How Minnesota Vikings FAILED To Develop J.J. McCarthy

How Minnesota Vikings FAILED To Develop J.J. McCarthy

It’s the line that is haunting Kevin Oonnell’s entire 2025 season. The organization is failing JJ McCarthy. Here’s how. Welcome to the Locked On Vikings podcast. You are Locked on Vikings, your daily Minnesota Vikings podcast, part of the Locked On Network. Your team every day. What’s up? What’s up everybody? Welcome to the Locked On Vikings podcast, where we’re always trying to learn something new. It’s part of the Locked On Podcast Network, the number one sports podcasting network. Today’s episode is brought to you by FanDuel. Right now, new customers can bet just $5, and if your bet wins, you’ll get $300 in bonus bets to use across the app. Today on the show is what I promised you yesterday. This is going to be probably the one JJ McCarthy video that is going to carry us through the off seasonason if anybody asks about how JJ McCarthy’s season went, why it went so bad, what happened. I kind of wanted it to be centralized in one place. And I think we’ve seen enough, you know, six games I think is a lot to be able to understand the ins and outs of how he is right now. Is it enough to write off a guy’s entire career? Of course not. Many, many years, guys can change. Guys can learn a lot over an offseason. We got to see what that looks like, too. But for now, we understand what JJ McCarthy is, I think, pretty well this season and and what we can expect him to be for the last few games is probably not going to be very different than what we’ve seen so far. I think we all agree on that. Uh, and if not, that’s fine. I think with McCarthy and and just the abject failure that he has been, um, it it leads to a bunch of follow-up questions, right? And those are the follow-up questions that I really wanted to uh focus on this season. And I haven’t spent a lot of time just like illustrating how bad he is. Uh a everybody’s doing that. B you can see it. I don’t need to tell you, hey, the stats are bad. Like I we don’t need to prove that point. Nobody’s debating that. Um but what I want to do is go for the follow-up questions, right? Which are what happens next? and we will have lots and lots of time in the offseason to discuss what they’re going to do, if they’re going to keep him, if they’re going to bring in competition, if they’re going to draft a guy, if they’re going to bring in a free agent, all that stuff, as it stands to me right now, I will be doing research on the quarterbacks. Um, I don’t know who would be available in the offseason yet. I don’t think anybody knows who would be available in the offseason yet. those decisions don’t get made till people are done have you know with games like all all of the organizations are planning week to week and coaches aren’t exactly making 2026 personnel decisions. So that is all going to have to be tabled um and and that’s okay. We this is a daily podcast and uh it remains daily throughout the offseason. So there will be a show every single week in February. We will have plenty of time to talk about what the Vikings should do in March. So, instead, I want to ask some of the other follow-up questions, like, how did this happen? And of course, you go back to the line that Kevin Oonnell dropped when he was sort of defending the offseason approach that the Vikings took, which was very heavily committed to JJ McCarthy, and he said, you know, organizations fail young quarterbacks before young quarterbacks fail organizations. I still think it’s a great line. I still think he is absolutely correct in that and it is unfortunate for him that it has turned around back on him because the organization is failing the young quarterback right now. Um and I think if you really held his feet to the fire, Okonnell would agree that this organization under his watch is failing JJ McCarthy more than J.J. McCarthy is failing the organization. And that’s not like absolving McCarthy. I think it’s something that I I’ve I’ve kind of noticed a vibe in the comments of people think that when I’m, you know, critiquing Okonnell for his play calling or critiquing Justin Jefferson’s effort in that one game or all of that that I’m trying to like make excuses and make up for McCarthy. No, that dude stank. Like, he’s bad. I Nobody’s arguing that. So, if you if you’re trying to debate me on that, you’re debating with nobody. But rather, why he is bad is a tougher question to answer. It’s really easy to just kind of say, “Well, he was bad in college and the stupid Vikings couldn’t tell and they were stupid.” Uh, but I think that is just never really how this stuff plays out because the draft is so much about potential. Think about how we talk about guys in the draft, right? We talk about a tool Z. We talk about how they’re 40 times in their three cones mean that they project out into the NFL. We say, you know, their production was this and that means it’s gonna their NFL production is going to be this. The draft is a world of trying to predict the future. And that means that you’ve got to do some projecting out, right? Uh you have to look at packages that have tools and say, “This is a problem. We think we can fix it.” You just simply must do that in the draft. Um because this game makes me sad. My Patreon page has decided I’m I I just decided I was gonna watch a quarterback and everybody told me Dante Moore is like the guy to watch right now. So, I did a stream which I’m doing on Patreon now by the way. If you want to catch me live, go sign up for Patreon. You’ll get an email. But, um patreon.com/loop NFL. Please support. But, uh in watching that, it’s so funny because a lot of the same problems come up, right? the same like young quarterback stuff about like imprecision with the feet or you know being slow with your eyes or whatever. And it’s so much funnier when you go into the draft paradigm and go, “Yeah, but like when he gets into the NFL, he gets NFL coaching. How much of that is going to change? How much of that is going to fix?” And when we are looking at draft quarterbacks, I try my best not to like hang my hat, oh well that’ll definitely get fixed, right? And maybe I did that a little too much with JJ McCarthy. Um, but I went back and looked at my old draft notes and I’m gonna read some of them to you. Can create some with his legs. Not Jaden Daniels or Anthony Richardson, but he can get out in space and punish man coverage. Sometimes it feels like he’s going a bit slow. More often it feels like he’s rushing his process to make up for it, coming off of long developing routes early and being overly eager to check down. And there are some really weird turndowns. There’s like one too many really ugly misses. Um, especially on outlets to the sideline. On the flip side, throws over the middle are just dot after dot after dot. Uh sometimes he would get a little jittery and lose his feet, but when that wasn’t happening, his habits are generally pretty good. Like I get off my back. I nailed this dude. I was just too forgiving of some of that stuff. Um and I was too willing to believe that it would get, you know, developed out. And here’s the thing, it still could. It’s just going to take years. That’s where I’m I I I think we’re seeing the baseline with J.J. McCarthy is he can learn all that stuff. Anybody could, right? Like that. Anybody can learn new things. Um, but it’s not something that he can learn all at once. And so, he’s going to have to choose a couple of the things that he needs to fix. I would say the hip rotation mechanically and I would say keeping his feet under him and getting rid of that bad habit that he picked up in his in his uh first starting season here. Those are the two things that like we I’ve talked about a ton on this show, but they’re basically both lower half mechanical issues that cause inaccuracy. I think if he focuses on those this off season and throughout the rest of this season and really gets those things down, a lot of the other stuff will be a lot less punishing. There’ll still be problems and there’ll still be things that are stopping him from being the franchise quarterback the Vikings need him to be. And they’re things that can’t really develop over the course of a season. So, you’re just going to have to go through another year with like six of the eight problems that we have to fix with JJ McCarthy. Um, and that’s going to be the and you got to just do two a year until suddenly it’s year five and now and now you’ve put it together. But where’s he going to be by year five? Cuz if he’s bad for four years, he ain’t going to be in Minnesota. And that’s really the bummer of it all. uh that his trajectory right now requires a really really really productive offseason and he hasn’t had an off seasonason in the NFL. That’s true yet, right? He had the draft off seasonason. That’s not true for anybody. And then he was rehabbing an injury. So like we don’t know what that could be and that’s where it is. But like the list of things is too long for one off seasonason to be reasonably expected to be able to like fix it all. Um but what they could fix in the off season if they were to decide, hey, you know, we’re going to write that season off as a wash. Injuries, stuff was messed up, travel schedule, whatever. We’ll write it off. We’ll run it back. We’ll see if we can do better. they can rewrite pieces of their playbook or choose other parts of the playbook that better suit what JJ McCarthy can and can’t do. I think they’ve done a bad job of that this time. They’ve put far too much on his plate both physically and mentally. And that’s one of the the ways that Okonnell and the the Vikings have failed JJ McCarthy. Um, but I kind of wanted to start with that baseline. What is wrong with JJ McCarthy? That those two mechanical things are big. Rushing his process, right? turning things down weirdly. Um, and you saw all of it in that Packers game. So, that’s kind of what we’re going to do next. What JJ McCarthy is doing wrong, some of that stuff he wasn’t doing in college that he is doing now and how I think the way the Viking season has played out put McCarthy in in a bad spot and how the Vikings misplayed that. That’ll all be next on Locked on Vikings. I’m Cody Ror from Locked on Broncos and this episode is brought to you by Pelaton. Pelaton is shaping the future of fitness with the brand new Pelaton crossraining tread plus powered by Pelaton IQ. This is Pelaton’s most advanced equipment yet, giving you realtime guidance and endless ways to move. 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And thanks for helping us make Locked On the number one sports podcasting network. So, what is wrong with JJ McCarthy is is a question that I don’t think we’ve put enough effort into actually answering. And I’m sure a million people just uh commented, started typing a comment and then stopped because I called them out. Everything, right? Everything’s wrong with him. He sucks. Okay. Well, that’s great, but it’s pretty pretty vague in general. And we want to do a little better here, right? Let’s use this as an opportunity to learn things for ourselves. And no matter what it means about McCarthy, let’s try to be academic, right? So, let me list some of the things that are wrong right now with JJ McCarthy and where they came from. you have the over rotation of his hips when he throws, right? His hips come through too far. It’s because he’s throwing it too hard and he’s it means that he’s winding up quite a bit of torque. Throwing the ball with all arm and then the torque he winded up with his legs isn’t actually transferring to the ball. It creates way less power and arm strength, you know, just winging it is going to be a lot more difficult to be uh to to be accurate with. If you’re if you’ve ever golfed, imagine not bending your knees at all and trying to hit the ball with all arm. You’re going to spray that thing everywhere. Even if you have the strongest arms in the world, then there is the the sort of marriage of his feet and his eyes. So, what I liked about how he moved in the pocket was mostly how he responded to pressure. And I’m I’m looking at my old draft notes, right? That when pressure would come, he would he did a pretty good job of just taking like a a little step to the side. Um, I think when things would get jittery, I thought that happened in the national championship game, for example, he would lose that. And we’ve clearly seen that manifest in a much more permanent way than, you know, this game got a little bit tight or was a big moment, so he got nervous. It’s now like every single game he just lives in a nervous place now. Um, so that’s one thing is not keeping his feet in a stable place. You want your feet shoulderwidth apart most of the time as a quarterback if you can help it. Sometimes pressure gets in the way. You got to do stuff off platform. That happens. But you want to keep your feet under you as much as you can. His go too wide. They he’ll click in too narrow when he hitches up. They’re they’re misaligned. Like his feet have he has no control over his feet anymore. And he used to be great at that. Um in terms of processing, I think his timing is just wrong a lot. He is progressing usually the way that you’re supposed to. He’s hitting the alert and then the first read and then the second read. way the the the way that the this offense wants you to progress. Um, however, that’s not actually consistent anymore. He is skipping to go to the checkdown a lot. He’s he’s abandoning the read and going to the checkown sometimes way earlier than he has to, which comes from the next problem, which is that he is rushing these reads. So, if he goes, you know, alert one, two, he’s going alert one two, and there’s no way for that route to have broken off by by the time he has moved away from it. That can be like an anticipatory thing, right? If someone’s breaking, you know, running an inbreaking route, you don’t need to sit sit there and watch them run it if you know that there’s a defender sitting right on top of where that route’s going to break and that’s and it’s not going to be open if it’s like zone defense. But there are times where that isn’t happening. There was an example of uh a dagger rep in the Packers game where Justin Jefferson ran the basic over the middle. We love to hit him on that. And there was a linebacker right in the hole who slipped and fell down and McCarthy moved right on before he could see uh but so so you know he wasn’t looking at the defender either. He just moved kind of right on and went into the checkown and I believe it was a third and long that would have converted and it turned into a checkdown that didn’t if I recall. I might be mixing that up with another play. Um so sometimes he’s there and then sometimes he’s just really slow. He’ll hang on on something he’s supposed to peak, but it’s a double move, so he’s going to sit there and watch it. But really, like this is a big tension I think in this team is when when somebody’s running a double move with the Viking, which the Vikings have to lead the league in double moves. I don’t know if anybody’s charting that, but if they are, please let me know where the Vikings are in terms of double moves run because holy moly. But, uh, when it’s a double move, a lot of times it is an alert. It is a we’re going to run something on the outside. It really just has to be a clear that occupies this corner. And we could make it a boring go router. We could put a little bit of a of an out and up sauce on it to make it something, you know, harder for him to look away from, right? It doesn’t really matter. But what McCarthy is doing is watching that double move develop like he’s actually going to throw it. And really what you’re supposed to do is just make sure the guy doesn’t bite like crazy, right? Make sure that that they don’t forget and bust the coverage. You’re just peeking at it and saying, “Hey, is something crazy happening?” No. Okay, back to my the rest of my progression. but he’s holding on it. So, he’s kind of both going too slow sometimes and too fast sometimes. Not to mention, there is the injury concern. I would say that because the like Michael Pennix’s injury concern is a different animal, right? Because he’s had the the knee reconstructed twice and now because of compensation maybe like the the the leg that he has been compensating on during all that rehab is now itself injured. um which means that in the rehab of his left leg, his twice reconstructed leg is going to get more stress and wear and tear. It’s a big concern. Those those injuries are related to each other. They affect each other. A concussion doesn’t have anything to do with an ankle injury, and it doesn’t have anything to do with a bruise on his hand or whatever the heck happened in that Ravens game. But both of the injuries that McCarthy suffered during this season were born of him not sliding or not protecting himself on the way out of bounds in a way that he should have. He probably just needed to go down in that in that Lambo game, but he fought for extra yardage and he got slammed to the turf. He probably should have run all the way through the white in the Atlanta game. He didn’t. He slowed up and he got tackled uh on the sideline, got his ankle rolled up and got a high ankle sprain. He has to learn to protect himself. That is a lot of problems. And those aren’t problems that are a text message away from being fixed like you can with a false start miscommunication. You go, “Oh, I thought you were saying blue and you were saying this. Oh, okay. Now I get it. Cleared up. It’ll never happen again.” No, this is stuff you have to work on and bring habits. But I think the major major major thing is there’s two ways McCarthy can play better. one, he can get as nervous as he wants, but change the muscle memory and the habits that come out when he is nervous. Cuz right now, he gets nervous and the bad habits come out. If you get nervous and the good habits come out, you’re doing great. And I would argue that that’s how the the true great athletes clutch up in the moment. They have the right habits and the the nerves, the energy turns into something good. Or he could just calm down, never be nervous again and take everything in stride and be a crazy, you know, just the most level-headed guy ever. I I Joe Montana very famously was that more recently for us, I would say that was Sam Darnold a little bit. He was never nervous about anything and no matter what the situation was, he was always going to play it the same way and that helped him. Um, and I think it hurt him earlier in his career, too, for his own reasons, but he’s a different story, different guy. But those are the two options. And I would say that if you’re going to try to undo all of those habits, that takes a long time and a lot of time commitment. And you just don’t have enough time over a calendar year to break all of those habits. It’s like trying to quit smoking 17 times in a year. Like that takes time. Um, so how did all of this happen? Well, I think it’s it’s really hard to have said it in the moment, but the Vikings throwing their whole lot behind JJ McCarthy and not really getting a reasonable backup that could take over if things went south was a critical mistake. Sam Howell was not an adequate backup solution. Now, I don’t think that necessarily means that going out and getting Aaron Rogers, who also got hurt this year, uh, was the gonna be the option, but they did turn Joe Flacco away, and I think that would have been perfect. Somebody who would have, you know, done a reasonable job. And if you have this sense, oh my god, this kid’s drowning, we can put Joe Flacco out there and we’re going to be okay. But boy, this kid’s drowning, right? Like all of those problems are are bad habits that weren’t broken or bad habits that have been picked up in high pressure, high high chaos, high stress situations. But why is it so high chaos and high stress? A lot of quarterbacks come into the league at 21, 22, play young, overwhelmed, you know, drinking through a fire hose, learning the playbook, but they don’t have this kind of meltdown. And for every reason I can come up with for JJ McCarthy why he is sucking, I can think of somebody else that had that problem, maybe even a worse version of it and didn’t suck as bad. And I can even think of guys that had problems that J.J. McCarthy ostensibly does not have that, you know, like Jameus Winston not being able to see, literally being nearsighted and trying to play quarterback for four years and uh being better. you know, rookie Jameus Winston was better than this, right? And so it feels like they’re like you can be as disparaging to JJ McCarthy as you want and still not explain it all. There has to be something else. And that is where the organization is failing McCarthy. So my theory for really how this went down, how this went so wrong will be next on Locked on Vikings. 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Right now, FanDuel is giving new customers $300 in bonus bets when your first $5 bet wins. So head to fanduel.com and play your game with FanDuel, the official sports betting partner of the NBA. Boy, that Kevin Oonnell line is just rattling through your head, isn’t it? Organizations fail young quarterbacks before young quarterbacks fail organizations. Well, JJ McCarthy has about seven bad habits right now. So if you want to call that that he has failed the Vikings, you can go ahead and do so. But some of those habits showed up only in the pros. Some of them were problems in college that we were kind of sold an idea that he would fix, but they weren’t fixed. You can blame that he was injured and that he didn’t get a lot of time to work with them or whatever, but he did have two full training camps and it’s now, you know, November. Um, you’ve had several weeks with him and these things are getting worse, not better as time goes on. And so I think you just have to and I’ve I’ve mentioned this a couple times before, but you just you got to call into question who is doing the developmental work here. Who is with him in practices telling him how to, you know, encouraging him on the the right footwork? Who is there telling him, “No, no, no. You got to make sure you take a minute on that dig and make sure you you you check that hook linebacker.” And who is telling him, “Hey, you held on that too long.” Is it Okonnell? Is it Macau? I don’t know, but somebody is doing an inadequate job of building on what is good and trying to coach away what is bad just in in in live reps, right? Whoever’s giving him notes is giving him notes that aren’t working. Whether he’s not Well, I’m not going to say he’s not taking to the coaching. I I shouldn’t imply that because that’s very incorrect. So, one of the things that I think I’ve noticed about McCarthy is that he is taking too much to whatever the emphasis of the last week is. The emphasis of one week was, you know, he he got heel clicky, right? And he got his his feet got all chaotic and out and out from under him, right? And so the next game, total statue, didn’t didn’t run once, didn’t scramble, he just stood there in the pocket and then he started taking sacks for that reason. So they clearly emphasized it, but they overemphasized it. And so maybe they pulled it back because then his feet got all wild and wacky in the next game. It feels like they’re it’s like too heavy a hand with a balance game. Um, and so he’s he’s kind of penduluming all over the place. Uh, with like that one really sticks out. The the the kind of feet chaos thing is sticks out to me. But I think there are a lot of instances of of that where, you know, whatever the problem was last week definitely got fixed. Um, you know, the he couldn’t break the huddle at 18 seconds. Well, now that’s happening a lot more fre that’s happening a lot more consistently. Um to the point where I no longer think it’s really an issue. The play calls were all messed up and false starts were happening. Okay, well now they’re getting like one false start a game. Still probably not great. Want to get that out of there. But it’s no longer something that you’re really going to write home about. That there’s progress in that, right? He he holds the ball and he reads too slow one time. He starts rushing the next time. So he’s taking the coaching, but he’s taking it too far every time. And so they’re they’re overcoaching him. I think that they are talk talk talk talk talk talk talking at him. This is I am now well into speculation mode. By the way, I’m guessing I’m not reporting. I’m not talking in a in any level of certainty at all. So grain of salt. Please give me space to kind of educated guess here. But knowing Okonnell and and how he’s even admitted this and joked about it, but but he has a reputation for talking a little too much in the headset to the quarterback as he gets to the line and saying, “Hey, we’re going to run this. Looks like they’re presenting cover three. Watch that middle safety. If he goes, you know, if he goes to the field side, you’re going to have the post.” Like that’s he’s going to say stuff like that in the in the headset as as long as they break the huddle in time. I think it’s 15 seconds is when the coaches uh is when the headset cuts off for the quarterback. So, as long as you still have time, he is going to be like saying that stuff while McCarthy’s trying to get everybody lined up. And it’s kind of funny, right? Like this this was very famously with Josh Dobs. He did like, you know, a ton of it. He basically explained every play and why it works in that 20 seconds, right? And it’s this incredible coaching performance. Um, but with McCarthy, I think it’s pretty clear to me that there is there’s too many notes. And so there’s no focus to it because you’re trying to fix every problem at once. I in a very thematic way to Kevin Oonnell and the Vikings. They’re trying to eat the whole cake in one bite. And you can’t eat the whole cake in one bite. No matter how hard you try, all right? Unless you’re Scooby-Doo, you’re not going to do it. So you you have to kind of pick a focus and get that dialed in. Turn a weakness into a strength and then move on to the next one. Um but you but you have to really calcify those good habits. The cement needs to dry to quote Kevin Oonnell again before you can start asking him to think about another thing right before you can really like ask like mental bandwidth is a finite resource for all of us. All right. And I not I don’t want to invoke the ADHD thing, okay? But I will invoke my own experience with it, which is that it is an extra finite resource. At least for me, it presents differently for everybody. So my experience might not be his, but mental bandwidth is a finite resource. And when you ask him to think about one thing all week and then in the game you ask him to think about another thing, the thing you were thinking about all week might go out the window. They’re just talking to him too much. And on top of that, the offense has too many complications. This is, I think, the biggest failure. This was they needed the training wheels a little bit. They took the training wheels off. The the training wheels offense was Carson Wentz. It was stick, it was curl flat, it was, you know, roll out flood. It was every staple that you run in every offense. It was the Josh Dobs playbook, more or less. Actually, yeah, it was it was kind of the exact same stuff they ran for Josh Dobs. It was, you’ve been in five different teams. They all ran stick. you know, stick, let’s do stick. And so it worked okay because we have talented players that when you’re executing, you know, boring staples that every defense can defend, but somebody’s got to win a matchup and you might win a matchup because you can if they know what’s coming, that’s maybe an advantage, but an advantage might not be enough against Justin Jefferson. You know what I mean? Like that that worked. Okay. And maybe that will happen with Max Bromer in this upcoming game. They’ll go back to the, you know, baby’s first playbook. something super simple. They’ll take away the RPO bubble screen, you know, triple read, like they’ll take that away and they’ll just say, you know, we’re only going to give you what we think you can run and it’s going to be a super boring playbook with only seven things on it, but if we execute those seven things, well, maybe we can move the ball and maybe that’ll be better. I don’t think you’re saving the season with it. And unless you’re strongly considering somebody like Brosmear as a long-term option, long-term option, I don’t know how much like good that does you once McCarthy clears the protocol to keep going with it. But we’ll have those conversations later. Um, but I would love to see that training wheels playbook on McCarthy even in this game where I kind of came away with the the impression that they had sort of taken some of that complication away from McCarthy. When I actually watched back the tape, they hadn’t at all. They still had him trying to set his feet to a fake before he could set his feet to the progression. So, you’re adding an extra step. They still had him, you know, pre- snap motion, sometimes two pre- snap motions that he then had to recalibrate his whole idea of what the defense was doing with that new information. They’re trying to give him information, but they’re overloading him with information. They’re trying to give him a fake so that the linebacker is a little open to make the throw easier, but they’re overloading him with physical stuff. There’s a balance to this. And what may be easier to a quarterback that can execute all of those things, but maybe, you know, is is too inaccurate and needs the extra throwing window or maybe doesn’t have the arm strength and needs the extra t time to get the ball in there, so you got to manipulate the defender to get him further away. There’s a difference between that and somebody who probably can play it straight up a little better. And I think McCarthy’s best moments this season have come in more simplified moments like two-minute drills where you can’t afford to do all that complicated stuff. and and on you know bow like the thing that gets me a lot. So so bow is a concept that the Vikings run a lot. There’s an arrow just a little like hitch route five yard hitch and then a wrap behind you might call it wrap in too and then just like a an in behind a basic behind it, right? It’s it’s a staple concept for the Vikings and it’s something that teams are always ready to defend because it’s one of the most common things you’ll see if you play the Vikings. So what the Vikings started to do is run that but it’s actually a stick nod. So the the basic that like Justin Jefferson would run that’s the wrap in or or whatever would um like cut up field and be a double move or the arrow that you would have like Aaron Jones run. Aaron Jones ran the arrow on one and then it turned it into a wheel route and it was touchdown Vikings against Chicago week one. Um, that sort of subversion is a nice little tricky play to keep defenses honest, but they kind of moved away from the staple too much. They’re now running the tricky play three times and the staple play five times. And it’s like you don’t need to be that close to even run the tricky play once just to keep them honest. But they’re running the tricky play way too much. That’s it bugs me. But what that means is that instead of just executing the concepts and then building on that from there, McCarthy has to fake execute the concept then execute another concept all while buying time in the pocket and god knows what who’s you know what Blake Brandle’s doing wherever whatever position he’s at. Um and trying to keep the timing together and trying to think about what you saw because that motion showed you a man indicator. It’s it’s too much. They have overwhelmed him. They have overcoached him and his worst habits have come out with a vengeance and he has completely total system collapsed. So many young quarterbacks that struggle early. The the shape of it is that their coaches can only ask them to do so much. So they’re running these like baby offenses that are really easy to defend, but they’re doing what they can handle. And they’re executing what they can handle. maybe still making some mistakes along the way, but they’re executing something that’s just not that powerful, but they’re, you know, developing in that time. I think what the Vikings have done and why it has turned into so much of an outlier despite JJ McCarthy not being that kind of outlier coming out of college was they have asked him to do so much more than he can handle. They have given him way too much dip on his chip, right? And that has caused him to collapse into the worst possible version of what he could have been. They have truly yatsied the worst possible way that they could have developed JJ McCarthy. At every turn, they’ve made the worst possible decision. And that’s how you get the worst possible quarterback, which is truly where we’re at right now. We are we are at 861 of 862. I mean, we’re the 999th out of a thousand guys. Like, it’s it’s bad. And that doesn’t happen just because a guy is a little bit stinky. A lot of teams have had a stinky guy and they’ve found the limit to what they can ask that guy to do and then they try to win within that limit. The Vikings have not given those limits to McCarthy and they have sumearily ruined him. He is a broken entity and now the question is can they or should they even try to salvage it. That’ll be an offseason talker. But for now we got the Seahawks game coming up so that’ll be tomorrow. Uh we’ll do the crossover with locked on Seahawks and then Friday we we will uh preview the game. Of course I’m going to be uh with family for Thanksgiving. So, I’m going to record all that stuff ahead of time. So, I hope you can still listen. Maybe if you got to drive for Thanksgiving, you can kick it on in the car. Otherwise, I will see you all for all of that.

J.J. McCarthy was far from perfect coming out of college. But things got worse as time went on. How could things have gone so wrong? If you’re looking for a Thanksgiving blame pie, you might need two to have enough to go around.

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