J.J. McCarthy’s brutal preseason performances could force the Vikings hand in doing something nobody would have expected
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that J.J. McCarthy isn’t going to work with the Minnesota Vikings.
The Minnesota Vikings selected quarterback J.J. McCarthy 10th overall with the idea of maximizing the winning window for a core built around Christian Darrisaw, Justin Jefferson, and an emerging Jordan Addison. What started with legitimate hype after McCarthy’s first preseason game has devolved into something far more concerning. The last two preseason performances were night and day from that opener in 2024 against the Las Vegas Raiders, and the trajectory over McCarthy’s tenure in Minnesota points toward a conclusion nobody wanted to reach.
Right now, McCarthy is unplayable in the National Football League, and quite frankly, there’s a real argument that he shouldn’t be kept on the 53-man roster.
The evaluation was always incomplete
My opinion isn’t about wanting to be proven right on a pre-draft evaluation that was relatively complimentary of McCarthy, but also flagged significant questions. The evaluation itself was very incomplete. A lot of the things that trended positively came in small samples. His success in high-leverage situations, his ability to execute game-winning drives, and operating an offense with a heavy pass ratio were limited. His total of 713 pass attempts over three years was a relatively small sample size compared to the rest of his draft class.
Caleb Williams had 2.5 years as a starter, Drake Maye had two years, Jayden Daniels had five, and Bo Nix had five as well. Daniels and Nix found early NFL success because they had a ton of reps, while Maye and Williams possessed outlandish abilities, with Maye finishing with MVP votes in his second season, carrying an offense the way he did in college at North Carolina.
McCarthy played on a national championship team in a very run-heavy offense. The debate at the time centered on whether that was McCarthy’s limitation or Jim Harbaugh’s scheme preference, the same approach Harbaugh ran at Stanford with a generational talent in Andrew Luck. McCarthy had a loose arm, good athleticism, and did a lot of nice things. The theory was sound: sit him for a year, let him learn, then go full bore in 2025 with a great offensive structure around him.
You can’t say he came into a poor situation
If you want to argue the Vikings didn’t do X, Y, or Z for McCarthy, that’s fair. The one thing you cannot say is that he came into a poor situation. He had a universally praised coaching staff, excellent weapons, an offensive line better than the fanbase will ever give credit for, and an offensive system built to utilize what he was best at: throwing anticipatory balls over the middle of the field, hitting dig routes and crossers.
The fact that he can’t do that now with any kind of success is very worrisome, because he was deemed by the majority of analysts as a perfect fit for this offense. Go back and look at draft analysts talking about McCarthy to Minnesota. The only way he found success was by stripping down the playbook at the end of the year. Those two things counteract each other.
The adversity problem
McCarthy tore his meniscus against the Las Vegas Raiders in the preseason, wiping out his entire rookie year. The Vikings did what they could. They kept him in the classroom, got him a VR headset, and even put a GoPro on Sam Darnold’s helmet so McCarthy could see the reads and understand how the offense operated. Darnold did an excellent job running it, so the idea had a lot of merit.
None of that seemed to work. McCarthy had three terrible quarters against the Chicago Bears, then a great quarter that won him NFC Offensive Player of the Week in his first start. That set some unrealistic expectations, because the next week he was bad, and he suffered a high ankle sprain. That caused him to miss five games. He came back, had an okay game against the Detroit Lions, a couple of poor performances that ended in losses, and an outright disaster against the Green Bay Packers that ended with a concussion and another missed game. Even after the playbook reset, it was a very mixed bag. His most successful outings came against the two worst defenses in the NFL per EPA per play.
The reports paint a troubling picture. The Athletic’s Alec Lewis wrote in May about how McCarthy’s process was viewed as inconsistent, and nailing that down could be a significant factor in a quarterback competition. Then came a report from Matt Zenitz of CBS Sports last Saturday, August 15th, where one source deemed McCarthy “unpredictable.”
“A franchise quarterback is supposed to be the stability piece of a franchise, like you know what you’re getting every day,” a source said. “But with J.J., you weren’t sure which version you were going to get. I think he’s just still so young and may not have understood yet what that position fully entails and things like the consistency and day-to-day commitment.”
“Then there’s the consistency piece: how McCarthy shows up to work every day and how his habits progress in his third season. The Vikings have a high standard at the position. They want the starting quarterback to lift the tide for the entire team in 2026. This requires a level of discipline, which was up and down last season for McCarthy.”
Those reports line up. You’re questioning the consistency of the process, and you don’t know which version of the quarterback you’re getting on a daily basis. Consistency is such an important part of the position.
It raises the question about him dealing with adversity. He played for IMG Academy, essentially a high school superteam as a senior, then followed it up with just one loss as a starter at Michigan before coming to Minnesota. Is it possible that McCarthy wasn’t set up for success to handle a difficult and turbulent stretch like he’s dealt with the last two years? There is no way of us knowing that answer, but going from reports of how he had a great mental makeup going into the NFL Draft process to what we have now, questions are fair to ask.
Vikings and McCarthy are heading for a divorce
Can you blame the coaching staff partially? Of course. How can they hold zero blame? But coaching can only do so much. You can only extract so much blood from a stone. Kevin O’Connell once said on the Rich Eisen Show in late September 2024 that organizations fail young quarterbacks, but young quarterbacks also fail organizations. Sometimes guys need to go somewhere else, find their own path, learn from their mistakes, and grow. That’s where McCarthy is right now.
McCarthy didn’t make the latest 53-man roster projection, and there’s a strong case he won’t be on this team when the season starts. Ten starts may seem too few, but the Vikings have had this guy in the building for two years and seemingly couldn’t wait to add Kyler Murray as the starter.
Nobody wants McCarthy to fail. But the reality is simple: he hasn’t beel close to good enough in Minnesota. A lot of people share blame, but it’s time to cut losses and move on. If you still believe McCarthy can be good somewhere, don’t lose that hope. But it’s time to look at reality. J.J. McCarthy will not be a successful quarterback with the Minnesota Vikings. If he proves otherwise, he deserves all the credit in the world. It would also be unprecedented in NFL history.
