On Sunday against the Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings quarterback J.J. McCarthy will start under center in a regular-season game for the sixth time in his entire NFL career.
In McCarthy's first five starts, he's had some good moments, and he's also had plenty of moments that most would expect from a 22-year-old who had no starting experience in the league until this season.
Typically, young quarterbacks in the NFL are given a bit of a grace period to go through some of the normal early-career struggles, especially those who were drafted in the first round. For whatever reason, however, that hasn't been the case for McCarthy.
It's starting to really feel like some people have been waiting with bated breath to point and tell everyone, "I told you so," as quickly as possible with the second-year Vikings quarterback.
Some recent comments from former NFL cornerback and current Prime Video analyst Richard Sherman are the latest example, as he apparently took offense to McCarthy speaking about his brain's neurological wiring earlier this week.
"If my quarterback's thinking about neurological pathways, then he's not going out there and executing. He's not thinking about, hey, who's the open receiver?' Go through my progressions. What defense are they playing? Et cetera, et cetera. It's almost like [he's] making excuses.
And not that the guy isn't a good player. I thought at Michigan he showed a really cool skill set, [as he was] able to execute a pro-style offense. But I thought he was limited. I thought he showed, 'Hey, I'm a game manager,' and that's what he is.
If you surround him with incredible talent, he can get you there. He can play mistake-free in
big games. But right now, he's limiting [the Vikings], and he's holding them back with big-time mistakes. He's missing by 10 yards.
Everybody's saying, 'Wait for him to develop.' This team doesn't have time to wait."
Why is it J.J. McCarthy's fault that the Minnesota Vikings miscalculated his development?
McCarthy has performed poorly in Minnesota's last two games against the Baltimore Ravens and Chicago Bears. No one is arguing against that.
But where was all of this criticism when he helped lead the Vikings to road victories over the Bears and Detroit Lions earlier this season by posting an average passer rating of 89.7 and accounting for a total of six touchdowns?
Those who criticize McCarthy will just claim that he got lucky in those two road victories over Chicago and Detroit, and that his play in the other three games is closer to the player that he really is.
Well, why can't it be the other way around? Why can't the bad performances just be blips in McCarthy's development, and the way he played against the Lions in Week 9 and the Bears in Week 1 be what people should actually expect from him during the majority of his NFL career?
Here's another question: why is McCarthy the only one receiving the blame for Minnesota's struggles this season? Vikings head coach Kevin O'Connell and his staff are just as much at fault for overestimating how good the young quarterback could be in his first season as the team's starter.
This isn't to say that Minnesota should have entered the season with a different starting quarterback, but it seems like McCarthy has turned out to be a lot more limited than O'Connell and the Vikings expected heading into the 2025 campaign.
It's almost as if he's looked like a player who missed his entire rookie year with Minnesota due to an injury, and that has made him more resemble an actual rookie this season instead of someone who is technically in his second year in the NFL.
But because the Vikings decided to, after a 14-win season in 2024, hand the keys over to a 22-year-old quarterback with no starting experience, it's all on him that the team has struggled to recapture the same success they had last year.
If we've learned anything after McCarthy's first five starts with Minnesota, it's that a lot of fans (including the person currently writing this) should have expected him to struggle more this season because of his inability to practice as a rookie, and most importantly, that the people getting paid to coach him in practice everyday should have already seen this coming instead of acting just as shocked by his play as all of us watching at home.