Kevin O’Connell can’t say with any level of certainty what would’ve happened had the meniscus in J.J. McCarthy’s right knee held up. But he does know what he was looking at just before McCarthy sustained the injury, as his then-rookie quarterback ascended on the practice field, before translating his steps there into the Minnesota Vikings’ preseason opener against the Las Vegas Raiders.
McCarthy had done enough, at that point, to at least provoke discussion in the Minnesota building.
McCarthy was, first and foremost, demonstrating the talent that O’Connell and GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah gambled on when they traded up a spot to take him with the 10th pick in the 2024 NFL draft. He improved steadily, took coaching points from the spring and continuously applied them, hit goals the coaches set for him for the break between OTAs and camp, and gobbled up whatever else they put on his plate.
“It started showing up more and more,” O’Connell told me Thursday. “And that’s always a real positive from my perspective, when you can really start stacking coaching points on to things that he’s showing improvement on or ownership of. His overall understanding of our offense, the comfort level, even in the reps, whether it was versus the No. 1 defense or in competitive situations in practice, you were starting to see him play faster but under control while still maintaining the principles that we’re coaching.”
Then, it all came crashing down.
McCarthy hadn’t been through an injury like this one before, and it wasn’t easy on him. He lost a lot of weight, and he had to have a second clean-up procedure after the first meniscus repair. He missed five months of on-field development time. The Vikings tried to make up for it where they could—he even started traveling with the team again in late October (the loss to the Los Angeles Rams on a Thursday night was his first NFL road trip)—but there’s only so much Minnesota could do.
That brings us to where he and the Vikings are now.
This isn’t a team in a reset that can afford to sacrifice games in the name of quarterback rearing. Minnesota won 14 games last year, with a strong core of veterans that have every right to feel like they’re close. That’s why, in the end, the Vikings made bids to keep Sam Darnold first, and then Daniel Jones, to insure the position as best they could. It’s also why they had to consider the idea of Aaron Rodgers.
It’s also why the decision now to lock in with McCarthy is significant. The Vikings’ whole approach this offseason was to not leave their fate to chance. Now it’s up to the 22-year-old to show that by going with him (and, for now, him alone), Minnesota really didn’t.
We’re back for another predraft MMQB, and that gives us plenty to get to in the takeaways. Over there, you’ll find …
• My take on the Cleveland Browns and New York Giants moving away from taking QBs at Nos. 2 and 3.
• Details on where things stand (and could go) with Kirk Cousins.
• Some info on the very curious case of Derek Carr’s shoulder injury.
But we’re starting with a story that, to me, is as fascinating as any in the NFL right now—and that’s where the Vikings are at quarterback.
It’s McCarthy’s show, and he’s going to get runway to affirm that over the next two months.
There’s a lot on the line for everyone involved.
We can start with where the Vikings were at this point last year. Over the first couple years of the current regime’s time in the Twin Cities, there was a pretty consistent churn on the roster to clean out the cap and get younger across the board.
It just hadn’t hit the most important positions until last March and April.
Minnesota let Kirk Cousins walk, signed Darnold, and did all the work on a bumper crop of quarterbacks in the draft, while replacing star pass rusher Danielle Hunter with Jonathan Greenard and Andrew Van Ginkel. Then, in the draft, they added rookies to those positions, moving up for both McCarthy and Dallas Turner. And into August, the plan at quarterback was working to script. Darnold was playing well, and McCarthy was pushing him.
The first big jump came when McCarthy returned for camp, with the aforementioned homework the staff gave him in mid-June done. Much of it was mundane footwork tweaking relating to the NFL dropback game, which is where the ex-Michigan star’s steepest learning curve laid coming from the Big Ten.
“He was already pretty accustomed to the play-action game, the keeper game,” O’Connell says. “He was already on the details of the play-action game—from the fake, to the setup at the top of the drop, and his ability to drive the football. He had already demonstrated that. So there really wasn’t a lot of transition there. It was more so the drop-back pass game. Whether you’re talking quick game, three-step, five-step, whatever it is. And just at the top of his drops making sure he had his base balance and body position set to throws.
“And then how could he read with his feet and progress fundamentally and with the speed of the play. And trying to learn how to tie all those things together and start playing fast, but playing calm and decisively.”
It showed up in practice right away at the end of July, even as the coaches ramped up the degree of difficulty. “The biggest thing is,” O’Connell says, “you’re doing it in [a] drill setting, then doing it when you’re throwing to the receivers without a defense, and then, Can you transition all of that to 11 on 11? Full-speed reps with a pass rush in front of you and coverage is changing and, things are happening fast, Can you still apply those things?”
Three throws from that first preseason game showed that McCarthy could.
• The first was on a first-and-15, first play of the second quarter, the rookie’s fourth play of the game. McCarthy took a shotgun snap, came off his first read, calmly climbed the pocket and found Jalen Nailor over the middle for an 18-yard gain.
“He’s really working the front side of a combination,” O’Connell says. “We’re getting back to the backside, a little pocket movement, and throwing a really accurate ball, maintaining his base through the totality of the play. And really getting back to No. 3 [in the progression], quickly, decisively, in a way that we’d worked on with him in every aspect of practice, individual, group and then team drills. So to see him do that early on in his snaps …”
• The second was on a second-and-6 at the Vegas 28 on the Vikings next series. McCarthy carried out a play-action fake from under center, and set up after taking a deep drop. Vegas linebacker Amari Burney came free on a delayed blitz. McCarthy stood in, square-jawed, and dropped the ball in to receiver Trishton Jackson, who was running an over route, outside the numbers to the quarterback’s left.
“We have a protection breakdown, kind of a missed assignment in front of him,” O’Connell says. “But it’s the look we’re looking for on the play. And he stands in there, and doesn’t flinch at all, and just throws an absolute strike as he’s getting hit by the linebacker. To get drilled, and stand in there and make a pretty big time play-action throw was impressive.”
• The third was another play-action throw, this one to Jackson again. McCarthy carried out his fake from under center, and dropped a touch throw into a hole between three defenders—corner Decamerion Richardson, safety Jaydon Grant and linebacker Luke Masterson—in zone coverage.
“And that was something that we had been working with him on,” O’Connell says. “On high-to-low, low-to-high reads, being able to layer the ball up and over defenders. And he makes a beautiful throw to Jackson right there, right on the boundary.”
Put together, the three throws each represented something different, and encapsulated how McCarthy kept checking boxes.
“It was all examples of things he had done well from the beginning.” O’Connell says. “The play pass, but now he was doing it with a free runner basically right in his face, making a big-time throw, taking a hit. The dropback game, showing the ability to set his feet and eyes to where we want for No. 1, No. 2, and then to reset, act in rhythm, and be accurate with the football in between the numbers. And then, the last one was the ability to layer the football in zone coverage, trying to high/low defenders.”
At that point, as they lined Darnold and McCarthy up against each other, in O’Connell’s words, “the difference was just Sam’s experience.” It gave the Vikings a real track record to build off, as O’Connell, OC Wes Phillips and quarterbacks coaches Josh McCown and Grant Udinski dove into what their offense would look like in 2024. With McCarthy, they’d simply be projecting more in what they were trying to accomplish on a play-to-play basis.
“We’ve kind of built things to be quarterback friendly,” O’Connell says, “but yet the quarterback has to have ownership of those things.”
Still, McCarthy was coming along fast enough in handling calls and motions and shifts and the cadence for the staff to at least create discussion on what that might look like for him.
And then everything changed. The Raider game was on a Saturday. McCarthy thought he had tweaked his knee a little in-game, but finished out his allotted playing time. He complained of knee soreness the following Monday, two days later. He got checked out, and it was determined he had a meniscus injury. During surgery that Wednesday, it was determined that he needed a repair, rather than a meniscus trim, which put him out for the season.
What followed wasn’t easy for him. The progress he made was halted. Early on, he had to focus on rehab, rather than football. He needed the second surgery, which was more of a clean-up procedure, but another surgery nonetheless. He dropped weight. He worked through all the challenges, both physical and psychological.
The good news is that having to handle all of that adversity certainly wasn’t without benefit.
“He was in meetings, he was taking great notes—I was meeting with him personally once a week, and he had great questions,” O’Connell says. “We were trying to steal whatever time we could, not only myself and him, but our other coaches as well. But the best part about it, he was in the building, he was around his teammates. He had a front-row seat to see the journey Sam went on. There was some value in that, albeit with the frustration of, Man, I wish I could be out there doing it physically every day.
“And that’s where for a young player, that can be hard sometimes, especially when you’ve had so much success. You really haven’t had to deal with things like this.”
And once the season was over—the Vikings were upended by the Rams in the wild-card round—McCarthy knew the stakes. Per O’Connell, on his own, McCarthy’s been in the building almost every day since the season ended. His weight is close to where it was on the day Minnesota worked him out privately in Ann Arbor last spring. He’s moving well. He’s been throwing a few days a week. If things were knocked off course a bit in the fall, McCarthy’s done what he’s needed to through the offseason to get them back on track.
But for the Vikings, there was too much at stake not to consider everything at the position.
They wanted to respect the year Darnold had and discussed a run-it-back scenario with the 28-year-old. Darnold found another team, in Seattle, willing to give him the chance to be a multi-year answer, so the Vikings made a strong offer to Jones, who joined the team in November. They pitched him on competing with tools around him to revive his career, but Jones preferred a fresh start without the Darnold comp hanging over him, and perhaps a better shot to start with the Indianapolis Colts.
Which is where Rodgers entered the equation. When the four-time MVP reached out to the Vikings, with the idea of making a one-year run at a Lombardi and tying it to being a willing mentor for McCarthy, the team felt it had to listen. The proposition, of course, was different than the other two—they’d be jamming the pause button on the idea of playing McCarthy, rather than generating competition and multiple quarterback options.
In the end, faced with all that, the Vikings found themselves emboldened to give McCarthy the runway to seize the job, the staff the opportunity to build the offense for him, and see how that looked at the end of the spring.
So the Vikings passed on Rodgers, pushing their chips in on a 22-year-old.
Now a week out from the official start of the offseason program, O’Connell couldn’t be more excited about what this looks like, with the opportunity the Vikings are affording McCarthy.
His team. His show. Let’s go.
“It’s pairing the individual work he’s doing with the teaching/learning phase of our whole team during that time of year,” O’Connell says. “And then seeing what projection we’re feeling, what kind of offense we can be while still being cognizant and aware of where he’s at in his [developmental] timeline. And then we go from there.”
They, of course, don’t know, and won’t know, until they get out on the practice field in May, how everything McCarthy’s gone through will affect the on-field part of it.
Robbed of having a cleaner view of all that by the quarterback’s injury, they still do have to do some of the projecting they would have had to do back in August, had McCarthy stayed in the lineup and kept pushing Darnold. That said, the coach is at least encouraged with what he’s observed over the past couple months.
“We won’t know until we get out on the grass with him,” O’Connell says. “But my expectation is he’s going to have a great spring and we’re going to feel really good about him going into training camp.”
Given the team the Vikings have, there’s a lot riding on things playing out that way.
If it doesn’t, well, the Vikings will address that later on. For now, though, they see all the pieces, in McCarthy himself and what’s around him. And we’ll know soon enough whether they come together as planned.
“I’m excited to see him get that opportunity to pick up where he left off and be accelerated, just because of the mental growth that he’s been able to have within our offense, and the verbiage and how we talk about plays,” O’Connell says. “So it’s just a matter of continuing to progress, knowing we feel good about the football team we’ve put together. We’ve got the goal of surrounding the quarterback with the best possible team we can, both offensively and defensively. We feel really good about what that looks like.
“Now we got to go to work, and we got to do our jobs as coaches.”
Most of all, they need to win the bet they’ve made on McCarthy. The rest of the guys on the team need that, too. And if you listen to O’Connell, you’ll understand why he was willing to gamble, by setting limits and drawing lines on other quarterbacks, that this one will pay off in a very big way.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Why the Vikings Are Betting Big on J.J. McCarthy.
