Vikings' big bet on McCarthy looks like a bust

Two years ago the Minnesota Vikings embarked on a bold, unusual plan to build a championship contender.

They had a bunch of pieces already in place: A creative offensive mind in head coach Kevin O'Connell, an all-world receiver in Justin Jefferson, and plenty of quality veterans on both sides of the ball.

They decided to part ways with quarterback Kirk Cousins, which was not the surprising part. Coming off a season-ending Achilles injury at 35, and after six years in which he had won exactly one playoff game, Cousins had reached a natural endpoint in Minnesota.

But instead of finding someone else with NFL experience to pilot O'Connell's offense, the Vikings drafted J.J. McCarthy with the 10th pick in the 2024 draft.

Crazy, or just crazy enough to work?

While the answer to that question seems obvious now, it is worth noting that there was broad approval for the idea when it was first hatched. A good quarterback on a rookie deal remains the most valuable commodity in the NFL, and the Vikings took some of those savings and improved the roster elsewhere.

McCarthy didn't have to be Patrick Mahomes - forever the gold standard of a quarterback on a cheap entry-level contract - but if he could take advantage of Minnesota's many weapons, under the guidance of a great play-caller like O'Connell, the Vikings could flourish. If he could be early-years Tom Brady, the game manager on talented and well-coached Patriots teams, Minnesota would have a tremendous advantage over rivals that gave nine-figure contracts to their quarterbacks.

That plan has since been all but wrecked. It crashed on the shoals of one of the NFL's most persistent challenges: trying to evaluate the quality of rookie quarterbacks.

McCarthy lost the whole of his first season to a knee injury suffered last year in the preseason, so he's not technically a rookie, but this was his debut campaign. And, hoo boy, it was not gone well. The Vikings are 2-4 in his six starts, and those two wins now feel like minor miracles after Minnesota endured three consecutive abject McCarthy performances. As he was falling apart against Green Bay on Sunday, numbers were flying around on social media that all seemed to be some version of, "Out of 867 quarterback performances over the past 20 seasons, this ranks 864th by EPA per play."

Perhaps the simplest indication of the quality of McCarthy's play is that he has been worse, in almost every statistical category, than Carson Wentz, who had five starts while McCarthy was out with an ankle injury. Carson Wentz!

O'Connell, after the loss to the Packers pushed the Vikings to 4-7 and effectively out of playoff contention, tried to avoid shoveling dirt on his 22-year-old quarterback.

"It's about not putting the game in (McCarthy's) hands, where the variance of a young quarterback will cost our whole team," he said. "There's a needle to thread there."

That's fair, but the Vikings - both O'Connell and general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah - signed up for this when they chose to make McCarthy the starter this season over Sam Darnold, who played brilliantly for most of 2024 after McCarthy was hurt, imploded over his final two games, and left in free agency.

Quarterback play is simply too important in the modern NFL to be handled by someone who still requires training wheels. To make McCarthy the starter was to put the game in his hands.

None of this can be easy for McCarthy. A collegiate champion at Michigan, but on teams not known for their dynamic passing attack, he then watched as Darnold piled up dazzling numbers in O'Connell's offense. Darnold was a former first-round bust who had evolved to a journeyman backup before O'Connell got his hands on him, proving that the coach could turn any quarterback into a Pro Bowler.

McCarthy wasn't just stepping into a team that had gone 14-3 in 2024, he was taking over for a guy who had thrown for more than 4,300 yards and 35 touchdowns under O'Connell's steady hand. He had never taken an NFL regular-season snap before, and now he was supposed to lead an NFC contender. It was a tough ask.

Would McCarthy have fared better had he taken over a team that didn't have Super Bowl aspirations, like, say, Drake Maye or Bo Nix did last year? Was trying to make a rookie quarterback the final piece of a championship puzzle a plan that was doomed from the outset?

McCarthy is, as mentioned, still just 22. If he can find his sea legs over the rest of this season he'd still be on a cheap deal for a few more years. But he's in concussion protocol now, and it's expected that fellow rookie Max Brosmer, who was undrafted, gets the start.

The Vikings host the Seattle Seahawks and Sam Darnold in the Road Not Taken Bowl on Sunday. Seattle has one of the league's best defenses. Brosmer is definitely being thrown into the deep end of the pool.

But if Brosmer plays and looks better than the first-round pick - a very low bar to this point - that raises a difficult question.

What if a rookie really can look good in O'Connell's system, and the Vikings just picked the wrong one?

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.