might ordinarily have been.
What do you think of the price tag for Jordan Addison’s fifth-year option? Is it a no-brainer for the Vikings or is it a little too steep for your liking?
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