Chip Scoggins: Vikings failed with J.J. McCarthy in evaluation, development and everything in between

Chip Scoggins, The Minnesota Star Tribune on Sep 28, 2026

Published in Football

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MINNEAPOLIS — Former Minnesota Twins owner Jim Pohlad once witnessed his team’s futility to start a season and gave a sobering assessment. He called it a “total system failure.”

Sorry, Jim. I’m going to borrow that line and apply it to the J.J. McCarthy “era” as a Vikings quarterback.

It was a total system failure.

Everyone failed. Everyone deserves a share of the blame, from ownership to player.

McCarthy’s name will now be etched alongside the biggest busts in team history after the team traded him Monday to the New York Giants for a fifth-round pick.

From No. 10 overall to a late-round draft pick in 2 1/2 years is quite a tumble on a “quarterback journey,” as Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell so often describes it.

In August 2024, O’Connell tried to reassure the fan base after McCarthy’s first injury that the organization had drafted its long-awaited franchise quarterback. Two years later, McCarthy is no longer part of the organization.

So what went wrong? Essentially everything.

Nobody gets skipped over when assigning blame to this failure.

Zygi and Mark Wilf signed off on the plan to pivot away from Sam Darnold after his career rejuvenation in 2024. Instead, the Vikings entrusted the job to an unproven youngster who was nowhere ready to lead an organization that ownership expects to win. That Darnold went to Seattle and won the Super Bowl made the optics even worse.

Former General Manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah’s draft failures got him fired. He’s not the first GM to make an evaluation mistake on a first-round quarterback, but this whiff is compounded by the Darnold decision.

People will debate how much influence O’Connell had in the McCarthy draft deliberations. Anyone who believes Adofo-Mensah went rogue and drafted McCarthy without O’Connell’s input and/or encouragement likely still believes in the tooth fairy.

Use some common sense. O’Connell is known as a quarterback guru. That part of his resume made him an attractive head coach candidate. He earned the “quarterback whisperer” nickname for his positive impact on Kirk Cousins and Darnold, among others.

Everyone acknowledged that Adofo-Mensah sought recommendations from coaches in personnel matters.

But we’re to believe that O’Connell had no say in McCarthy getting drafted?

Please.

McCarthy must take ownership of his lack of development too. His immaturity was on display last season as a first-time starter. He gave himself a nickname based on an alter ego — “nine” — before he had established himself as a reliable NFL starter.

He defied coaches’ instructions not to showboat into the end zone when scoring a touchdown. He did it anyway when he scored against the Dallas Cowboys in December.

He showed more immaturity in the Green Bay Packers game in the season finale. Already proving to be injury-prone, he lowered his shoulder into a defender along the sideline, then drew a foolish taunting penalty.

This divorce isn’t all that surprising, other than the Vikings opted to remove their No. 3 option knowing Kyler Murray and Carson Wentz have their own injury histories.

That underscores how much the organization wanted to close the book on McCarthy.

His time in Minnesota went as poorly as one could imagine.

A series of injuries disrupted his development. He looked skittish when he was on the field. The conversation regarding flaws in his mechanics last season was, frankly, embarrassing. The intense focus on that topic gave the appearance of someone new to the position, not an NFL quarterback.

McCarthy’s future with the team was all but sealed when not only did he lose the quarterback competition to Murray in training camp, but he tumbled to No. 3 on the depth chart. That was a clear sign of the organization’s opinion of him.

Maybe McCarthy will find his footing with a different organization. His tenure here short-circuited almost from the beginning. Not one person is to blame for that. All the key stakeholders had a hand in the mess.

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