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The Minnesota Vikings made due at replacing Michael Pierce after the veteran defensive tackle refused to take a pay cut.
Minnesota signed former Buffalo Bills defensive tackle Harrison Phillips to a three-year, $19.5 million deal on the first day of free agency, March 16.
Sure, it’s a cheaper deal than the three-year, $27 million contract Pierce signed back in 2020 that amounted to just eight games played by the veteran defensive tackle.
But after opting to test the market, Pierce returned home to the Baltimore Ravens on a team-friendly deal worth half of his cap hit in 2022. Meanwhile, the Vikings swapped one defensive tackle with injury concerns for another in Phillips, who is also damaged goods.
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Phillips Recovering From PCL, Pierce Takes Cheaper Contract
NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport tweeted on Thursday, March 17, that Pierce agreed to a three-year, $16.5 million deal with the Ravens — an average annual value of $1 million cheaper than Phillips’ deal with the Vikings.
Pierce had a quiet two years with the Vikings. He was a high-risk opt out of the 2020 season during the peak of the pandemic due to his sports asthma. In 2021, he suffered a torn tricep injury that forced him to miss 11 games in the middle of the season.
But when he played, Pierce was worth his weight on the team coffers.
Returning in Week 13, Pierce turned in a strong performance to finish the season with a 78.5 Pro Football Focus (PFF) defensive grade, the 12th best among defensive interior linemen.
However, he was unwilling to take a pay cut toward his $10.5 million cap hit with the Vikings in 2022.
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Bills Media High on Phillips Despite Knee Issues
Phillips is no slouch, himself.
He worked his way through the Bills ranks and started in eight games in 2021. Phillips posted a 77.4 PFF defensive grade that ranked 14th among defensive interior linemen.
However, Phillips has also had a string of bad luck with injuries over his career. He’s torn the ACL in his left knee twice, once at Stanford in 2015 and again with the Bills in 2019. Phillips was also playing through a torn PCL on the same knee in 2021, Buffalo News reported, missing 21 games over the past three seasons in total — seven of which were healthy scratches.
Phillips played through the injury last season and put together his best year as a pro but his recovery and risk of reinjury remain in question after he admitted his knee has not been 100%.
Despite Phillips’ injury history, most of Bills media shares a positive consensus that the team should have re-signed him.
After being oft-injured and inconsistent in the infancy of his NFL career, Phillips flipped the script over the final months of the 2021 season.
“Over the final seven regular-season games, Phillips had a pressure rate of 11.5 percent, trailing only defensive end Jerry Hughes and Ed Oliver. As a one-technique whose primary responsibility is to eat up space for his teammates, that’s a slightly absurd figure,” The Athletic’s Joe Buscaglia wrote. With Phillips set to become an unrestricted free agent, the Bills must decide on their future with him, but there is little doubt that his end-of-season play has changed how the league views him, not to mention his own team.”
The Vikings may have slightly overpaid with Sportrac’s valuation of Phillips, projecting the 24-year-old defensive tackle to garner a deal worth $5.4 million a year.
However, he appears to be a player on the upswing with potential versus Pierce, whose impressive final five games of the regular season weren’t enough to warrant his $10.5 million cap hit on the 2022 books.
In the end, the Vikings ultimately saved less than $1 million on Phillips on the 2022 books.
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