4 Veterans the Minnesota Vikings Must Part with Before 2015 Season

Now that the initial frenzy of free agency has finished, the Minnesota Vikings have a long way to go to complete their roster moves and improve the team going into 2015, and making difficult decisions with team veterans is a big part of that.

Replacing them will be difficult, but that's why the NFL has a draft and free-agency period. The Vikings will be put in a bind, but they need to find ways to grab players who will allow them to part ways with some of the franchise's former cornerstone players.

There are five team veterans the Vikings will need to find ways to let go of, whether by trade or waiver.

Adrian Peterson

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The argument for trading Adrian Peterson has less to do with the likelihood that he's no longer good or that the running game isn't important; neither is true. Instead, Adrian Peterson's departure should happen for other reasons.

Adrian Peterson wants out of Minnesota, per Peter King of The MMQB at SI.com. Keeping a player in the locker room who does not want to be there is not a recipe for success. Making sure that the players are cohesive and focused is a priority for any coach, and even justifiable resentment can drag a team down.

Even a well-meaning return by Peterson would be marked by questions and murmurs among players, and Peterson himself would have a difficult time concealing the fact that those around him, including his wife and agent, don't want him in Minnesota, per ESPN.com's Ben Goessling.

Aside from that, Peterson is grossly overvalued by the Vikings even without considering these distractions. His contract is too high, and that's after accounting for the fact that he's the best in the NFL at his position.

The possible return in trade compensation would help Minnesota as well. The possible returns on a trade are difficult to gauge, but getting more than a second-round pick would not only allow the Vikings to trade into the bottom of the first round without losing much but also find a suitable replacement for Peterson to pair with Jerick McKinnon—a player with loads of potential.

New cap space, new assets and a more cohesive locker room point to moving Peterson instead of keeping him.

Chad Greenway

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Chad Greenway has been a fixture on the team since 2007, when he returned from ACL surgery to grab the starting “Sam” linebacker job and played as one of the best linebackers in the NFL for quite a few years following. At this point, the Vikings would be doing themselves a favor by losing him instead of keeping him.

The most important determination to make in any discussion involving a player’s worth—on-field performance and talent—is not friendly to Greenway. His on-field performance—not just this past year but the past couple of years—has been subpar at best and abysmal at worst.

Aside from being a league leader in missed tackles on a consistent basis (whether you ask Pro Football Focus or Football Outsiders), he’s been slow to react to plays as they develop and can’t shed blocks to get to the running back.

In coverage, he’s been stiff and slow, and he has even missed his assignments entirely, giving enormous space to defenders attacking the seam. There’s a reason Pro Football Focus had him as the worst outside linebacker for most of 2013, where he played every snap. In 2014, he missed a number of games due to injury but would have ranked near the bottom on a per-snap basis.

Greenway may rack up crowd-pleasing traditional statistics, but he’s been a liability to the team for years, and those traditional statistics do a poor job of accounting for it.

On top of that, he will consume $8.8 million of cap space and only carries a $1.7 million cap charge in dead money if he’s cut, per Over The Cap. With that cap space concern are injury issues that have followed him the past couple of years, with offseason surgeries providing worries that manifested in missed games this last year.

It’s true that his veteran presence will be missed on an otherwise young linebacker corps, but that’s not enough for a player who has played as poorly as he has.

A deserved fan favorite who has been ignored for the recognition he deserves for his play for years, Greenway’s time is nearly up.

Cullen Loeffler

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Re-signing Cullen Loeffler wasn't a bad move; the Vikings need to make sure they enter the season with a long snapper. The issue is if the Vikings do not provide reasonable competition for the spot come training camp.

Loeffler's past season was the worst yet, but the past few seasons have created some issues that have led to underperformance from both the punting and kicking units. Long snappers need to be consistent, powerful and accurate, and there were times throughout the season that Loeffler missed all of those qualities, with the blocked punt against Miami to seal the loss for the Vikings the representative example.

One option for the Vikings could be to sign Morgan Cox, former long snapper for the Ravens, and see if he can provide competition for Loeffler. Cox wasn't cut; he's a free agent, and the Ravens replaced him earlier in the year because of injury rather than performance.

There also happens to be some agreement among draft analysts and long-snapping enthusiasts that the top long snappers coming out are Andrew East of Vanderbilt, Matt Dooley of Indiana and Jesse Schmidt of Purdue. Joe Cardona of the Naval Academy has also drawn some hype and was an early invite to the Senior Bowl. Any one of them could earn a training camp invite and battle it out against Loeffler.

Poor performances from the position may not seem important, but they kill punting mechanics and reduce kicking accuracy. It's worth looking into after Blair Walsh put together his least accurate season yet.

Jeff Locke

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It's perhaps a credit to the rest of the team that two members of the list are special teams players with a relatively marginal impact on the game. Locke's performance has improved in his time with the Vikings, but it's not enough; he's still the worst punter in the NFL.

When looking at the combined effects of reducing touchbacks, pinning defenders deep, maximizing hang time, punting accurately into the corners and keeping in rhythm with the rest of the unit, Locke has had some serious issues.

Loeffler's struggles have magnified the issues with Locke, but that doesn't mean Locke doesn't have issues of his own. Some of his punts have come up bafflingly short, and though yards per punt is often a misleading stat, it's not good to be in the bottom half of the league when the field position given to Locke generally dictates longer punts.

Per Pro Football Focus, Locke has had over 50 percent of his punts returned, and a quick look through the games will tell you it's usually because of accuracy or hang-time concerns and rarely the result of an otherwise stellar set of special teams units.

He's technically improved in other statistics, such as the ratio of kicks downed inside the 20 to touchbacks, but he's still in the bottom five in the league, without providing other assets to make up for it. The Vikings should be looking at how to replace their punter as well as their long snapper.

On Notice: Brian Robison, Matt Kalil, Greg Jennings

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Though the Vikings shouldn't get rid of these players quite yet, all three of them deserve special scrutiny this offseason.

Brian Robison has often been one of the best in the league at pressuring the quarterback, though he hasn't had the ability to finish and turn pressures into sacks. For the most part, that's not an issue. Disruption is production, and hurrying a quarterback massively increases turnover and incompletion rates. This year, Robison didn't quite do that or live entirely up to his billing as a talented run-stopper, having been run on and stonewalled for many games.

Robison has had a number of successful years with the Vikings, and his raw athleticism means he has further to fall than most players his age, but that doesn't mean he's in the clear. His past success should buy him time to compete for a starting job or a heavy rotational role this year, but unless he produces, the Vikings should find ways to move on, either internally or through the draft.

Left tackle Matt Kalil has had a bad stretch. That stretch has lasted two consecutive years, but there's no denying that Kalil has shown talent and high-level ability as a tackle in the NFL. As a Pro Bowl alternate his rookie year, Kalil was a solid pass-blocker, functional run-blocker and phenomenal screen-blocker.

As time has gone on, Kalil has seemingly gotten worse. He plays stiffer, with more passivity and without the movement that characterized his early career. Kalil told Tom Pelissero of 1500 ESPN that he battled pneumonia in 2012, but that doesn't explain his struggles before he contracted the illness and after he was healed.

He also had a lingering knee injury and offseason surgery before this last year, and that might provide some explanation but again doesn't provide clues as to why his early 2012 was disappointing. Still, there's some credence to this as Kalil improved later in the season (though probably not enough).

There's talent to be had, and the Vikings want to exploit it. If Kalil can fix what's going on, it's one less hole to fix for the Vikings and a reliable cornerstone for years to come.

For the past two years, Greg Jennings hasn't really been bad at what he does. His limited production is an issue—he wasn't paid $11 million to advance the ball only 700 yards, after all. But production is only part of the equation. The team's leading receiver the last two years, it's not as if Jennings hasn't grabbed the market share of available passing yards. It's simply that there weren't many passing yards to go around in offenses quarterbacked by Matt Cassel, Christian Ponder, Josh Freeman and Teddy Bridgewater—who only turned it on late in the year.

But even though Jennings does a good job of getting open, a good job of catching the ball when targeted and a good job of generating yards after the catch, he may still be at risk. His contract is large, and the return isn't. Unless he and Bridgewater can get on the same page, Jennings will need to go—even if his film shows he has the raw talent to play at a high level.