The 2025 season couldn’t have gone worse for J.J. McCarthy. He struggled to stay on the field and completed only 57.4% of his passes, throwing for 11 touchdowns and 12 interceptions in 10 games. He became an Internet meme. Meanwhile, the quarterback he replaced, Sam Darnold, won the Super Bowl with his new team.
Although McCarthy showed signs of growth over the final month of the season, the Vikings still signed Kyler Murray in March. Because of how poorly McCarthy played throughout most of the season, it’s been easy to dismiss a potential quarterback competition. Kevin O’Connell has maintained throughout the offseason that he wants a more “competitive” room in 2026. Still, it’s easy to dismiss McCarthy’s candidacy based on the disastrous 2025 campaign.
However, there’s reason to believe this will at least present McCarthy with the opportunity to win the job. Last week, NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero told The Rich Eisen Show that he expects a “fair competition going in.”
“Contrary to popular opinion and all the memes, J.J. McCarthy’s career to this point has not been an abject, unqualified failure,” Pelissero said adamantly. “He’s not stayed healthy enough. He’s not been available enough. He’s not been consistent enough.
“There’s enough there, and he’s young enough that they’re not just going to punt on him,” Pelissero continued. “If this were just, it’s Kyler’s job, and J.J. is competing with Carson Wentz to be the two, you would have traded J.J.”
It may be tough to see that there is, indeed, “enough there.” Still, McCarthy’s best game of the season was Week 9 in Detroit. The Vikings had lost their previous five meetings against the Lions, none as bad as their Week 18 loss last year, where Darnold had his worst game in Minnesota.
“You can’t go back and watch him play in Detroit last year after a six-week layoff because of a high ankle sprain, watch him play against the Lions, and go, ‘This guy can’t play in the NFL,’” Pelissero told Eisen. “He was good that day.”
McCarthy’s stat line was modest that day, completing 14 of 25 passes for 143 yards. But he threw two touchdowns, both coming one play after converting third-and-long conversions to extend the drive. He added a nine-yard rushing touchdown, this time on third-and-eight, to give the Vikings a 24-14 lead with 6:04 to play in the third quarter.
McCarthy iced the game with a 16-yard rope to Jalen Nailor on third-and-five, giving Minnesota its first victory over the Lions since Week 3 of the 2022 season.
For McCarthy, who was diagnosed with ADHD, he was perhaps at his most comfortable playing in the hostile Ford Field environment.
“People with ADHD, they find calm in the chaos and chaos in the calm,” McCarthy said last April. “I’ve always felt, ever since I was a kid, just any competitive environment I was in, I felt like I was at home. Playing at Michigan, there’s 110,000 [people], and you’re at one of the most prominent universities out there. That’s where I feel most comfortable, is when the lights are the brightest, the stage is the biggest stage out there. And I know it’s going to be a lot more of that to come.”
The win was McCarthy’s second victory in three starts. His first win came in Week 1 at Soldier Field, when a spectacular fourth-quarter rally helped the Vikings beat the Bears 27-24 after trailing 17-6 entering the final 15 minutes. He won the NFC Offensive Player of the Week for his performance.
Squashed in the middle of those two wins was an ugly home debut in Week 2. McCarthy, who missed a day of practice that week because of the birth of his son, entered the game riding the momentum of the thrilling comeback against the Bears.
Whether it was emotion, expectations, or simply a quarterback still learning the speed of the NFL, McCarthy looked out of sync from the opening drive. He completed only 11 of 21 passes for 158 yards, throwing two interceptions and fumbling three times (losing one).
He lost that calmness he found in the raucous environments at Soldier Field and Ford Field inside U.S. Bank Stadium. When the circumstances should have been most ideal, McCarthy appeared overhyped, overstimulated, and in over his head.
It may have been more apparent in training camp that McCarthy wasn’t ready for the starting role had there been more competition in the quarterback room. Sam Howell was the only legitimate competition, acquired from the Seattle Seahawks via a trade on Day 3 of the draft. Howell proved ineffective in camp and in the preseason, and the Vikings traded him to the Philadelphia Eagles shortly before the regular season.
A failure to secure a legitimate QB2 may have taken the pressure off McCarthy heading into the offseason, inadvertently allowing him to create chaos in the calm. His NFL.com scouting report coming out of college from draft analyst Lance Zeurlein states McCarthy “is confident and seems to have the ability to take slights and digest [them] as competitive fuel,” later adding McCarthy “plays with a chip on his shoulder and intensifies focus when needed.”
Does that mean McCarthy loses focus without competition? Did off-field events affect his day-to-day, and what about the mental toll that a quarterback who had lost three games in 66 starts in both high school and college took on him?
Some athletes need to learn how to handle success. McCarthy had never had to deal with losing before coming to the NFL. Add that into the stresses a 23-year-old already has, and it may highlight why the 2025 season went as poorly as it did for him.
McCarthy now has legitimate competition at quarterback. The Vikings signed Murray and are bringing Wentz back. There’s a good chance Murray wins the job anyway, because McCarthy’s own improvement won’t dictate Murray’s success in camp.
And maybe that’s what this ultimately is for McCarthy and O’Connell. Even if McCarthy can’t win the starting job, he can become a better quarterback than he was at the beginning and end of the 2025 season if he embraces the competition.
“I think he has perspective now,” O’Connell said of McCarthy after signing Murray. “In a lot of ways, those 10 games, albeit we’d all love to be talking about 30-plus games starting, he definitely has experience.
“He knows what it’s felt like to go in there and do some things that are really high level. Now, it’s just about consistency. It’s about being in a competitive situation, not necessarily any other reason [than to] continue the arc of trying to become the best player he can possibly become. I think he’s going to have a really good offseason, and I think it’s going to be a very competitive situation.”
There’s also the possibility that McCarthy starts at some point in the season, even if he doesn’t win the QB1 job. The Vikings have started at least three different quarterbacks in two of O’Connell’s four seasons, and Murray has missed 27 starts over the past four seasons.
That means McCarthy’s time to start could come because of injury, whether he’s prepared or not. He may not be able to control whether he’s the Week 1 starter. But how he embraces that challenge could help him turn into the quarterback who never relinquishes the job the next time he starts.
