Matthew Coller: Darnold, McCarthy and the many possibilities of the Vikings QB situation

The Vikings have a quarterback battle for the first time in a long time... how will it play out? Well, that's anybody's guess...

Sam Darnold and J.J. McCarthy / Images courtesy of the Minnesota Vikings

Have you ever thought about the number of times in Minnesota Vikings history that the results of the quarterback position have been insanely different than expectations going into a season?

The unpredictability of this franchise’s quarterbacks goes all the way back to their first Super Bowl appearance. In 1969, the Vikings traded for Gary Cuozzo, who started the season by losing to Fran Tarkenton’s Giants. In Week 2 both Cuozzo struggled to get rolling so Bud Grant went to his former CFL star Joe Kapp, who had gone 8-6 with a 58.8 quarterback rating as a starter the previous year. Against the Baltimore Colts, the 13-1 NFL Champions in 1968, Kapp threw for 449 yards and seven touchdowns and produced 52 points in a blowout victory. Kapp led the Vikings to the NFL Championship over the Cleveland Browns and they ultimately lost in the Super Bowl to the Kansas City Chiefs.

Kapp got into a contract dispute with the Vikings and played just one more NFL season with the Boston Patriots. He went 1-9 with the Pats with three touchdowns and 17 interceptions.

That was just the start of Vikings quarterback unpredictability. It’s impossible to explain how they could have had a very good first-round quarterback and owner of numerous Vikings passing records in Tommy Kramer but the only NFC Championship appearance during Kramer’s career came with career backup Wade Wilson starting.

How about telling someone unfamiliar with Vikings history that the Vikings had an eventual MVP quarterback as their leading passer for three years but he wouldn’t win the award for another decade. Or that they had a Hall of Famer in Warren Moon for three seasons but did better with a ninth-round pick who mostly played basketball in college.

Try spinning the yarn to a casual fan of a retired quarterback coming back in his mid-30s to lead the greatest offensive performance in history up until that moment. You have to add in that the same QB would come apart the next season and one of the biggest busts of the previous decade would lead a playoff win.

How about a washed up three-time MVP Packers Hall of Famer posting his best statistical year in Minnesota at age 39? Or a promising first-round pick nearly losing his leg in a gruesome practice injury? What about the undrafted, undersized gunslinger from Texas whose play was nothing short of a miracle in 2017?

Here’s the point: Everyone keeps asking what’s going to happen with Sam Darnold and JJ McCarthy this year. How the heck would anyone even begin to guess? All we know right now is that anything is possible.

What we can do is go over all the potential outcomes and what they would mean to the Vikings’ 2024 and beyond.

Let’s start with The Jeff George Scenario.

Back in 1999, George took over for Randall Cunningham and put together a remarkable 8-2 run and led the Vikings to victory over the Dallas Cowboys in the wild card round of the playoffs. The “Greatest Show on Turf” Rams beat them 49-37 the next week and the Vikings decided to move on from George and hand the pigskin over to first-round draft pick Daunte Culpepper in 2000.

History could repeat itself. Darnold has George vibes. The beginning of both players’ careers was so brutal that it’s hard to believe they continued to get opportunities and yet their arm talent was so outstanding that NFL teams kept giving them chances. Darnold’s personality is quite a bit different and George already had a resurgence in Atlanta before arriving in Minnesota but fundamentally there are similarities. Or at least they will have similarities if Darnold has a good year in 2024.

You don’t need the FBI to put together a dossier to prove that Darnold had it rough before he arrived in Minnesota. Just simply point to the coaching and chaos of his previous organizations and maybe Google his top receivers outside of DJ Moore.

However, the reason it’s the Jeff George Scenario and not the Steve Young Scenario is that the most likely outcome if Darnold wins the starting job and reinvents himself in Minnesota is that McCarthy is still the starting quarterback on opening day 2025.

In order for Darnold to reach the point where the Vikings are considering keeping him next year and beyond, he would have to perform at a level that has essentially not happened in many, many years. Out of all QBs to throw at least 1,000 career passes in the last 10 years, Darnold has the second lowest QB rating only ahead of Brock Osweiler. He is behind Mike Glennon, Trevor Siemian, Blake Bortles, Brian Hoyer and, yes, Case Keenum.

It wouldn’t be unfathomable that he could go from that point to playing well under the right circumstances like Geno Smith, who had more interceptions than touchdowns prior to the 2022 season. It might go even beyond the realm of Vikings-ness for him to turn into Steve Young, who went 15-24 to start his career and 79-25 the rest of the way.

If Darnold played the whole year and put together an eight or nine-win season with something like 25 touchdowns, 14 interceptions, then it would make for a fairly successful 2024 for everyone considering the organization is in flux with its roster. He would be good enough for fans to feel good about the direction and ownership to trust the coaching to develop the next guy but not so good that McCarthy would remain on the bench.

Likelihood rating of the Jeff George Scenario: 5/10

The next scenario is called The Mike Glennon Situation.

This is where everybody spends the offseason talking about how the journeyman QB with some arm talent might make things interesting with the rookie and wins the job out of training camp and then the rookie ends up playing after four weeks.

In 2017 Glennon started the year for the Bears after they drafted Mitch Trubisky. The rookie watched as Glennon went 1-3 with four touchdowns, five interceptions and averaged just 6.0 yards per attempt. Chicago grew tired of that pretty quickly and turned the reins over to Trubisky for the final 12 games of the season and went 4-8 with a 77.5 QB rating the rest of the way.

The Vikings’ schedule through the first half of the season makes this one pretty plausible. Following their opener against the New York Giants, they take on the 49ers, Texans, Packers, Jets, Lions and Rams. All teams with extremely high expectations and mostly good-to-great defenses.

Kevin O’Connell has said that he wants McCarthy to check off certain boxes before he is going to put him in but common sense would also tell us that going 1-4 or 2-5 would dramatically increase the chances of putting McCarthy in the game.

If things played out exactly the same as Glennon/Trubisky, it would fall below expectations for team success and McCarthy’s expected performance, though there aren’t a ton of examples of rookie QBs putting up huge numbers right away. The only first-year starters with QB ratings over 95 since 2013 are Justin Herbert, CJ Stroud, Deshaun Watson and Dak Prescott. It wouldn’t be a death knell to McCarthy’s chances for success either. QBs to make it as starters with lower QB ratings than Trubisky’s rookie year include Derek Carr, Josh Allen Jared Goff.

Leaving the 2024 season without a feel-good Darnold story or clear signs of McCarthy’s greatness would leave us feeling a great deal of uncertainty about 2025 and whether the Vikings could make a big leap into legitimate contention in short order. However, it would also leave them with a high draft pick. The Bears selected Roquan Smith in the 2018 draft. He turned out to be an immediate star for the No. 1 defense in the NFL.

Likelihood of the Mike Glennon Situation: 6/10

The Justin Herbert Permutation is up.

The Chargers opened the 2020 season with Tyrod Taylor as their starter but an injury (caused by the team doctor) threw Herbert into the fire quicker than the team wanted. He was flat-out fantastic, throwing 31 touchdowns to 10 interceptions and 289 yards passing per game. The Chargers knew immediately that they had their franchise quarterback.

Putting aside the bizarre injury part of this, it could play out this way for the Vikings: They enter training camp assuming that Darnold is going to start and then McCarthy ends up winning the job and playing the entire season even if the consensus pre-camp was that he needed a lot of development.

This one doesn’t take a lot of explaining or breaking down. If McCarthy played like any of the previous strong rookies i.e. CJ Stroud, Dak Prescott, Baker Mayfield, then they would look like one of the most dangerous teams in the NFL going forward because of the rookie QB contract advantage and the fact they loaded up on salary cap space for next offseason (not to mention they have the world’s best receiver).

Expectations for 2025 would shoot through the roof and the Adofo-Mensah/O’Connell “competitive rebuild” plan would look like it was headed for massive success. We wouldn’t hear a whisper of questioning the draft pick or the decision to let a proven veteran QB walk.

Likelihood of the Justin Herbert Permutation: 3/10

Our last scenario is The Kenny Pickett Plot

On a good team with quality coaching, Pickett went 7-5 despite overall poor numbers and the Steelers went 9-8 overall and missed the playoffs. Pickett averaged just 6.2 yards per attempt and a 76.7 rating but found his way to four game-winning drives. Steelers fans felt that they had themselves a winner while analysts questioned whether there was a true “next step” for QB1.

Obviously we know now that the next step never came but as it pertains to Vikings 2024 outcomes there is a chance that McCarthy could play and win games and still leave a lot of uncertainty about where he is going to go in the future.

In this case there would still be a lot of positivity about where McCarthy could take the organization because he is much younger and has higher upside than Pickett. It would also leave the team with a nervous feeling going into 2025 because if the Vikings were a .500 team and couldn’t make a big leap from there behind McCarthy’s development then “hot seat” discussions would start pretty quickly.

Likeliness of the Kenny Pickett Plot: 4/10

If you are easily made nauseous, you might want to stop reading here and call it a day. Our final potential outcome is The Rosen Explosion.

The Arizona Cardinals signed Sam Bradford as their bridge quarterback to start the 2018 season. He struggled so much that Rosen was thrown into the mix in a panic. He was horrendous and the Cards knew right away that he was never going to be their long-term quarterback. The former UCLA star went 3-10 with a 66.7 rating and Arizona traded him in favor of picking Kyler Murray in 2019.

With the first few games of the season being quite difficult, it’s not crazy to think that Darnold could struggle and force the Vikings to quickly pivot. But McCarthy has a few things going for him that make this scenario less likely. First, his drive and passion for the game have never been questioned — in fact, they are central to the belief that he can become a star quarterback. The coaching McCarthy will receive and overall franchise stability is worlds better than what Rosen had in 2018.

Still McCarthy doesn’t have to go full Rosen to leave 2024 with a bad statistical season and enormous questions about his future. The same happened with Jared Goff in Los Angeles. It also happened with Bryce Young last year and plenty of others, from Josh Allen to Sam Darnold, EJ Manuel etc.

Likelihood of The Rosen Explosion happening: 2/10.

Out of all the comparisons we have made here, one that we haven’t talked about that might score the highest is the Teddy Bridgewater Brand. In that scenario Darnold would start a few games and then McCarthy would come in, win over his coaching staff and teammates despite some rocky performances. The stats wouldn’t blow people away, yet they would go into 2025 feeling strongly that the team could be built around its young leader. It’s not quite as good as the Herbert Permutation but it’s pretty, pretty, pretty good anyway. Likelihood here might be 6/10.

In search for all the possibilities, there is one more we have to consider: The outcome that we can’t foresee, no matter how deeply we look into history. Think of the classic Chaos Theory example about a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a tornado in Texas.

The Vikings’ history at quarterback might as well be the example for Chaos Theory. Teddy Bridgewater hurts his knee, which leads to JJ McCarthy being picked by the Vikings to lead them into the future. What events will happen in training camp that ultimately lead to the answer to the Vikings’ QB conundrum?

We’re about to start finding out…