Kevin O’Connell Must Eat His Vegetables For J.J. McCarthy To Develop

With the Minnesota Vikings’ training camp entering its third week, the dominating storyline has been J.J. McCarthy‘s progress. You can’t have a conversation about the Vikings without asking, How does J.J. look?

The answer has been a mixed bag.

Every young quarterback has highs and lows, and since the pads came on last week, the defense has largely dominated practice. But McCarthy’s development is about more than completions and touchdowns. It’s about putting him on the best path for long-term success.

Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell has done his best to make sure McCarthy becomes the team’s next franchise quarterback. However, to ensure he grows up big and strong, KOC must eat his vegetables when the season begins.

You could dream up some bizarre intro where Brian Flores is screaming, Here comes the airplane! as O’Connell swats it away. However, the start of the 2025 season will go against his ethos as head coach. An offense built on hunting big plays downfield may need to be adjusted in the early months, which could make the Vikings a team that relies more on the running game and its defense.

The seeds are there for the defense to carry the load again this season. The Vikings return eight starters on defense from last season, which gives them plenty of experience in Flores’ scheme. Other young players, like Dallas Turner, also have another year to soak in the information, potentially setting the stage for a breakout campaign. The additions of Jonathan Allen, Javon Hargrave, Isaiah Rodgers, and even Jeff Okudah have some upside and could make Minnesota’s defense the team’s backbone.

Relying on the defense isn’t new in the O’Connell era. A 13-win season in 2022 was derailed when Ed Donatell’s defense couldn’t hold water in a paper cup. The Vikings won seven games despite major injuries to Justin Jefferson and Kirk Cousins, thanks in part to their defense outperforming expectations in 2023. And last year’s success was largely predicated on a defense that became one of the NFL’s best and lessened the need for Sam Darnold to put up 40 points a game.

Even as the defense has dominated practice to this point, it’s a true case of “iron sharpens iron,” with the Vikings testing McCarthy’s mettle before he makes his NFL debut at Soldier Field next month. But while the defense is something that O’Connell has been comfortable with, he’ll also have to lean on the running game.

A strong running game has negative connotations in Minnesota due to the end of the Mike Zimmer era. Zimmer always wanted to run the ball to control the time of possession, but it became a flawed strategy in his final years with the Vikings. Running Dalvin Cook into the ground was one factor that ultimately led to Zimmer’s dismissal. Still, it was also the decision to run in unusual situations, such as second-and-long or trailing by multiple possessions.

To this point, the Vikings haven’t repeated the flaws of late-Mike Zimmer football. But it’s because they haven’t been successful enough to make it happen.

O’Connell scraped together the remnants of Cook for a successful season in 2022, but he craved more efficiency. An attempt to make Alexander Mattison RB1 flopped in 2023, and the Vikings had something with Aaron Jones early in the 2024 season. But Jones’ effectiveness waned as the season wore on.

The same went for the offensive line. The decade-long Can He Play Guard? battle royale raged on through O’Connell’s first season, and Garrett Bradbury’s struggles in pass protection neutralized any advantage he provided in the running game. Some days, Minnesota’s offensive line would be maulers on the ground. On others, they’d be pushed around by bigger, stronger athletes.

It’s what’s made the running game O’Connell’s kryptonite as a head coach. The Vikings ranked 27th and 29th in rushing yards in their first two seasons. While they improved last year, they still ranked 19th, underwhelming in a division known for the black-and-blue colors it leaves its opponents after games.

While O’Connell doesn’t need to go full Zimmer, he knows that a strong running game could help his young quarterback, much like Daunte Culpepper admitted that Robert Smith‘s presence helped him when he took over as Vikings starter in 2000 after essentially redshirting his rookie year.

“It takes a lot of pressure off your quarterback anytime you can run the football,” Culpepper said in an interview with Adam Patrick of The Viking Age. “If [the Vikings] are smart, which I know they are, they’re going to make sure that the running game is solid. Because once your running game is solid, it opens up everything else.”

Those comments should reveal why the Vikings invested heavily in the ground game this offseason. Will Fries, Ryan Kelly, and Donovan Jackson should help an interior that teams pushed around toward the end of last offseason. Jordan Mason should help spell Aaron Jones and give opposing defenses another threat to worry about in the backfield.

There are some jokes to be had about McCarthy leaning on a ground game after starring in Jim Harbaugh’s ground-and-pound scheme at Michigan. But what those trolls aren’t mentioning is that McCarthy won a national title with that style of play.

It also doesn’t have to be permanent. If Minnesota’s ground game carries them through the first four to six weeks of the season, McCarthy can get comfortable and start throwing the ball downfield to O’Connell’s preference later in the year.

It’s not the Patrick Mahomes route to success, where he took the league by storm in 2018. But it’s something that will help O’Connell win games and not throw McCarthy completely into the fire.