There comes a time for every franchise when they need to take a big swing so that they can avoid the fleeting allure of floundering in the middle ground. Plenty of franchises thrive on comfort, doing just well enough that their fans will continue to attend games and can talk themselves into whimsical optimism, while not doing good enough to ever actually win the games that matter. The modern NFL is built around the QB position, and Cousins has taken this Vikings roster as far as he can. Cousins is a good not great QB on a good not great team, and I think prescribing his departure for all the teams failings is faulty. It isn’t that Cousins isn’t good enough to win a Super Bowl, but he isn’t good enough to do so with this roster and given the depth of the QB class in next year’s draft, it may be time to look for someone who can.

This week, the Vikings will face a desperate Chargers team trying to avoid going 0-3 and if they lose that game, they themselves will be 0-3. The odds of them making the playoffs if they open the season at 0-3 are grim, and while the 17-game season may aid in a comeback of sorts it still feels like a hole that’s much too deep to dig themselves out of. If the Vikings lose this week, we look forward to seeing a five-game stretch that includes the Carolina Panthers, Kansas City Chiefs, Chicago Bears, San Francisco 49ers, and Green Bay Packers. If I told you they went 1-4 in that stretch, would you even blink? If I told you they went 2-3, would you be pleasantly surprised? This stretch will take the Vikings right up to the trade deadline, and may very well force them into a rebuild.

When looking at prime candidates to get traded, Cousins is obviously chief among them but there are a lot of issues with that. For starters, he makes a prohibitive amount of money that will preclude teams already paying a quarterback from trying to trade for him. He isn’t going to be willing to go to a bad team, and his no-trade clause ensures that he almost certainly won’t have to. To top this all off, he’s in a contract year and has whatever team trades for him over the barrel for whatever contract he may desire.

In a vacuum, a fringe top-ten quarterback is easily the most valuable asset on the Vikings roster, but the circumstances make him difficult to trade and could easily serve to lower his value. Even still, many have speculated that this may be Cousin’s last year with the team and if your options are using him up on a dead season or getting some draft capital out of him, I think the answer is pretty obvious on which the franchise should go with.

The Vikings are well set up for their quarterback of the future, they have one of the best offenses in the league with a bevy of reliable offensive weapons that present a situation many college quarterbacks would kill to be a part of. If you could insert one of the top 3-4 quarterbacks into this offense and let them develop, the team may finally be able to ascend to the level Vikings fans have been hoping to see for years. This option isn’t without risk, there’s always a chance that they draft a dud and end up back at square one like plenty of other teams in the NFL, but we already know the current teams ceiling is well below the Super Bowl.

Vikings fans, if the losses begin to pile up do not fret. For this season it may spell disaster, but if you look to the future you might see a team ready to reload for the first time in nearly a decade. A new chance to become a contender is on the horizon, and it’s time to see if their new GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah decides to seize it.