Vikings fans have waited a long time for this
As camp gets ready to start with JJ McCarthy as QB1, a look at how we got here and why fans are so amped up for this training camp
By Matthew Coller
When I walk through the metal detectors at TCO Performance Center on Wednesday, it will mark my ninth Minnesota Vikings training camp. I arrived in Minnesota to work for 1500ESPN in 2016 but I didn’t start the job until after camp had wrapped up. In fact, my first time ever on the air was with Patrick Reusse at the state fair, only moments after the Vikings sent a first-round pick to the Philadelphia Eagles for Sam Bradford. Welcome to covering the Vikings, right?
My first camp was 2017, the last year in Mankato. It was great to have gotten one whiff of what camp used to be like for the all-time Viking legends. It was also a remaining shred of the old timey atmosphere that NFL Films would put military marching music behind. It was gritty and chaotic. The team was also really good.
I learned to trust my instincts in camp because of 2017. As the blazing summer days went by, Bradford got better and better. Stefon Diggs, Adam Thielen and Jarius Wright were catching everything. The defense looked like an absolute monster. So did Dalvin Cook. The vibes were good. At one point, Bradford celebrated a touchdown by knocking down Mike Zimmer. Yes, Zim actually laughed and smiled. And despite Case Keenum struggling in practice, when he got in the first preseason game, he instantly had some magic to him. I’ll never have another first training camp. I’m glad it was 2017.
If there was a year that feels like a completely new beginning, however, it’s 2025.
While there are a lot of the same players from last year and even a handful from the previous regime, the 2025 Vikings feel completely new. The reason for that is JJ McCarthy’s arrival. It’s also because of the long road that it has taken for the Vikings to feel like they are seriously chasing a Super Bowl rather than entering training camp with hopes, dreams and prayers to be in the conversation.
Last year Kevin O’Connell went with the “nobody believes in us” rallying cry entering the season. In that instance, he was absolutely right. The Vikings’ over-under was 6.5 and most prognosticators had them finishing in last place in the NFC North.
At the same time, if you always have “nobody believes in us” narratives going into camp, you’re probably just not that good. Unfortunately the Vikings have been in NBIU mode at the start of camp for quite a long time. Go back to 2019. The Vikings had a strong yet dysfunctional 10-6 season that was highlighted by a playoff win against the New Orleans Saints in the Wild Card round. When they lost the following week in San Francisco, it marked the end of the squad Zimmer and Rick Spielman had built from (almost) scratch when Zim took over in 2014. They lost Xavier Rhodes, Linval Joseph, Everson Griffen and Trae Waynes to free agency and traded Stefon Diggs.
Since then, the Vikings have been trying to outrun the ghosts of 2019’s past. The Spielman-Zim attempt at a “competitive rebuild” went poorly when the defense collapsed in 2020. We sometimes talk about how the Vikings could have drafted Lamar Jackson in 2018 but in 2020 they also could have picked Super Bowl champ Jalen Hurts had they not elected to extend Cousins after 2019. In 2021, the entire bottom fell out — highlighted by Zim slamming an unsuspecting Kellen Mond in Green Bay — and the team collapsed under the weight of its head coach’s rage and frustration over the roster coming apart around an expensive QB contract. Two wasted years bumbling around the “in the hunt” graphic.
The best conversation I had about the 2022 season was with Brian Murphy. After they lost to the New York Giants in the playoffs, I asked him: Was it worth it? Murph started to say yes because the 13-win season with a roster formed mostly from the graveyard of the Zimmer era was pretty darn impressive and set a high cultural standard for O’Connell. But then Murph stopped himself and said, no, it was not worth winning 13 games when we all knew that group and quarterback just wasn’t good enough.
The last two seasons have been transition years. In 2023, nothing helped them move the franchise forward more than a fortuitous Achilles tear that sunk them out of the playoffs and into the No. 11 draft slot, allowing them to pick McCarthy. In 2024, a wildly-entertaining season ended in typical fashion. Last year was different than 2022 because we learned just how much KOC is capable of connecting with a quarterback and just how good Brian Flores is at identifying talent and just how right Kwesi Adofo-Mensah’s “competitive rebuild” path was for the roster.
Still, the same old result left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth and made it clear for the Vikings that it was best to stick with the plan from the outset and turn the franchise over to McCarthy. It doesn’t take an NFL history book to look around and that recently the NFC representatives in the Super Bowl have all been teams that had stacked rosters. Whether it was the 2018 Rams around Jared Goff on his rookie deal or the 2019 and 2023 49ers elevating quarterbacks or the 2022 and 2024 Eagles building behemoths in the trenches. That’s what they aimed to emulate. And now it looks like they have achieved that goal.
The roster was already good enough to win 14 games with its core of needle-moving players i.e. Justin Jefferson, Jonathan Greenard, Christian Darrisaw, Andrew Van Ginkel, TJ Hockenson, Jordan Addison, Aaron Jones, Blake Cashman etc. but it was missing a few key elements of the aforementioned Super Bowl reps. Specifically a physical presence up front, a nasty run game and QB pressure from the interior. They went into free agency this year and acquired every single one of those things.
So as training camp begins and the attention is entirely surrounding JJ McCarthy, it’s worth remembering that the hype for the 2025 Vikings isn’t just about its young quarterback. It’s also about a plan coming together over several years of taking down a roster that wasn’t good enough and building up a roster that can be good enough. It’s about following a path that has proven successful in other NFC cities. It’s a result of the decisions made by the GM and head coach to chase a Super Bowl by taking a “risk” and moving on from Cousins and Darnold and onto McCarthy because it’s actually much riskier to get stuck in the middle than it is to swing for the fences.
For fans that drop by TCO Performance Center to see McCarthy in action, it will be exciting to see the Next Big Thing. Everyone can go home from those sweaty camp practices in the stands with their own feelings on whether it’s going to work or not. As they bake in the sun, they can also appreciate the fresh air of a talented young quarterback with a stacked roster around him. No longer will fans look out onto the roster and wonder if the right guard can patchwork the offensive line or if the interior D-line has anyone who can get after the quarterback. Nobody will think that the Vikings didn’t give McCarthy enough coaching, receiving, blocking and even running with the addition of Jordan Mason.
When was the last time you could say stuff like that? Well, probably my first camp, in 2017.
The difference was that leading into camp the consensus was that the Vikings were a decent team with no real prospects of being a serious contender. This year they are getting much more buzz as everyone asks: “How good can McCarthy really be?”
Vikings fans paying attention to the NFL in recent years know that the days of needing to develop a quarterback for 3-5 years before he can lead a team deep into the playoffs are gone. Goff was in Year 3 in 2018. Hurts’ first Super Bowl came in Year 3. Purdy was in Year 2. Jayden Daniels took the Commanders to the NFC Championship game as a rookie.
The days of wait-until-next-year are done. They believed McCarthy was good enough to lead a Super Bowl-contending roster and fans are following suit with their expectations. And they should. They deserve to fall in love with a team from the start rather than being surprised by their competitiveness. It’s been a long, long time since that happened. Gosh, maybe 2015?
Of course, we can’t downplay the even larger context of McCarthy’s first camp. Few fan bases could argue that they have been more patient in waiting for a franchise quarterback than the Vikings. The only times that it appeared imminent in the last 30 years, knee injuries derailed the Franchise Quarterback concept. Since Fran Tarkenton, they have flirted with the possibility but never had it come to fruition — heck, even after Week 17 last year you could have convinced me that Sam Darnold might be that guy. There were a lot of times where Kirk looked like that guy. There were times were Jeff George or Case Keenum looked like that guy. But those were pipe dreams, not first-round QBs that were handpicked by the QB Whisperer himself.
So I’m not going to be the one who says you should temper expectations. The team isn’t doing that. Otherwise they wouldn’t have spent seven gazillion dollars in free agency. And you’ve done enough of that. This camp, it’s OK to go crazy with McCarthy fervor folks. Nobody ever knows how any of this is going to work out but this is the arrival of a new age where it actually makes sense that the Vikings could truly compete for a Super Bowl rather than hoping for a miracle. Don’t let anybody tell you that you have to wait and see. You’ve done enough waiting and seeing.
Warning: It will probably be some kinda ride. Off we go, into the future.
How many other teams have waited this long for a franchise quarterback? Most of the NFL fan base can never ever understand why Vikings fans are so hyped over JJ. He's OUR quarterback, not someone purchased from the used car lot.
I am officially on board the Vikings bandwagon. Win or lose, this is a solid team with a stacked roster.