I’ve never played the sport of football at a high level. I’ve never really played the sport of football at what you’d consider a medium level. Like a lot of folks, I’ve spent a lot of time watching football over the course of my life and would like to think that I’ve learned a few things along the way. So, when I see things regarding our Minnesota Vikings that I find confusing, I do what I can to try to relate them back to my own life experiences in an effort to understand them.
Yesterday, as the Vikings were thumping the Washington Commanders 31-0 just a week after being the thumpees against the Seattle Seahawks, we saw much-maligned second-year quarterback J.J. McCarthy have what was, by far, the best game of his young career. He was making good decisions, getting the football out quickly and accurately, and had the first game of his career where he didn’t turn the ball over at least once. He only had two completions of 20 yards or longer and only had 163 yards passing, but three of his completions went for touchdowns and he played a big role in engineering a 19-play, 98-yard touchdown drive that ate up twelve minutes of game time.
When the news broke earlier in the week that McCarthy had cleared concussion protocol and would get the start against the Commanders, the word was circulating that the Vikings were going to “simplify” the offense in order to get McCarthy more comfortable. Perhaps that’s why things looked the way they did on Sunday, and if that’s the case, the question that everyone should be asking is. . .why did it take so long?
Back in the late 20th Century when I was in high school, our English classes took part in something called “Accelerated Reader.” I think it still exists today, and I’m not sure if it works in the same way it did then, but the gist of it was that you would read books and take multiple choice tests on them in order to accumulate points. Longer, more complex books were worth more points, and the better you scored on the test, the more points you got. If you failed the test for whatever reason, you got no points and you couldn’t go back and redo the test for that particular book.
Our English teacher mandated that we needed to have a certain number of Accelerated Reader points by the end of the year, or else we’d fail the class. Now, my sophomore year, I slacked off a bit and had to go through a bit of a rush at the end of the year to get all of my points. I did it, but it was awful, and I didn’t want to do that again. When my junior year started, I thought I’d be super slick and try to get things done early. So, I decided I was going to read a terrible, awful book called Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. And not only was I going to do it, I was going to do it in a week. Then, once I got that out of the way, I could relax a little bit and not have to stress the rest of the year.
So, I devoted every spare minute I had over the course of a week to reading this book. Just marathon sessions, page after page, cramming that thing into my brain. I finished the book on a Sunday afternoon, went in on Monday morning, sat down at the computer, and took the exam.
I absolutely bombed the hell out of that test. Seriously, it was the 2000 NFC Championship Game of reading comprehension exams. Had the Apple IIe computer I took that test on been capable of mockery, it would have sounded like a Comedy Central roast. If the Accelerated Reader software had been able to give me negative points, I absolutely would have been in the hole.
Now. . .the fact that I failed in this endeavor didn’t mean that I couldn’t read. It didn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy reading. It didn’t mean that I couldn’t comprehend what I was reading.
What it meant was that my approach to the task at hand was faulty and that it needed to be changed.
So, I did what I probably should have done all along and read books that were shorter and easier to manage. Sure, they were worth fewer points, but they were easier to absorb and, when I took the test, I actually got points for taking them rather than getting nothing. It gave me something to build on rather than getting nothing and being frustrated. At the end of the day, I could have saved myself a lot of stress and other issues if I had just done that in the first place.
This is what the Vikings and Kevin O’Connell should have been doing with J.J. McCarthy all along. They spent the offseason investing in the run game by bringing in Jordan Mason and attempting to invest in the offensive line, and then they let McCarthy (and Max Brosmer, to some extent) hang back and run an offense that’s based on long-developing routes while the injuries on that offensive line made it difficult to keep them protected.
What we saw on Sunday against the Commanders is what we should have been seeing all season long, and I don’t know why it took until Week 14 to make this shift. Let the young quarterback get the basics of an NFL offense down first, let him adjust to the speed of the game, and then add some of the more complex things in to it as the season progresses. Then, maybe, over the summer you can add a bigger project to work on so that when you get to Training Camp next year, you can start adding that to your repitoire.
(Not Wuthering Heights, though. Never subject anyone to that. Ever.)
And, no, I don’t care that it was “just the Commanders.” It was just a week ago that the Denver Broncos, who would be the #1 seed in the AFC playoffs if the season ended today, needed overtime to defeat that same Commanders team at home (without Jayden Daniels), and would have lost to those Commanders if Marcus Mariota’s two-point conversion pass in overtime would have been a little better. So, no, the “just the Commanders” argument doesn’t hold any water here.
Games like what we saw on Sunday are why I’ve been saying all along, both here and on social media, that it’s way too early to be completely “out” on J.J. McCarthy. Between the injuries and the flaws in the way his development has been handled thus far, nobody really knows what the Vikings have in him at this point. I’m hoping that Sunday is the start of the upward swing for McCarthy, but we won’t know for sure until we see him start stacking a couple of consistent, solid starts together.
See More:
