Daily Norseman
We’ll always have the fourth quarter of Week 1.
First and foremost, happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the DN family. It’s a time to be grateful for the things that truly matter in life: family, friends, health, and happiness.
It’s also a helpful distraction from the fact that the 2025 Vikings are the equivalent of Clark Griswold’s turkey. They’ve now lost five of their last six games, and a 5-12 or 6-11 record isn’t out of the question. We have to accept that we might face the worst-case scenario, which could not only hurt this season but also threaten the franchise’s future. More on that in a moment.
MCCARTHY, YES, BUT…
I’m not going to sit here and pile on J.J. McCarthy. If that’s what you want, there are plenty of other places to look. The facts are the facts. It’s been historically ugly. If you’re a masochist, you can watch Colin Cowherd pat himself on the back for the one solid take he has every year. The fourth quarter of the first Bears game and the first quarter of the Lions contest now seem like anomalies amid a wealth of head-scratching regression.
After six games, I was monumentally wrong. Everything that I’ve written about McCarthy in this space has been way off. I’m genuinely at a loss because I felt it was coming from a good place. Not in a psychologically biased, purple-neurons activating to convince me that is down, left is right, or that Christian Ponder was the next Drew Brees way, but based on objective and rational reasoning. The story isn’t over, and I still believe, but we can only go by what we know—and right now, what we know is very bad.
That said, they’re team losses for a reason. McCarthy dominates the discussion online and across social media, but this Vikings team has underperformed everywhere. Christopher Gates noted it here, as did Alec Lewis of The Athletic.
Kurt Warner did an excellent breakdown of Sunday’s disaster here. It’s a bit lengthy, but definitely worth watching. It emphasizes that multiple things can be true at once: Yes, McCarthy is struggling a lot, but KOC’s route concepts aren’t helping him either. KOC’s strict adherence to his scheme and the (correct/predictable) assumptions about McCarthy’s primary reads played right into Packers’ D-coordinator Jeff Hafley’s hands.
The Packers game was a perfect reflection of many issues that have troubled the Vikings all season.
The offensive line has been a work in progress all year. Yes, injuries have played a role, but there have been too many uncharacteristically poor performances from starters to dismiss it easily. We had all five starters go for the first time this year – and Micah Parsons just got another pressure.
While the defense has played well enough to win games since the Chargers debacle, it has regressed by any objective measure. I know some of this is due to fatigue caused by an offense that can’t stay on the field, but they’re far from blameless....
