Daily Norseman
I want to preface this story with the following disclaimer before I get too deep into things here:
Jonathan James McCarthy did not play well on Sunday against the Chicago Bears. Sure, the last drive was great, but there were way, way too many mistakes in the first 57 minutes for those last three minutes to paper over. He has to be significantly better going forward, and there are numerous areas that he has to improve in.
Okay, now that we have those pleasantries out of the way.
We are five starts into J.J. McCarthy’s career as the starting quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings, and we’ve seemingly already reached the point where it’s damn near impossible to have a rational, meaningful conversation about him in the online space. We’re already getting the unflattering comparisons to past Vikings quarterback failures and revisionist history about how the Vikings have “fumbled” the quarterback position.
On the latter front, Exhibit “A” is the case of Sam Darnold. Darnold, if you’ll recall, was (mostly) brilliant for 17 weeks last season when most of the Really Smart Football People™ laughed at the idea of him being a solid answer at quarterback for the Vikings. After being cast off from numerous teams, he turned in the best season of his career for the Vikings in 2024. You’ll notice that I said 17 weeks. . .unfortunately, the NFL regular season is 18 weeks long, and he was abysmal in the Vikings’ regular season finale in Detroit with the #1 seed in the NFC on the line. He topped that by somehow being even worse in the next week’s Wild Card playoff game against the Rams, taking nine sacks while the entire Upper Midwest was screaming for him to just throw the damn ball.
Still, the Seattle Seahawks rewarded Darnold by signing him to a three-year contract worth north of $100 million, a price the Vikings were not willing to match. Now, if I missed any full-throated excoriations of the Vikings for not bringing Darnold back, I apologize, but I don’t recall seeing any. But, with the Seahawks getting off to an 8-2 start with Darnold at the helm, the takes were that the Vikings made a serious mistake by not giving Darnold that sum of money and instead rolling with McCarthy, who missed his entire rookie year with a knee injury.
Well, on Sunday, Darnold once again ran into the Rams with the inside track to the #1 seed in the conference and first place in their division on the line. And, once again, Darnold was positively awful, throwing four interceptions in a 21-19 loss. Yes, the Seahawks had an opportunity to win at the end of the game, much like McCarthy and the Vikings somehow had an opportunity to beat the Bears despite McCarthy’s poor performance. And even if their special teams hadn’t failed them, a victory for either of them wouldn’t have erased the fact that they did, in fact, perform poorly.
The difference is that...
