Big Blue View
The New York Giants face the Minnesota Vikings this weekend. This is an interesting game for the Giants, if a meaningless one in the standings. We turned to Christopher Gates of SB Nation’s Daily Norseman to learn aboutt his Vikings in this week’s ‘5 questions’ segment.
Chris: I think that, in the long run, the Vikings will have made the right choice in moving on from Darnold and Jones and turning things over to McCarthy. I think a lot of McCarthy’s struggles early on stemmed from O’Connell trying to overload him with too much at once and overestimating his ability to run the type of offense he wanted to run early on. He’s simplified things a bit in recent weeks, and McCarthy has really responded well to what he’s been asked to do. Outside of his inexplicable lack of chemistry with Justin Jefferson thus far, he’s been really good over the past couple of weeks and has shown quite a bit of what the Vikings saw when they made him a top ten pick in 2024. The floor right now is certainly lower than what Darnold or Jones might have been able to provide this year, but if O’Connell can build him in a much more orderly manner than he did at the beginning of this season, I think the ceiling is going to be significantly higher for McCarthy than it would have been with either of those two guys.
Chris: It’s pretty much been directly tied to his quarterback situation. In 2022, he had Kirk Cousins playing the best football of his career, Cousins stayed healthy all year, and they won a lot of close games on their way to going 13-4. In 2023, Cousins blew out his Achilles just as he was hitting his peak, they spent the second half of the season playing musical quarterbacks with Josh Dobbs, Nick Mullens, and Jaren Hall, and they went 7-10. Last season was the Sam Darnold Renaissance that got them to 14-3, and this season has brought us J.J. McCarthy’s struggles, Carson Wentz playing until his arm (almost literally) fell off, and whatever the heck that was Max Brosmer did in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. That’s why this offseason is going to be crucial for this football team. They’re going to be in a rough spot cap-wise, but if they can start next season with the sort of play from McCarthy that he appears to be finishing this season with, they should be significantly better in 2026 than they’ve been this season and the even/odd/even/odd pattern could, potentially, continue.
