O’Connell was asked about a potential timeline for McCarthy.
The first priority, he said, is getting the 2024 No. 10 overall draft pick healthy.
“No matter how much I believe J.J. would go out there and tough it out today, tomorrow, if we asked him to. To me, at this point in a very young career, his mobility is one of his weapons that has clearly already shown to be something that’s a positive for him, so we want to make sure he’s healthy and allow this to be something that we can put in the rearview mirror and continue on with where he’s at,” he expressed.
“He responded well to treatment early on,” O’Connell continued, adding that McCarthy is out of the boot he wore last week to provide stability and limit mobility. “Now it just becomes the phase of high-ankle kind of rehab that we’re gonna hopefully be able to get him back up to speed pretty quickly.”
After the health hurdle is cleared, O’Connell said the Vikings would not “just throw him out there and say, ‘Hey, go figure it out.’ “
“I think we saw, as phenomenal as he was getting prepared for the Atlanta game, he did miss practice that week (for the birth of his first child a few days after the win at Chicago), and when you’re in the phasing of building up the 10,000 reps and 10,000 hours of what it takes to play the position at a very high level, which we know J.J. McCarthy is going to do, you can’t cut corners on that,” O’Connell said.