What if J.J. McCarthy Isn’t the Guy?
The question that is at the back of every Vikings fan’s mind but no one really wants to discuss: What if J.J. McCarthy completely falls flat? What if he’s a bust? What if he simply just isn’t any good?
By a lot of Vikings fans who are around-the-clock optimists (which is a completely fine thing to be), you’d be cast aside as a doubter if you even considered introducing the topic of conversation that J.J. McCarthy might not be good in the NFL. Unfortunately, it’s a true possibility, and if history has shown us anything about quarterbacks that are the 5th to go off the board in their respective draft, the odds are that he will bust.
There are rarely draft classes that have more than two noticeably good signal callers at the pro level, and without McCarthy even playing, his 2024 NFL Draft might have already produced at least four, and maybe even five. Caleb Williams and Drake Maye are going to be very good, Jayden Daniels is arguably already a top 10 quarterback in the NFL, Bo Nix showed he has the stuff in 2024, and Michael Penix Jr. has already unseated Kirk Cousins as starter for the Falcons in year one of his four-year/$180 million contract.
McCarthy would complete what would probably be the most stacked quarterback draft class of all time when all is said and done, a long time from now. I’m not guaranteeing that the other five guys will be good forever, but a draft class with this many quarterbacks that have shown this many flashes is virtually unheard of.
No, technically, the success of other players in the same draft has nothing to do with the potential success of another player, but trends are important, especially in evaluating and selecting quarterbacks.
The other thing that is technically working against him is his torn meniscus, which he suffered in the first week of his rookie preseason against the Las Vegas Raiders, an injury that cost him his entire rookie season. This made McCarthy the first quarterback drafted in the first round in the common draft era (since 1967) to miss their entire first season due to an injury. A completely “Vikings” turn of events.
McCarthy has fully recovered and will be good to go for the 2025 regular season, so the injury shouldn’t hamper him that much. While it isn’t really “working against him” anymore, it still held him back significantly. Not to say he won’t still end up being just fine, but many took solace in the fact that he could now just “sit and watch and talk to coach” while he recovered from his injury in 2024. Yes, true, but that doesn’t mean his development sped up.
The most important part of development is getting reps, something McCarthy hasn’t really been able to do in nine months. While it’s nice to say that when he got hurt, he could just focus on absorbing everything around him (which wasn’t technically wrong), it begs the question: Did you really think that he wasn’t going to do that anyway?
Let me be clear because I’m sure some will just read the headline and not get this far (cheers to you for actually doing so); I 100% believe that J.J. McCarthy will be the Vikings quarterback for the next twenty years. The kid has two things that trump every knock you can throw against him: he’s won literally everywhere he goes and plays his entire life, and he has some of the most impressive mental fortitude I’ve ever seen in an athlete, and he’s only 22 years old.
That doesn’t mean that the Vikings’ fan skepticism and fear of getting hurt again doesn’t rear its ugly head every once in a while.
Vikings Rescinded Their Offer to QB Daniel Jones