JJ McCarthy has the answers, needs the execution
McCarthy talked with reporters on Wednesday about the challenge of learning how to play QB on the fly
By Matthew Coller
EAGAN — You have to appreciate the fact that Kevin O’Connell has put us all through Quarterback Mechanics University this year. He hasn’t tried to hide the things that JJ McCarthy must improve in order to be a consistent thrower and we’ve all learned a lot more about the development process because of it.
On Wednesday, O’Connell answered a couple of common questions regarding McCarthy’s technique that have been on everyone’s mind since Sunday’s tough outing against the Chicago Bears. The first was about his leg swinging violently forward on his follow through.
“It’s something that some throwers historically have,” O’Connell said. “But to me, it’s the times where it can be credited to due to a lack of foundation and balance more so than the than the torque that he’s generating. I think there’s a a middle ground there that we’re working towards. And we’ve seen from kind of a smooth rhythm standpoint that I think is what we’re hunting a little bit more on a snap-to-snap basis.”
O’Connell noted that they are emphasizing throwing from a more “comfortable base” at 80% velocity rather than the 100% that tends to result in the leg whipping around his body. They are looking for more catch-and-run friendly balls.
Makes sense.
The other element of McCarthy’s passing that O’Connell addressed was pocket presence. At times we have seen the young QB step up into the pocket aggressively, which has caused some batted balls.
The Vikings’ head coach opined about what McCarthy must do in order to navigate the pocket better, pointing to the greatest QB of all time as an example.
“I was talking to Tom Brady about this last week when we got a chance to catch up before the game — a messy pocket doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a broken pocket and your ability to find…safe space within the pocket to exhaust that 1-1.5 more seconds while a pattern or a play expresses itself is what made him the greatest of all time doing it,” O’Connell said. “How many more times are we going to show his 40-yard dash from the combine? What we need to show is the pocket movement within a progression and he’s working [reads] one-to-two-to-three-to-four and ability to throw the ball anywhere at any time based upon his lower half kind of being his guiding force.”
O’Connell said that McCarthy’s athleticism has been on display during games — speed, quickness, agility, scrambling — but it’s about harnessing that athleticism into more controlled movements “to be able to keep that athletic base progressing through a down without needing to move too far up into trouble.”
If we put together all the technical information that we’ve gathered from O’Connell press conferences and radio appearances recently, we can come up with a pretty clear conclusion that much of the struggles are based around the consistency of what he’s doing with his feet. That seems to be combined with him trying too hard at times.
The question, of course, is whether all of this is fixable.
ESPN’s resident NFL QB analyst Dan Orlovsky did an extensive breakdown on NFL Live of some of the same issues that KOC has laid out and he answered that very question.
“It’s concerning but I’m a little bit more encouraged because I think those are correctable things,” Orlovsky said. “I think two years of injuries are a little bit attached to this.”
The reality is that it’s now on McCarthy’s shoulders to fix it. KOC can QB whisper and the ex-QBs on TV can break it down all day but nobody else can throw the ball for him.
On Wednesday, McCarthy was open about how much NFL style quarterback play is different from anything that he had done at Michigan and how far missing last year set him back.
“It’s very new,” he said. “Coming in here, I was taught how to play quarterback in a very different way. And that’s expected going into the league, going into any new team, any new system. But at the end of the day, it was really just the injuries that I felt like kind of took away all those reps in the constant repetition to make those a habit and make them ‘concrete’ like KOC talks about.”
The second-year QB ran down the things that he feels like are correctable.
“I know what I’m getting, but let the rhythm of the play play out,” he said. “Don’t be getting to that answer too quick because it’s timing and rhythm of the concepts and the defenses. And just decision making, understanding the situation of the game, not just the concept that I’m trying to execute.”
He used the example of taking a shot to the end zone and throwing an interception when they were already in scoring position and he didn’t need to take a big risk.
McCarthy said that he has to give himself “grace” and have patience when it comes to the development process but added, “especially playing at the level of the National Football League, the urgency to it is something very important.”
One of the reasons that he was drafted was the work ethic and coachability that he displayed in college so it isn’t surprising that McCarthy is not shying away from the coaching points. He realizes that fixing the problems is going to take time and that there isn’t a lot of time to do it.
The million dollar question is: How long is that going to take?
“I feel like it’s really close,” McCarthy said.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Purple Insider to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.