A fascinating, highly-anticipated Minnesota Vikings season will kick off in storybook fashion on Monday night at Soldier Field. Not only is it a primetime game to wrap up Week 1 of the 2025 NFL season, but it pits J.J. McCarthy in his debut — about 30 minutes east of his hometown — against first-time head coach Ben Johnson and a division rival looking to take a step forward this year.
As we look towards Vikings-Bears on MNF, here are three big questions to keep in mind.
This is going to be quite the moment for the Vikings’ 22-year-old quarterback. His long-awaited NFL regular season debut, delayed by last season’s meniscus tear, comes on Monday Night Football against the team he grew up cheering for as a kid in the Chicago suburb of La Grange Park, IL. The lights, both literally and metaphorically, are going to be bright.
And yet, there’s plenty of reason to believe that the stage won’t phase McCarthy. He’s won at every level he’s played at, including a national championship with Michigan two years ago. He hasn’t thrown an official pass in the NFL, but he’s had an extra full year to prepare for this moment compared to if he were debuting as a rookie. And he can take comfort in the people he has around him, from Kevin O’Connell on the headset to Justin Jefferson out wide and the offensive line in front of him.
“As we know, it’s gonna be a big moment for him,” O’Connell told KFAN’s Paul Allen this week. “We want to basically surround him with the best guys we can in the huddle. We feel like we’ve done that. We feel like the other side of the ball’s gonna play good football defensively for us, as well as in the kicking game. And then it’s just gonna come down to a lot of really boring things. It’s gonna come down to footwork and his comfort in doing the things that he’s done a lot now on the practice field and throughout this offseason.”
The Vikings don’t need McCarthy to be a hero, they need him to get everyone lined up and run the show. That means making good, on-time decisions and getting the ball into his playmakers’ hands. It means taking care of the football and using his legs when pressure requires it, but not trying to do too much. He’s about to put 16 months of preparation to the test for the first time.
In the four meetings between the Vikings and Lions since Brian Flores was hired as Minnesota’s defensive coordinator two years ago, Detroit scored 30, 30, 31, and 31 points in four victories. The Lions recorded 389, 381, 391, and 394 yards in those games. That’s remarkable consistency. Jared Goff, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Jahmyr Gibbs, and the rest of the Lions’ offense shredded the Vikings’ defense in those meetings. Johnson, of course, was Detroit’s coordinator.
The question is how much of that success was predicated on Johnson out-scheming Flores and how much of it had to do with the execution by the players on a Lions team that went 27-7 overall during those two seasons. Can Johnson have the same success with Caleb Williams and the Bears’ other offensive pieces that he had in Detroit? Will Flores have any schematic adjustments up his sleeve, especially now that he has Jonathan Allen and Javon Hargrave in the middle of his defensive line?
The chess match between these two coaches has been emphatically won by Johnson over the past two years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the trend will continue under new circumstances in 2025.
Both teams are dealing with some injury question marks to key players heading into this game. The big one for the Vikings is left tackle Christian Darrisaw, who is less than 11 months removed from a major knee injury and sounds like a potential game-time decision on Monday. If he can’t play, backup Justin Skule would be out there, which would be a significant blow to the Vikings’ offense. Safety Harrison Smith’s status is also up in the air, which is another one to watch.
For the Bears, the big name to keep an eye on is cornerback Jaylon Johnson. Chicago’s No. 1 corner missed all of training camp with a significant groin injury but is back at practice this week and hoping to play. Whether or not he has a shot will depend on how he feels over the course of the week.
If Johnson can’t play, the Bears would be pretty light at corner, with Kyler Gordon and Tyrique Stevenson as the top two options and the depth chart unclear beyond them. There’s a chance former Vikings practice squad CB Nahshon Wright would step into a meaningful role, which would undoubtedly be an advantage Minnesota would try to exploit.
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