When Minnesota Vikings fans thought back to the slog that was the 2025 season, the team’s poor quarterback play stood out repeatedly. J.J. McCarthy, who was billed as the franchise’s savior a year ago, never got his feet under him. The result was a 9-8 record.
Any time a team spends January on the couch instead of playing in games, there will be disappointment. But for McCarthy, it was taken to another level by an observation many fans had.
He looks like Christian Ponder!
If there’s one quarterback in Vikings history that you don’t want to be compared to, it’s Ponder. Many fans believed Ponder was a bad pick the moment the Vikings turned the card over to Roger Goodell during the 2011 draft. But McCarthy has played his way into a comparable situation, putting Kevin O’Connell in a position where he had to differentiate himself from his predecessors.
McCarthy’s current predicament is a quarterback battle with Kyler Murray. Anybody who watched the Vikings last season knows that quarterback depth is a good thing. Looking at O’Connell’s time in Minnesota, he’s watched his team go down to its No. 4 option (Jaren Hall) in 2023 and its No. 3 option (Max Brosmer) last season.
But to some, adding Murray feels like overkill. McCarthy is the highest-drafted quarterback in Vikings history. Even with his struggles, it still doesn’t feel like O’Connell has put him in a situation to succeed. While O’Connell has insisted McCarthy and Murray are in a competition, it’s felt like Murray has been at a major advantage. It wouldn’t be surprising if he pulled away in the first week of training camp.
Part of this is the nature of the National Football League, where roster spots are always up for grabs. But it’s also O’Connell ensuring he doesn’t end up as Leslie Frazier did with his handling of Ponder.
Going back 13 years, many of the concerns about McCarthy were true of Ponder. He had trouble handling pressure. His footwork was a mess. The infrastructure around him lifted him to a winning record and a playoff appearance in 2012, but it was almost done despite him. Adrian Peterson ran for over 2,000 yards and became the last non-quarterback to win the NFL’s Most Valuable Player Award.
Ponder had one of the best games of his career in a Week 17 win over the Green Bay Packers to earn a playoff spot, throwing for 234 yards and three touchdowns. However, he wasn’t available when the team needed him the following week, suffering a triceps injury that cleared the way for the dreaded “Joe Webb Game,” and a playoff loss at Lambeau Field.
Anyone who watched Ponder questioned whether he could become an effective quarterback. Still, the Vikings put up minimal resistance to the starting job the following season. They brought in Matt Cassel to back up Ponder, but it was clear the job was Ponder’s. It led to a dreadful start, during which Ponder completed just 59% of his passes for 691 yards, two touchdowns, and five interceptions in the first three games.
The Vikings lost all three of those games. Because the franchise demands that they be better than the Packers, the New York Jets, and the Cleveland Browns, it wasn’t a coincidence they pulled the plug on Ponder after a 31-27 loss to Cleveland at the Metrodome.
Cassel stepped in to make six starts the rest of the season, but the Vikings never got out of their early-season funk. They lost seven of their first eight games and finished the year with a 5-10-1 record, which led Minnesota to fire Frazier at season’s end.
The Vikings are currently in a situation similar to the one they faced in the summer of 2013. McCarthy flashed at times during his first year as a starter, but his inconsistencies were too evident to ignore. While it may be tempting to forge ahead and let McCarthy try to figure it out, O’Connell couldn’t just pull Derek Carr out of retirement or rely on Carson Wentz to be McCarthy’s main competition.
It’s also notable that as of last spring, O’Connell didn’t know what his future would hold. The Wilf family seemed to give O’Connell a vote of confidence when they didn’t fire him alongside general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah. But while it now seems like things would really have to go wrong for O’Connell to be fired next season, as he was part of the interview process that led to the hiring of Nolan Teasley, bringing in Murray was the best way to protect himself.
O’Connell has preached about a baseline of quarterback play, and Murray should be able to bring it. A former No. 1-overall pick, Murray has started 87 games in the NFL and given his team a chance to win every week.
His 38-48-1 record over seven years won’t inspire confidence among fans. But it is interesting that O’Connell, who fans stopped short of believing that he could turn a middle school quarterback into an NFL starter after Sam Darnold’s success in 2024, signed off on Murray. Perhaps it suggests that the Arizona Cardinals’ infrastructure was the reason for his failures.
In hindsight, Murray is the type of quarterback Frazier probably wishes had been available to challenge Ponder 13 years ago. It’s also the type of obstacle that McCarthy should overcome after a challenging first season as a starter.
That may not mean that McCarthy is destined to be Ponder, and he could get a chance to prove it at some point this season, given Murray’s injury history. But the situation is similar, which leads the Vikings to the high-stakes quarterback competition they’ll have during training camp.
