A year ago on Tuesday, Minnesota Vikings quarterback J.J. McCarthy led a fourth-quarter comeback in his first NFL start on his way to winning NFC Offensive Player of the Week. What a long, strange trip it has been since, through multiple injuries, all the way to trade rumors and legitimate talk about his spot on the depth chart.
All indications have been Carson Wentz will be, and he should be, Kyler Murray's primary backup. With his comments about the dynamic with Murray in the quarterback room back in June, McCarthy immediately signaled to the coaching staff how he'd handle being the backup.
Which is to say, not well, in terms of having a relationship with and helping the man who was preordained to unseat him as the starter. An injury narrative around the preseason finale was subsequently debunked by general manager Nolan Teasley, inviting more questions about the situation.
However, Teasley was broadly not ready to throw in the towel on McCarthy.
Minnesota Vikings are (finally) done with their J.J. McCarthy facade
It took way too long for head coach Kevin O'Connell to be asked who the second quarterback will be for Sunday's game against the Green Bay Packers during his Wednesday press conference. But he answered the question in expected fashion.
"Carson [Wentz] will be the backup on Sunday. J.J. [McCarthy] will obviously be the third guy.
Really, I'm looking at that right now as a week-to-week thing. I think Carson, he's got almost 100 career starts. What he was able to do last year, from a standpoint of very limited repetition but being able to apply a career's worth of experience, that's kind of what you need to do as a backup quarterback, especially early on when so much of the emphasis is going to be on getting Kyler as comfortable as we can possibly get him.
...I want to make it week-to-week, so when we feel like we need to declare something different, we can and we will. But this gives us the best chance to win this Sunday based upon how the game goes."
As it has become inevitable to happen, there have been easy questions about how McCarthy might handle being the No. 3 quarterback. It's also hard to see how he or the team benefits from him being in that role.
Along with pointing to a week-to-week assessment regarding who the QB2 will be, O'Connell went on to say McCarthy is "still two snaps away" from having to play.
Of course, for Sunday and any other game, he's the No. 3 quarterback; that would be in a disaster scenario where Murray and Wentz were both injured and unable to play.
So McCarthy will dress on Sunday, but he will likely be listed among the inactives as the emergency third quarterback. What it will take for him to usurp Wentz and be the primary backup in a given week is unclear, at best, but it's hard to see it coming to fruition.
The facade the Vikings tried to maintain with McCarthy over the last six months was always flimsy. He was never a legit threat to Murray for the starting job, and Wentz surely didn't re-sign way back in March, content to just be the No. 3 quarterback this year.
Ideally, the Vikings can eventually find a trade suitor for McCarthy, take the 'L,' and put the entire situation to bed. Propping up his trade value, like O'Connell may still be trying to, is par for the course.
But propping McCarthy up in any capacity as a quarterback has a "Weekend at Bernie's" vibe now, with O'Connell and Teasley playing the roles Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman played in the movie.
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