Matthew Coller: McCarthy's surgery is a setback but shouldn't change Vikings' future outlook

Kevin O'Connell announced the Vikings' QB has two options for surgery timelines.

J.J. McCarthy / Minnesota Vikings

CLEVELAND — The Minnesota Vikings couldn’t have asked for a much better start to training camp and preseason for first-round draft pick J.J. McCarthy. He developed quickly, worked hard to learn the playbook and master the scheme, had no complaints about working with the 2s behind Sam Darnold and then went out and played his tail off against the Las Vegas Raiders.

In his first game action he bounced back strong from an interception and tossed two long touchdown passes. He made plays under pressure. He made plays with his legs. It didn’t take any sort of scouting genius to see all the reasons that the Vikings drafted him.

Only a few days after a peak moment in recent Minnesota sports excitement, head coach Kevin O’Connell announced that McCarthy suffered a torn meniscus and will require surgery.

The team isn’t sure whether he will have a “cleanup” surgery or if he’s going to need a total repair of the meniscus.

“What’s best for the long-term health of J.J. [McCarthy] will be the priority,” O’Connell said.

The timelines for the two options are quite different. A “cleanup” would mean that he could return in fairly short order and still be ready to play early in the season if needed. Based on the normal timeline for such surgeries (like Adrian Peterson had in 2016), a full repair would keep him out much longer, maybe allowing him to be available late in the season. Peterson missed between Week 2 and Week 14.

Both cases are a setback for McCarthy. The team is traveling to Cleveland to hold two joint practices on Wednesday and Thursday and then face the Browns in preseason action on Saturday afternoon. McCarthy would have been a huge part of those practices — in fact, O’Connell indicated that it was his plan to give the 10th overall pick some well-earned first-team reps.

“I had a very clear cut plan and really was going to continue through that with J.J. [McCarthy] on the field,” O’Connell said on Tuesday. “Getting more and more reps and coming off of a performance like he had where we felt strongly about where he was at in his development process. So really you hurt for him just in the short term here because he really had such a daily process, focus, all those things that I was really looking for in a young player at the position.”

He probably would have played another large snap count in the game too. It’s hard to replace the experience that he would have gotten from seeing an excellent Browns defense in practice and the road game reps that would have helped him gain comfort in a different environment. O’Connell also remarked on Monday about how there is no better teaching tool than actual game action.

The short-term surgery would move back the timeline for the earliest possible day for when McCarthy could potentially start. It gives KOC a smaller sample size to work with and keeps him from shoring up some of the details over the final few weeks of the offseason.

If McCarthy ends up with the full repair, that means lots of practice time and game preparation and extra reps after practice with quarterbacks coach Josh McCown would be left on the table. It would mean having to get back all the muscle memory from the drop-backs and throwing techniques that he’s come far along on since OTAs and minicamp.

As daunting as all of that may be, everything that McCarthy has shown in camp/preseason and what that means to the franchise’s long-term future did not change with his knee injury. He has already shown that he is a quarterback that they can build around.

The clock to truly make a Super Bowl case was always going to start ticking at 2025 and beyond. Rarely have rookie quarterbacks even reached the postseason as CJ Stroud did last year. The Vikings brought in Sam Darnold this offseason to have a bridge to McCarthy because they were aware that he was going to need time to master the QB position after throwing just over 700 passes at Michigan and the fact that he was just starting to earn first-team reps was evidence of a deliberate development approach that probably wasn’t going to change after one preseason game. All preseason/camp indications still pointed toward Darnold starting and potentially maintaining the job.

The plan has always appeared to be to create a roster that could compete for the playoffs this year and then to spend the dollars freed up by Kirk Cousins joining the Atlanta Falcons on free agents next year to shore up the roster. While certain aspects of the squad are very strong like the tackles, wide receivers, edge rushers, linebackers and safeties, the weaknesses in other parts like the cornerback group, interior offensive and defensive lines are still evident. Another step for the roster needs to be taken around McCarthy in 2025 in order for the Vikings to put themselves in the same conversation as clubs like the Packers and Lions. None of the facts about where the roster stands are any different from what they would have been right after McCarthy walked off the field against the Raiders following his terrific debut.

His injury is also more of a bump in the development road rather than a total detour. McCarthy can still watch Darnold prepare, learn in meetings how to analyze game action and work with the coaches on other parts of his game while his knee recovers.

He would hardly be the first QB to be injured in his first year. It happened to Joe Burrow and Anthony Richardson, recently. Generally the offseason between Year 1 and Year 2 is the biggest for any young player anyway because they no longer have to worry about the NFL Combine and draft visits.

None of this is to count out that he could be back for 2024 — maybe even fairly soon if the surgery is the short-term version. It’s just to say that, while it feels like a gut punch to Vikings fans who got excited by his debut performance, it doesn’t severely alter where we see the franchise and McCarthy’s future is headed.