Three years of painstaking roster-building by the Minnesota Vikings needed less than 24 hours to be blown apart. Go back to last week and Minnesota’s newly christened starting QB, J.J. McCarthy, appeared ready to fulfill his destiny as this franchise’s long-awaited savior after engineering a 21-point fourth-quarter explosion in a comeback win at Soldier Field. A few days later, his fiancée gave birth to their first child, a boy. A few days after that, he made his formal debut at the Vikings home stadium on Sunday Night Football against the Falcons. The crowd was poised to detonate. Some Vikings fans had been waiting decades for this moment. Here’s what they got instead:
You could argue that pick represented one of McCarthy’s better throws on Sunday night. In a game where touchdowns were excruciatingly scarce, McCarthy and the Vikings’ offense failed to produce a single one of them. He looked uncertain of himself while making calls at the line of scrimmage, he mishandled the snap on multiple occasions, and he appeared incapable of manufacturing even a single first down. He was awful; no sense in talking yourself into any other conclusion.
Because the data is even uglier than the tape. McCarthy was sacked six times and turned the ball over three times. He held onto the ball for well over three seconds per dropback: a death sentence in the NFL, especially if two of your best O-linemen are already out of the game. He all but ignored the left side of the field all game long, and overshot a wide-open Jalen Nailor streaking past Atlanta’s secondary when he finally acknowledged that area’s existence. In every regard, McCarthy was wholly unprepared to conduct an NFL offense. Both his team and his body suffered for it:
Monday’s news that McCarthy had a sprained ankle which would sideline him for 2-4 weeks came as a surprise to fans who might have missed seeing McCarthy get that ankle taped up in the second half, after he’d been brought down by a revitalized Falcons pass rush for the 800th time. But the QB really does appear to be hurt, which means that living nightmare Carson Wentz really will serve as the Vikings’ starter for the next few weeks … and perhaps beyond, if Wentz can make this offense look anywhere near respectable.
This, obviously, was not Minnesota’s plan. After drafting McCarthy in 2024, the QB appeared on the verge of challenging then-QB1 Sam Darnold for the starting job before a torn meniscus put him down for the entirety of his rookie season. Minnesota head coach Kevin O’Connell used that rehab time to relentlessly tutor his new protégé in the team’s offense. McCarthy proved to be such a capable student in that timeframe that O’Connell eschewed all other potential QB1 candidates for 2025—including Darnold and Aaron Rodgers—and elected to put the former Michigan Wolverine at the helm of a roster that was built to win right now.
This was the plan: When O’Connell and GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah arrived in Minnesota three years ago, they shared a vision of building a championship roster around a talented young passer still on his rookie contract. After shedding cap weight, sifting through multiple draft classes, and rehabbing a few veteran QBs along the way, they finally settled on McCarthy as their centerpiece. McCarthy’s rookie deal allowed Adofo-Mensah to spend lavishly on players to surround him, and a relatively soft 2025 opening schedule would be all the new kid required to get the hang of things. Once the real meat of the schedule began in October (featuring consecutive games against the Eagles, Chargers, Lions, and Ravens), the QB who has won all of his life would be rolling. You could argue that no young QB had ever been put into a more favorable position to succeed.
McCarthy, thus far, has failed. And he’s now in dry dock indefinitely. Vikings fans, already a fragile lot, are left to wonder if the highest-drafted QB in franchise history is already a lost cause. That’s an awfully premature conclusion to reach given McCarthy’s age (22), his paltry résumé, and the pending return of both vital LT Christian Darrisaw and star WR Jordan Addison a few weeks from now. It’s a long season. You can be a completely different team in December than you were in September. This is sports, after all; you never know what’ll happen.
But when you’ve waited as long as Minnesota fans have for a title—in any men’s pro sport, let alone football—you’re not just afraid of the unknown, you’re exhausted by it. Maybe McCarthy is just stumbling awkwardly out of the gate, as virtually every young QB does. Maybe the Vikings already know he’s a bust and used that ankle sprain to soft-bench him. Maybe O’Connell was too much of a helicopter parent to his young charge; the best quarterbacks are ones who don’t require a QB whisperer in their headset. Or maybe a witch placed a hex upon this organization at its inception and nothing they do will ever matter. Maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe. Kevin O’Connell was hired, and J.J. McCarthy was drafted, to get rid of those maybes. For a single quarter last week, it looked like they’d succeeded. It looked as if the Minnesota Vikings finally had their answer. Now they’re left with nothing but questions, each one more draining than the last.
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