Is this how JJ McCarthy is going to be covered?

Already it seems that national media hosts are planting their flags on McCarthy. Prepare yourselves for the takes to heat up

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By Matthew Coller

I have to make a confession: Once upon a time, I allowed myself to be trolled on the internet. I know, it’s shameful. Sad. Embarrassing. But it’s true. A few years ago, if I saw some engagement-farming hot take, I felt the need to dunk on it. It wasn’t until the last couple of years that I realized that’s how those people win. Even if you respond with something thoughtful, all you are doing is spreading the troll job and making the problem worse.

It is much easier to ignore engagement farming these days too. When Twitter turned into X, it boosted the craziest possible people who spend all day firing out nonsense like SHEDEUR SANDERS IS THE NEXT JOE MONTANA PROVE ME WRONG. There are still some artful farmers out there, folks that come across as genuinely making an argument for something but going much farther with their take than any rational reporter or media person would be willing to go. Their statements aren’t absurd on their face, just way too confident to be rational.

JJ McCarthy and the 2025 Vikings are catnip for artful engagement farmers.

Because we don’t yet know anything about how McCarthy is going to play, he can be anything that any talk host or analyst wants him to be. If you want to plant your flag and argue that McCarthy is going to be a top-five quarterback, nobody can prove that you’re wrong and because Sam Darnold just played at a top-10 level with Justin Jefferson, Jordan Addison and Kevin O’Connell, it doesn’t seem utterly ridiculous that he could play outstanding football right away.

On the other side of that, since we have never seen McCarthy play, anybody can argue that he isn’t going to be as good as Darnold. If you go back to his time at Michigan, where he was not the main driver of the offense, the argument doesn’t sound too preposterous to say that he isn’t going to be good enough to take the Vikings very far.

The reason I bring this up is that I spotted a clip of FOX host Colin Cowherd saying, “JJ McCarthy is closer to Jaxon Dart than he is Jayden Daniels.” The tweet had hundreds of replies with a bunch of accounts arguing with him and each other. Vikings fans, taking the bait, were going after Cowherd and other teams’ fan bases were saying that McCarthy stinks.

Nothing out of the ordinary. Cowherd is an OG in the DEBATE MY TAKE world. He is as crafty as it gets when it comes to planting flags early and going ride-or-die on those opinions. He’s a smart guy though and doesn’t do it in a cartoonish fashion, so it’s not like Skip Bayless, who’s much easier to ignore.

Last year Cowherd seemed to love Sam Darnold’s rise. Cowherd has been on his side since the beginning, so that must have been a boon for him to finally see that old failed take get resurrected. It seems that the Vikings moving on from Darnold has inspired him to be an anti-McCarthy guy.

Cowherd is clever, of course. I’m sure that he understands regression and has a copy of the Vikings schedule. He knows that repeating a 14-win season is near impossible even if you have Peyton Manning and first-year quarterbacks need an adjustment period. It’s certain that he’s familiar with the number of times the Vikings have followed a great season with a clunker where everything goes sideways. As long as they aren’t as good as they were with Darnold, he can be right.

Let’s get back to Cowherd’s statement and then the point. I have no idea what the heck it’s supposed to mean to say that McCarthy is closer to Dart than Daniels. We don’t know what Dart is going to be either. He wasn’t anywhere near the same level of prospect as McCarthy, otherwise he would have been taken much, much higher with all of the QB-needy teams in this year’s draft. And nobody thinks that McCarthy is going to play football like Daniels because they are two very different quarterbacks. Does the Dart thing mean that he’s going to be a physically limited player who might have a chance to play within the system but can’t elevate a team?

There will probably be a lot of folks who say that about McCarthy because they haven’t seen him since Michigan. During training camp and preseason last year, he didn’t look like a game manager. He showed well above average arm strength and playmaking ability that he only was allowed to use occasionally under Jim Harbaugh. He was pushing for first-team reps behind a QB who ultimately won 14 games.

It’s also a pretty important data point that the Coach of the Year decided to stick with the plan and roll with McCarthy. If Kevin O’Connell felt like he hadn’t seen enough from McCarthy last year or behind the scenes during the 2024 season to trust him to take a stacked win-now team to the promised land, then the Vikings would have franchised tagged Darnold and let him take another swing at it this year.

This Vikings leadership group has earned a lot of benefit-of-the-doubt points over the last three seasons, whether it be their ability to build a roster, scheme a defense or coach up a quarterback. O’Connell identifying Darnold as a guy that could be much better than his previous performance provides a lot of credibility when making this decision. If he thought that he could only be a middling game manager, then he would have stuck with the game-breaking, gunslinging Darnold.

The most rational opinion on McCarthy is a tough one to create viral sports entertainment with. He has a better chance than almost any first-year quarterback of succeeding because of his supporting cast, coaching and the experience he got last year and the Vikings made a good bet that they could increase the roster strength enough around him to give themselves a better chance to win in the postseason even if there’s some bumps along the way with McCarthy.

Who’s going to click that take?

Now to the point. Cowherd isn’t doing anything wrong. Shows like that aren’t built to have detailed, in-depth reporting. They are meant to get a conversation going and build some tension and passion between the host, his audience and the guests. Going out on a ledge is usually the way to do that. But what I’m curious about is whether this type of thing is going to be the trend in the national media as it pertains to McCarthy. Is he going to be an A-block debate topic every day this summer and into the season?

It would make sense if we saw a lot of “DO U BELIEVE IN JJ MCCARTHY???” graphics across the bottom of the screen in the coming months. Because we all saw it coming from miles away, it didn’t seem all that bold for the Vikings to move on from Darnold but it’s very rare historically that a team would move on from a 35-touchdown, 14-win quarterback, no matter what happened in the playoffs. If you plug Darnold’s season into Pro-Football Reference and look for comparable years, you find guys like Joe Burrow (2022), Dak Prescott (2023), Carson Palmer (2015) and Tom Brady (2015). If we didn’t understand the context, it would seem pretty darn wild to let him go. That alone starts a debate.

McCarthy was also a debatable prospect last year too. He didn’t have massive numbers to lean on, so the analysts who loved him had to use a microscope instead of sunglasses to see why he was top-10 caliber and the analysts who weren’t buying it had plenty of reason for skepticism.

The other part of McCarthy becoming a debate topic is that the Vikings are relevant again. Welcome back to the party! It has been a long time since they have been a front-page team. Over the years there were some moments where they were at the forefront of the national discussion but it usually involved an offseason move. The QB decision after 2023, Justin Jefferson’s contract etc. Even throughout the year in 2024 they couldn’t buy an argument between two ESPN analysts. They were a nice story but not one that moved the needle.

The 2018 season was probably the last time they were in this seat. That’s when the focus of attention was “Super Bowl or Bust” after they paid Kirk Cousins the most guaranteed money of any player in NFL history at the time. Even then, I can’t recall a lot of folks in the national spotlight arguing that the Vikings should have kept Case Keenum over taking the big swing with Cousins. They were talked about more as a team with high expectations than a team caught in the shouty-show crossfire. (Shoutout to my friends at the Check the Mic podcast for the term shouty show).

In general, the fact that they are here says a lot about how far they have come from just-another-team-in-the-league status a few years ago. You don’t get to be a take-artist’s dream unless you give folks a reason or you are the Jets/Cowboys/Bears. We can’t lose sight of how dark the situation seemed when O’Connell and Kwesi Adofo-Mensah arrived. They had a middling roster and no easy way out. Over the last three years, they have torn it down and built it back up to the point where McCarthy has everything in place — and they did it without going to the bottom.

There is also the risk that it doesn’t work. Without any tension within a story, it doesn’t have juice in discussion. The fact that they are going to be the target of hot takes and debates also is a reminder that there is a chance that they didn’t make the right call.

McCarthy strikes you as the type of person who can handle this just fine. He was at Michigan when his head coach got suspended amidst an enormous scandal and then went on to win the national championship. But there is nothing like the pressure cooker of the NFL. College football drama is a walk around one of the 10,000 lakes in comparison to getting caught up in the crosshairs of the NFL media cycle. It’s inescapable unless you are Andrew Luck, who famously kept a flip phone. Cousins talked about trying to emulate that and ultimately going back to modern technology, minus a few key apps.

There is no blocking out the noise these days. If something goes sideways, every single person in the building is feeling it and criticism from the biggest outlets is going to be felt everywhere. A bold decision like going to McCarthy will be second guessed to high heaven if it doesn’t work right away.

Is he ready for that? McCarthy hasn’t been criticized ever. How will he deal with that if everything doesn’t go super smoothly right from the beginning? It’s a major part of the adjustment from college to the NFL. There’s no preparing for it.

So it might get loud. It might be impossible to avoid the engagement farmers. They are still thriving because it is so tough to stay away. But all it means is that you made it to one of the most interesting times in recent Vikings history. After all the years of projecting .500 seasons and having one mid-June analyst try to make a Kirk-for-MVP argument, the franchise has arrived at a time where they are good enough and interesting enough to belong here. That’s going to come along with pressure and a lot of TV time. We’ll find out if they are ready — and if we are ready — for the spotlight.

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