An empty feeling loss
The Vikings left a long list of questions after they weren't able to follow up on a big win last week
By Matthew Coller
MINNEAPOLIS — If you weren’t there to see it, you wouldn’t have believed it. Eight false starts? That has to be a typo. Did the NFL’s stat system freeze up? There is no way on Roger Goodell’s green turf that a home team committed eight false start penalties in a single afternoon.
Like telling the younger generation about the Halloween storm of ‘91 or the time Josh Freeman threw a football and hit the moon, The False Start Game will go down in Viking lore as one of the strangest things we’ve seen from a franchise full of oddities.
In the locker room and podium following the game, some attempted to explain it.
— “They were making ‘move’ calls up front and sometimes it sounded like it could be JJ saying ‘hut’ but they were making move calls and you’d see them stem [move] and they were trying to get [us] to jump,” running back Aaron Jones said.
— “A couple of them came from when we were motioning from one side to the other and there was a little bit more of a hard count emphasis by JJ at certain times,” head coach Kevin O’Connell said. “We have multiple cadences and guys have had not a very large issue with the cadence this year. JJ’s first start post-injury was last week so we didn’t have a lot of cadence in Detroit so whatever was unearthed today needs to get fixed immediately.
Some attempted to take blame for it.
— “I take full responsibility for the pre-snap procedural penalties,” JJ McCarthy said.
— “We have to operate better as a unit,” tackle Brian O’Neill said. “I’ll take it upon myself to make sure we get it fixed as a unit.”
Some were just perplexed.
“Going into the game, it’s a focus that we put on ourselves, so we have to lock in more and understand and communicate with the cadence and make sure everybody is on the same page,” Justin Jefferson said. “Hearing JJ call the snap count in the huddle, locking in and go execute the plays. There’s nothing too difficult about it.”
Whatever the reason, the penalties put the Vikings in constant situations where they were forced to throw and McCarthy finished with 20 completions on 42 attempts for 258 yards. That’s nowhere near the blueprint to win with a “rookie” quarterback.
Plenty of other things that didn’t fit the blueprint happened too. McCarthy threw two interceptions. Myles Price fumbled a kickoff. Aaron Jones and Jordan Mason added up to only 13 carries. Jefferson and Jordan Addison added up to only 72 yards on 23 targets.
And the unfortunate irony of it all was that the defense played really well, keeping Lamar Jackson to just 6.0 yards per pass attempt and 36 rushing yards and holding Derrick Henry to 3.8 yards per rush.
“There was probably two series where I thought we could have been better on and tightened some things up,” linebacker Blake Cashman said. “But for the most part I felt like we did a good job keeping us in the game. A lot of their success on offense came on a short field or on penalties on our end.”
Of course, we might just be looking at the trees rather than the forest. It’s really hard to win games when the quarterback completes under 50% of his passes. How hard? Before Week 10, there were 13 instances of a team completing sub-50% in a game and only two of those clubs won. In all of 2024, teams went 10-for-31 when under 50% completion percentage.
“I thought [McCarthy] was pretty dialed in early on, pretty good throw to Jalen Nailor on third down early on,” O’Connell said. “There were a lot of tipped balls for a variety of reasons…then as we were getting into no huddle trying to make our way back from two scores, we may have made the play on third or fourth down to convert but some of those early down plays where he can be a little more pitch-and-catch on some of those opportunities.”
Slice it whatever way you want, McCarthy walked out of his second home start with a Completion Percentage Over Expected of negative-12.2%, a QBR of 18.7 and QB rating of 54.5. None of that is remotely good enough to win.
Here is the part where we say it wasn’t all his fault.
It did not seem that Jefferson was in his usual Jefferson form. There was a near touchdown pass that we usually expect him to catch and on the interception, he walked behind Marlon Humphry rather than chasing him. It was uncharacteristic of one of the never-say-die players in the NFL.
“I feel like I was OK physically but the ball didn’t find my hands today,” Jefferson said. “That’s part of football and our life….gotta make the most of those opportunities.”
In terms of Jefferson working with McCarthy, they have now played four games together and the superstar receiver has just 17 receptions for 209 yards. On average that’s 4.3 catches for 52.3 yards per game — nowhere near expectation.
How can Jefferson help the young QB get through the rocky moments?
“Giving him motivation to keep fighting and not let the bad plays or negative plays to effect him in any way,” Jefferson said. “It falls on us as a whole offense. The pre-snap penalties, not executing plays to their fullest…me, myself, I have to play better. Fighting off contact and catching a ball at the end of the day.”
If you were on any social media platform on Sunday, you probably caught a waterfall of second guessing for O’Connell as well.
Run more. Throw more short passes. Don’t put so much on JJ’s plate.
The main fixation of criticism centered around several times where the Vikings had third or fourth-and-short and they decided to pass — or heave. O’Connell explained that he liked the third-and-1 look on third down that turned into a game-changing interception in which Jefferson fell down. Another instance was in the third quarter when the Vikings were down 19-10 and he threw on third-and-2 and fourth-and-2, both incomplete, turnover on downs.
Throwing in short yardage situations has not been successful for the Vikings ever in the KOC era. Entering Sunday’s game, the Vikings had run the second most passes on third/fourth and three or fewer yards to go since 2022 (KC has more) and have the third lowest conversion percentage in the NFL (48.1%), per Pro-Football Reference.
At some point, it’s not just a matter of questioning the decision after seeing the result.
In terms of putting so much on McCarthy’s plate, the run-pass ratio isn’t exactly fair to use in this instance since they threw many of those passes when desperately trying to get back in the game. However, when his time-to-throw was the third slowest in the league on Sunday (per NFLNextGen) and the fifth slowest in Week 9 and the slowest in Week 2 and the 9th slowest in Week 1, there is a pretty clear trend, even if some of that is caused by scrambling.
Since Sam Darnold was one of the slowest snap-to-throw QBs in the NFL last year, it doesn’t look like a fluke that McCarthy keeps ending up at the bottom of that list. Usually the first step to solving problems is...
Anyway, it did not feel like any progress was made on Sunday. It did not feel like McCarthy took steps forward or the offense got sharper or the chemistry grew closer or the belief got stronger. Those things can still happen in a loss, but not this kind of loss.
This one was full of regret and regression.
That doesn’t mean the season is over. They play the Chicago Bears next week with a chance to get back to .500.
A victory keeps the door open. But it’s a very difficult trek if they are even going to finish with a winning record. The Vikings will have to take five of their last eight to get there and likely six of their last eight to make the playoffs. They have four division games. When the entire season has been a yo-yo, it’s tough to see a path where that happens after giving away a winnable game on Sunday.
One thing we can’t say for sure is what this game means for McCarthy. There QB with the worst quarterback rating through four games in the last 25 years turned out to be very good (Alex Smith). The sample size isn’t big enough to start making sweeping statements. Patience is impossible in football but maybe that’s the place it’s most virtuous.
What we can say is that if the team plays like this going forward, even a routine amount of young QB roller coaster is certainly going to land them at home watching in January. That’s not where they expected to be. They were supposed to be built and coached well enough to smooth out the hot and cold moments. They have eight games to prove that’s the case because after Sunday’s loss they are sitting in 10th with one impressive victory under their belt in nine games.
Super frustrating game for a lot of reasons. It was a winnable game even if they did not outplay their opponent like they did in the eagles game. The return fumble, which was due the way that Myles has played, might have been tough to recover from, but I still feel like they win the game if they just run the fricking ball on short yardage and bring down McCarthy’s average depth of target a couple of clicks. The stats are there staring them in the face, they brought in a whole slew of players that seemed specifically geared toward running the ball in short yardage situations, and he still can’t bring himself to do it. Send KOC to passers anonymous. He can’t help himself.
Absolutely 💯 nauseated. Great article Mathew 👏