Vikings’ 2025 Season Sets the Stage for the Rest of the Decade
The Vikings’ 2025 season is shaping up to be an interesting one, and it’s going to be a ride seeing how they respond in 2025 to their 14-win 2024 season with J.J. McCarthy at the helm this time.
To a lot of people, 2025 is all about how McCarthy plays, and it shouldn’t even be considered that the Vikings could go deep. It’s understandable logic; McCarthy has never played a snap, and this Vikings team has been very freshly put together over only the last two offseasons. This mentality led to a lot of those people wanting the Vikings to cave into the desires of Aaron Rodgers.
The NFL is unpredictable, so nothing can ever truly be ruled out, but one thing is for certain: we will learn a LOT about the 2026 Vikings, all the way to the 2030 Vikings and beyond.
It all really does begin with McCarthy. Will he immediately be a baller? Is he going to take multiple years to reach his peak? It’s certainly possible he could go the path of C.J. Stroud and be phenomenal as a rookie, but if I had to make a prediction, McCarthy would have a rookie season similar to that of his 2024 NFL Draft classmate, Bo Nix of the Denver Broncos.
He will have his flashes and his dwindles, but it appears likely that Sean Payton and the Broncos have who they believe is their quarterback of the future, and the same likely will be said about McCarthy after the 2025 season.
McCarthy has simply just been too much of a winner his entire life, and the surrounding cast around him is much too good for the kid not to, at the very least, look like a competent NFL starter, even if it means he’s fooling us.
A couple of things that will likely be the same in 2030 as they probably will be in 2025 and the years between include the fact that Kevin O’Connell is one of the best head coaches in football, and Justin Jefferson is the best wide receiver on the planet. The Jefferson one is a bit more of a longshot, as he will be 31 years old in 2030, but he is one of those players who will just have an extended prime because of how much of a freak he is. He could have longevity similar to Jerry Rice.
Kevin O’Connell will be in his mid-40s in 2030, so he will still be considered a “younger” head coach half of a decade from now, which is pretty sweet considering he already has Coach of the Year honors under his belt. Christian Darrisaw will still be in the prime age range of left tackles at 31, Dallas Turner will be 27, as will J.J. McCarthy.
Harrison Smith will be 41, but he could be on the eighth installment of his retirement tour if the last three seasons are any indicator.
The stage for the rest of the decade will ultimately be set with the play of J.J. McCarthy and the chemistry that is built between himself, Justin Jefferson, and Christian Darrisaw. Looking at the year 2030, Jordan Addison will likely still be around, depending on whether the Vikings consider him worthy of a contract of the magnitude that Bengals’ WR2 Tee Higgins just got.
Brian O’Neill, Ryan Kelly, Will Fries, and T.J. Hockenson will likely be aged out by this point, though they will obviously be vital pieces to this team trying to win the final years of this decade.
A lot of the tone for the rest of the decade also hinges on the seemingly imminent extension of general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, who has had conversations with the Wilf family regarding his lingering compensation to keep in Minnesota alongside Kevin O’Connell. Kwesi has done marvelous in the last two free agency periods, and the display that Dallas Turner and J.J. McCarthy put on this season will solidify him finally as an all-around GM and quiet the naysayers that rib him for the 2022 NFL Draft.
Adofo-Mensah will likely get his bag after the 2025 NFL Draft (where he has lots of options), and it is fair to say it would be deserved. He and O’Connell both deserve to stay in Minneapolis to finish out the decade and see through what they have built, as truthfully, the stage for the rest of the decade was set when they let Kirk Cousins walk to Atlanta and called J.J. McCarthy on draft night.
Now, in 2025, the plan just has to come together.
The Vikings’ Definition of Success in 2025