JJ McCarthy will not start a game in his rookie season. He won’t even make a single appearance.
The reigning College Football Playoff champion and 10th overall pick of the 2024 NFL Draft is out for the year after a torn meniscus suffered in the first preseason game of his career. McCarthy looked solid in that exhibition, throwing for 188 yards and a pair of touchdowns against the Las Vegas Raiders’ assortment of backups and practice squad fodder.
Instead, the highs and lows of his debut season will wait until 2025. In his place steps Sam Darnold, on his fourth team in the last five seasons and with a 10-20 record as a starter in this stretch.
On the other side of the ball is a defense that united over a “[expletive] it” philosophy when it came to extra help in the secondary and opted to blitz the hell out of everyone until they were exhausted. That unit too will be dealing with attrition, as 2023’s top two pass rushers — Danielle Hunter and D.J. Wonnum, who had 24.5 sacks between them — each departed in free agency.
Thus, 2024 is set to be a trying year for head coach Kevin O’Connell’s Minnesota Vikings. And that’s OK.
The Vikings post-Kirk Cousins reset meant 2024 was always going to be a gap year
Minnesota found its ceiling with Cousins behind center. With a perfectly fine, occasionally great veteran quarterback at the helm, the Vikings could make it to the playoffs and even win games there. But so could Daniel Jones’ New York Giants (who escorted Cousins from the playoffs after the 2022 season), so who cares?
This left general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah with a hard truth to face. His team was expensive and stuck in contention limbo. Do that long enough and you turn into the late stage New Orleans Saints. The Vikings were good enough to fight for a playoff spot without truly threatening Super Bowl hopefuls. That, plus a stuffed salary cap, left little room for meaningful improvement, particularly at quarterback.
Rather than read too much into 2022’s 13-win season — a season in which the Vikings had a stunning -18 point differential) or trudge back into the void after an injury marred, seven-win 2023, Adofo-Mensah hit reset. 2024 was the year Cousins and Hunter slid off the roster, leaving more than $43 million in dead salary cap commitments this fall, per Over the Cap. Justin Jefferson would get the record-setting contract extension he deserved, and the space needed to pay for that while being able to afford impact free agents in 2025 and beyond would come from a rookie contract quarterback.
That led Minnesota to McCarthy, who may lack top end quarterback tools (average size, arm strength) but provides winning intangibles in spades. Instead of seeing what he could do against NFL defenses, the Vikings will have to instead wait. In his place comes Darnold, who is sorta the anti-McCarthy since he’s bigger, stronger, still provides a plus arm and, notably, hasn’t won much.
Since showing the 2020 New York Jets he wouldn’t be the team’s oft-sought franchise quarterback, the former third overall pick has been, to put it kindly, going through it. 2020 and 2021 were the nadir of his career so far, a stretch in which he started 23 games and won six. He failed to complete more than 60 percent of his passes in each year and finished the stretch with an 18:24 touchdown:interception ratio.
This led to a quarterback competition with fellow Carolina Panther Baker Mayfield in 2022, which Darnold lost. Mayfield went on to be the league’s worst starting quarterback that fall, but Darnold was only able to take the reins in Week 12 thanks to an ankle injury that sidelined him early. From there, things took a surprising turn. The discarded QB slashed his interception rate and was sorta… good?
That’s a small sample size, but it was the best football of Darnold’s career. His interception rate dropped and his scrambling efficiency rose to a career-high 9.0 yards per escape, per Pro Football Reference. That led him to the San Francisco 49ers to back up Brock Purdy, a stint that allowed him one Week 18 start alongside the rest of the team’s backups and little useful data regarding whether or not his 2022 is replicable.
That’s the proposition on which the Vikings staked a one-year, $10 million bet. Darnold was always going to be a bridge to a rookie quarterback, but he was also supposed to be the guy who could carry the team early in the season while said rookie got his feet underneath him. Turns out, that’ll cover the entire 2024 season.
There are benefits and drawbacks to this. Darnold gets the most talented wideout he’s ever worked with (on a season-long basis) via Justin Jefferson and a talented WR2 in Jordan Addison. TJ Hockenson will be back from the ACL and MCL tears he suffered last December as well, though he may need some ramp-up time before he’s a devastating tight end weapon again. He’ll also have the foundation of one of the league’s best pass protecting offensive lines ahead of him:
Another way to look at pass protection (finally found this code from last year):
Here is the average pass block grade among offensive linemen in "true pass sets" (excludes plays with less than 4 rushers, play action, screens, short dropbacks and time-to-throws under 2 seconds) pic.twitter.com/E9laeKYoth
— Computer Cowboy (@benbbaldwin) October 24, 2023
The run game he’ll lean on was below average last fall and will rely on a 29-year-old Aaron Jones and third-year back Ty Chandler. Jones finished his final season as a Green Bay Packer with 100-plus rushing yards in each of his last five games, but was also limited by injury and has nearly 1,300 NFL carries under his belt. Chandler averaged 4.5 yards per carry, but his 1.8 yards after contact weren’t great and the league’s Next Gen Stats tabs him at -0.14 rushing yards over expected (RYOE) per carry for 2023. It’s no sure thing this group can rise up to carry Darnold should his passing struggle.
And Darnold may be tasked with winning shootouts, because…
The Vikings defense is in the midst of an overhaul
The pass rush trusted to sew chaos and make everyone else’s lives easier (by virtue of a 51.5 percent blitz rate) will look very different under coordinator Brian Flores this fall. Losing Hunter and Wonnum hurt, but replacements are in line who could replicate 2023’s pressure without having to send as many attackers to the pocket.
This began with veteran signees Jonathan Greenard and Andrew Van Ginkel. Neither are name brand stars, but each is effective. Greenard will have to prove his 12.5-sack breakthrough in 2023 is sustainable. Van Ginkel may not wow you with counting stats, but he’s had at least 19 quarterback hits in two of the last three seasons.
More importantly, Van Ginkel can start or come off the bench. This is vital thanks to the arrival of first round draft pick Dallas Turner — the team’s only defensive draftee before round seven. Turner is a twitchy athlete who should be able to provide speed along the edge, even if there’s room for him to flesh out his pass rushing attack.
Any pocket-shrinking help those three can provide will be a boon to a thin secondary. Byron Murphy was the best full-time starter among the team’s cornerbacks and still gave up a 97.8 passer rating in coverage. 2022 fourth round pick Akayleb Evans gave up a 120.4 rating when targeted and may lose his job to new arrival Shaquill Griffin. Griffin was released by the Houston Texans last season and, in 2021-2022 allowed a passer rating of 109.9 in coverage.
Harrison Smith is back, but the longtime Vikings safety is 35 years old. Camryn Bynum held down the starting spot next to him and failed to thrive. Granted, these struggles can at least partially be attributed to the lack of help defenders in a blitz-heavy defense, but there’s a reason Minnesota’s passing defense failed to crack the top 20 in passing efficiency or EPA allowed last fall.
There’s plenty of fixes that need to take place among that group, but Minnesota lacked the cap space or the draft capital to do so. That sets the stage for 2025, where the Vikings will likely have a top 10 pick (that can be used on a corner or auctioned to the highest bidder) and, per Over the Cap, an estimated $54.5 million to spend in free agency.
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That means 2024 was going to be a challenge even before McCarthy’s injury — a table-setting season with painful losses and valuable lessons to be learned. Even if you talk yourself into Darnold (look at that 2022!), the defense remains a massive knot for Flores to untangle.
A base has been laid for the Vikings future, and that’s the important part. Win or lose, Minnesota will enter 2025 with a solid foundation, some genuine stars and the cap space to improve at key positions will create the space for a leap up the NFC North standings. And if that comes with a premium first round pick — the kind that can be traded for more picks, since Adofo-Mensah has already shipped off the team’s selections in rounds two through four — that’s even better.
So Vikings fans can relax on a current of low expectations this fall. Maybe Sam Darnold realizes his potential. Maybe this team crashes and burns. either way, 2025 is the year things matter again.
