Let’s Talk About J.J. McCarthy’s Start
There’s no denying it: J.J. McCarthy’s first five games as a Viking haven’t quite gone according to plan.
To be sure, he’s shown flashes of competence, such as the 4th quarter of the Week 1 game at Soldier Field and the Week 9 game against the Lions. But those flashes have been brief and are more than offset by many quarters of poor play. At present, McCarthy’s passer rating of 61.7 places him dead last in the league among starting QBs by a wide margin.
It’s still too soon to write him off as a bust, but these numbers don’t bode well for the immediate future. Among QBs drafted in the first round since 2001 (see plot below), the correlation coefficient between first-year passer rating and second-year passer rating is .86.
In other words, about 73% of a QB’s second-year performance can be explained by their first-year performance. In the NFL, where small sample sizes rule and datasets are incredibly noisy, that’s about as clear a signal as you can get: year one performance is a strong indicator of year two performance.
On the other hand, year one performance has not been nearly as good at predicting year three performance, with a correlation coefficient of just 0.337. In other words, among the datasets considered, only 11% of the third-year performance can be explained by year one performance.
QBs can improve after a shaky first season; notable examples include Josh Allen, Matt Stafford, and Bryce Young. The NFL game is very different from college, and it takes even the most pro-ready passers a while to figure it out.
Conversely, first-year success doesn’t always last. C.J. Stroud and Robert Griffin III are examples of players who haven’t quite lived up to the hype they generated in their first year. It’s also worth remembering that J.J. McCarthy still has only five NFL starts; as bad as it’s been, even his first season on the field is not yet a finished product.
If the Kevin O’Connell era has taught us anything, it’s that the NFL is a season-to-season league. Teams that are supposed to be terrible can be great (2024). Teams that look great on paper can fall flat (2025 so far). Seasons can be derailed by a key injury or two (2023).
We Vikings fans were perhaps a bit too optimistic coming into this season. But there’s still time for J.J. McCarthy to turn things around in 2025 and beyond.