The Minnesota Vikings may have cost a good roster its chance at the playoffs this year by getting too cute at the quarterback position.
And while that is a debatable assertion, there is no questioning how much second-year quarterback J.J. McCarthy has struggled since making his NFL debut this season. McCarthy is now 2-3 as a starter. He has completed less than 53% of his passes, thrown for six touchdowns against eight interceptions, and has left wide receivers like Justin Jefferson visibly frustrated on the sidelines following missed throws.
McCarthy continues to say all the right things during the postgame press conferences, taking full accountability and saying that he must (and will be) better. And while those sentiments are nice to hear and reflect leadership, they begin to grow stale if he must continue making them every week without his performance on the field changing all that much.
In fairness to McCarthy, the No. 10 overall pick in the 2024 draft, he has only started five games, which isn’t even one-third of a full season. As such, Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell shot down a question from a reporter on Sunday about how badly McCarthy would have to play before the team might consider benching him for undrafted rookie Max Brosmer, the current QB2 on the roster.
"Yeah, I'm not going to get into any of that right now," O'Connell responded.
That’s a reasonable response from O’Connell, and the one that should be expected at this point in a 4-6 season with a developing QB who has missed significant time due to a knee injury in 2024 and an ankle injury this season. But there were still audible cracks in O’Connell’s assessment of McCarthy’s play in comparison to that of the team overall during the same press conference Sunday.
“We knew coming into the game that [the Chicago Bears] had won all of their games by winning the turnover margin, and we lost that 2-0 and did a lot of things as a football team to try and battle and continue to overcome the adversity that we kind of faced in many cases caused by ourselves,” O’Connell said.
“We did a lot of the things that we talked about not doing, and the main thing being the turnovers. Gotta take a look at them, obviously. But I was proud of the way we ran the ball, tried to stick with it as much as we could,” O’Connell continued. “For the most part the guys up front, I felt like we protected. We limited the negatives for the most part, we just felt like we were a play away all day.”
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