The Buccaneers signed offensive tackle Justin Skule on Monday, the team announced.
Skule, 29, previously spent 2022-24 with the Bucs, appearing in 35 games with five starts.
He entered the NFL as a sixth-round pick of the 49ers in 2019, and he spent his first three seasons in San Francisco. Skule signed with the Bucs’ practice squad early in the 2022 season after the 49ers cut him.
Skule was with the Vikings last season, playing 16 games with nine starts. He saw a career-high 578 snaps.
In his career, Skule has appeared in 82 career games, including 26 starts.
Kirk Cousins has spent 14 years in the NFL. He’s been to the playoffs three times. He has one postseason win.
And he nevertheless sits near the top of the list of all-time NFL earners.
Depending on the source, Cousins is either second behind Matthew Stafford or third behind Stafford and Tom Brady. Once the latest $20 million is added to the total Cousins pile, he’ll likely become the undisputed No. 2.
And $20 million is a key number. It’s the bookend to the figure that sparked Cousins’s climb.
In 2016, Washington applied the franchise tag to Cousins, at $20 million, after his four-year, fourth-round contract expired. But they offered him a long-term deal with an average annual value of $16 million.
It made the decision a no-brainer for Cousins. Take the $20 million, show up for everything, and focus on having the kind of season that would lay the foundation for a long-term deal.
In 2017, Washington tagged him again, at $24 million. (Some in the organization at the time lobbied for Colt McCoy at $3 million, arguing that Cousins wasn’t eight times better than McCoy.)
As of 2018, Washington wasn’t inclined to give Cousins a 44-percent increase (by rule) for a third tag. He became a free agent and the highest-paid player in NFL history after the Vikings boxed out the Jets.
His initial three-year deal in Minnesota became a six-year stay. When the Vikings insisted on a year-to-year arrangement as of 2024, Cousins opted for the multi-year financial security in Atlanta, which (as he quickly learned) didn’t mean multi-year job security.
Through it all, Cousins kept adding cash to the pile. He got $98.7 million for two years with the Falcons. His new deal with the Raiders puts him north of $330 million.
It’s obviously a temporary title. As the NFL’s money increases, the salary cap will rise and the market at the various positions will, too. Inevitably, Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes will be No. 1 and No. 2.
For now, though, the biggest claim to fame for Kirk Cousins comes not from his exploits in the postseason, but from trips to the bank made in January and other months of the year.
The NFL’s intransigence regarding the Bears’ plea for compensatory draft picks following the hiring of Ian Cunningham as the Falcons’ General Manager raises an interesting question.
Could another team hire Cunningham away from the Falcons as its primary football executive?
It’s a fair question. If Cunningham didn’t get a job with the Falcons that triggers the provision in the Rooney Rule that rewards a team for developing a minority candidate who becomes a General Manager with another team, he’s not really a General Manager. Another team could, in theory, hire him as a General Manager — if that G.M. job makes him the primary football executive.
That’s how the league distinguished the Saints getting a pair of third-round picks when assistant G.M. Terry Fontenot became the Falcons’ G.M. in 2021. Although Rich McKay was the Falcons’ president and CEO at the time, Fontenot became the primary football executive. This time around, Matt Ryan (the president of football) is viewed as the primary football executive.
For now, it’s a hypothetical. As soon as next month, it could become something tangible.
The Vikings will be looking for a new General Manager. If the job, as defined by the Vikings, makes the new G.M. the primary football executive, they could hire Cunningham.
It doesn’t even have to go that far to become a potential mess for the league. The Vikings could, in theory, put in a request to interview Cunningham. And the Falcons, under the league’s Rooney Rule reasoning, wouldn’t be able to say no.
We’ve asked the league for clarification of this point. But it’s hard to imagine that Cunningham wouldn’t be eligible to be interviewed or hired by the Vikings or any other team that would make him the primary football executive.
If Cunningham can’t be hired by another team as its primary football executive, the league would have created a bizarre dead zone for NFL front-office positions. It would make the job Cunningham has big enough to prevent upward mobility elsewhere, but not big enough to trigger the compensatory draft-pick provision.
Eventually, it could become an issue for the league to confront. If the Vikings don’t try to interview him next month, the question will become ripe for consideration the moment a team that is looking for a primary football executive submits a slip to the league office seeking permission from the Falcons to interview their G.M. who, per the league, isn’t really the G.M.
Offseason programs will start getting underway around the NFL next week.
The ten teams that hired new coaches this offseason will be eligible to start working with their players on Monday, April 6. The Ravens are the only team that has set that as their first day of work while the Cardinals, Falcons, Bills, Browns, Raiders, Dolphins, Giants, Steelers and Titans have set Tuesday as their opening day.
All of those teams will also be able to hold a voluntary minicamp later in the spring. Every team is also scheduled to hold a rookie minicamp and a mandatory minicamp over the course of the next few months.
The first two weeks of work for all teams is limited to meetings, strength and conditioning, and physical rehabilitation only. The three-week second phase allows for on-field work, but no full-speed team drills while the third OTA phase allows for team drills, but there is no live contact allowed at any point in the offseason.
Most of the 22 teams with returning coaches will be opening their offseason programs on April 20 or 21. The Broncos have set May 4 as their first day.
The Vikings currently have four quarterbacks on the roster. There is no starter, for now.
Coach Kevin O’Connell explained during a recent visit with PFT Live that, eventually, there will be a clear delineation of positions on the depth chart.
The real question is when. He didn’t rule out the possibility of determining the starter entering training camp. That seems unlikely, however. The competition will likely commence during preseason practices and games.
The goal, as O’Connell explained it, is to have one guy lead the way throughout the season. That’s what happened in 2022, when Kirk Cousins started all 17 games, and in 2024, when Sam Darnold started all 17 games. The Vikings went 27-7 in those two seasons.
It will come down, undoubtedly, to Kyler Murray or J.J. McCarthy. O’Connell explained that he has no concern about McCarthy becoming disenchanted if he doesn’t win the job.
The best news for the Vikings is that, however it plays out, they’ll have a solid No. 2 and (if Carson Wentz makes the final 53) a third-stringer who can win games if need be. Last year, Wentz showed up less than two weeks before Week 1, and he played better than anyone could have expected. This year, he’ll be involved throughout the offseason program and training camp.
In 2025, the Vikings came within a whisker of the playoffs, despite having three different quarterbacks start games. This year, with the Vikings learning down the stretch that there are ways to win that don’t rely on a high-octane passing game, they could find a way to do better than expected.
But that’s how it’s been going for the Vikings in recent years. When the bar is low, they do well. When the bar is high, they sputter.
This year, the bar is low again. Which is exactly where they need it to be.
