Minnesota Vikings News and Links: Onward And Upward!

The JJ McCarthy trade was a shock. I mean, some folks thought it would happen but it is still a shock when it does. It is sad too. Sad for the Vikings team and for JJ. The team really wanted him to be the long term answer and injuries just kept getting in the way of putting game reps on tape. To me, it is as simple as that. The head coach and GM spoke about the trade and Teasley said one line that resonated with me. “Contracts are not infinite”. If the Vikings kept JJ through the season then trading

him in 2027 could be harder especially if he would not have received any game action. The Vikings saved about $4.66 million in total cash and cap space across the remaining portion of the 2026 season ($885,294) and the full 2027 season ($3,775,200). The Vikings will have to absorb $3,178,599 in remaining dead cap for 2027 due to his prorated rookie signing bonus. That extra 3.775M could come in handy.

I am not really upset about this situation even though it is a wasted draft pick (Brock Bowers would have been nice. Real nice!). The draft is a crap shoot and failed first round picks are not uncommon. The truth is that you miss every shot you do not take.

There is a lot of discussion about the team and specifically KOC letting JJ down or not developing him enough. It is a mystery how or why folks think this but what can you do? If the dude is unable to take real game reps, how can he be developed? Time was running out too. Next year is the last year of his rookie contract and picking up his 5th year option was not going to happen and still wont happen. I am not sure what more KOC could have done.

I am certain that JJ would not trade his time at Michigan and the National Championship for anything. But, did Harbuagh develop him enough for the NFL? He attempted 713 passes in college and 243 passes in the NFL regular season, for a combined total of 956 regular season pass attempts. Bo Nix attempted 1,988 in college and 1,272 in the NFL for a total of 3,260 attempts. Is 713 pass attempts enough in college? Others have done it (data from AI) …

FEWER THAN 600 ATTEMPTS:

Cam Newton (292 attempts): Played only one full season at Auburn before going No. 1 overall.
Trey Lance (318 attempts): Started only one full season at North Dakota State before being drafted 3rd overall.
Michael Vick (343 attempts): Played just two seasons at Virginia Tech in a highly run-heavy option offense.
Anthony Richardson (393 attempts): Started only 13 games at Florida before being taken 4th overall.
Mitch Trubisky (572 attempts): Was a one-year starter at North Carolina before being drafted 2nd overall.

CLOSE TO J.J. MCCARTHY (600 – 850 ATTEMPTS):

Mac Jones (638 attempts): Served as the full-time starter for just one season at Alabama.
J.J. McCarthy (713 attempts): Handled a low volume across 28 starts in a run-heavy Michigan offense.
Kyler Murray (754 attempts): Only had one full year of starting attempts at Oklahoma.
C.J. Stroud (830 attempts): Only started two seasons at Ohio State before departing for the NFL.

Hmmmm … maybe it is not the number of pass attempts?

Hard to say but he is gone now and the train keeps on keeping on!

Onward and Upward!

Minnesota Vikings News and Links

Prisco’s NFL Week 4 Power Rankings: Bills claim No. 1 status while Vikings continue to climb
https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/2026-nfl-power-rankings-week-4-bills-vikings/

Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores is a madman when it comes to calling defense.

The philosophy is simple, really: Blitz, blitz, and blitz some more. He has taken defense and made it truly fun to watch.

The Vikings are blitzing at a rate of 73-78% of passing plays, depending on the site giving out the data. That is by far the highest percentage in the league — and it’s not close.

They are a zone-blitz unit that shows a ton of looks that confuse offensive lines and quarterbacks to the point that the passers are often left seeing ghosts even when the pressure isn’t there. It’s why the Vikings lead the league in sacks with 14 and are quickly becoming a team opposing quarterbacks fear.

They registered six sacks of Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield in their 23-16 victory Sunday, a game in which they made the Tampa Bay offensive line look bad. They also ran through backs and tight ends in pass protection, and Mayfield was jumpy all day.

It looked like Minnesota was playing with 13 players on defense all day long.

The Vikings are 3-0 because of that defense. Their quarterbacks haven’t thrown for over 168 yards in a game because they haven’t needed it, thanks to that dominant defense.

Minnesota is up to No. 4 in my Power Rankings as Flores continues to show off his impressive defensive mind. If the offense, with Kyler Murray back under center, can get some flow in the passing game, this is going to be a tough team to beat week in and week out. It’s also going to make for tough weeks for opponents to recover after playing them, since they beat you up on defense.

4 Vikings 3-0-0
If only they had a better offense. They might just be considered the best team in football. Brian Flores and the defense have led them to a 3-0 record.

NFL Power Rankings, Week 4: 49ers claim No. 1 spot! Raiders, Vikings enter top 10; Patriots drop to 31
https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-power-rankings-week-4-2026-nfl-season

Rank 9
Rank increased by 6

Minnesota Vikings 3-0
I know the Vikings’ offense is completely unreliable. I also know Minnesota’s defense is special and the reason these Vikes are 3-0. That’s enough for me to move them into the top 10 for the first time this season, even if I still can’t trust Kyler Murray.

NFL Power Rankings: Vikings Surge Continues with 3-0 Start
https://www.vikings.com/news/nfl-power-rankings-surge-continues-with-3-0-start

No. 6 (up 5 spots): Brent Sobleski – Bleacher Report

The Minnesota Vikings understand the exact blueprint for them to be successful, even if it’s not pretty. Brian Flores is going to bring more pressure than any other defensive play-caller and dictate games. The approach is simple yet effective.

Kyler Murray’s return to the lineup didn’t exactly jumpstart Minnesota’s offense. The Vikings 230 yards were fewer than the team managed during the previous two weeks with Carson Wentz at the helm.

Maybe Murray shows more once he gets comfortable in Kevin O’Connell’s offense. As for now, Minnesota will blitz, blitz and blitz some more to ensure they’re in a position to win every game possible.

No. 7 (up 2 spots): Nate Davis – USA Today

Per Next Gen Stats, [the Vikings] -0.22 EPA per play leads the league (trust us, that’s good) as does a 46.7% QB pressure rate and 14 sacks. If QB Kyler Murray settles in without trying to do too much − good job on that front Sunday in Tampa − this team should be really dangerous.

‘New Set of Eyes,’ ‘Fresh Start’ — Ex-Vikings Star Adam Thielen Sees Giants Giving J.J. McCarthy a Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold-Like Revival Path
https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/set-eyes-fresh-start-ex-144059832.html

But Thielen, who spent nearly a decade with the Vikings after coming on as an undrafted free agent, isn’t ready to give up on him just yet.Speaking on the “Airing It Out’ radio show on SiriusXM, he explained his stance.

“J.J. gets a fresh start. He gets an opportunity to prove who he is and who he thinks he is,” Thielen hoped, after having shared a locker room with McCarthy during the 2025 season before he requested a release.

“It’s not a surprising thing,” Thielen added. “The longer you’ve been around this league and in this league and seen all the stuff that’s happened over the years, like, it’s not surprising. I’m very excited for J.J. to get that fresh start, to get a new set of eyes on him, for people to kind of judge him for who he is, and we’ll see what happens.”

Vikings Insiders Dish on ‘Brutal’ J.J. McCarthy Era, ‘Eye-Rolls’ About ‘Nine’ Nickname
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/25504986-vikings-insiders-dish-brutal-jj-mccarthy-era-eye-rolls-about-nine-nickname

The Athletic’s Alec Lewis spoke to a team staffer who revealed that the Vikings had lost faith in McCarthy since his disappointing 2025 season.

“I knew this was going to be up and down when we made that choice this spring (to move forward with McCarthy as the starter), but it has just been brutal,” the staffer said.

The Vikings moved up in the 2024 NFL draft to select McCarthy 10th overall. His shortcomings were quickly on display, as Lewis reported that “in the immediate aftermath of the draft, several team sources acknowledged that McCarthy had work to do. He would have to eliminate his overstriding on throws and develop better touch.”
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Lewis also explained that McCarthy’s immaturity affected his tenure in Minnesota. His comments regarding his “Nine” alter ego reportedly “earned several internal eye-rolls,” and he “similarly baffled members of the organization when he told reporters that he bucked his coaches’ advice by dancing the ‘Griddy’ before he reached the end zone against the Cowboys in Week 15.”

“These bouts of youth and defiance, evident both in front of the cameras and away from them inside the TCO Performance Center, were troubling for Vikings executives and coaches,” Lewis added.

Why J.J. McCarthy Didn’t Succeed in Minnesota and Why He Can Still Turn His Career Around
https://www.si.com/nfl/jj-mccarthy-succeed-minnesota-turn-career-around

First, the reality of the situation: The Vikings still need a long-term solution at the most important position on the field, and had become certain McCarthy wasn’t going to become that answer by the expiration of his rookie deal in a year and a half. Even with a veteran roster and even with a veteran coaching staff, stocked with sturdy infrastructure for any quarterback.

Time will tell whether they’re right. But it’s also indicative of where McCarthy is right now as a player, and how far he has to go. Even as the Vikings reeled off five consecutive wins to finish 2025—McCarthy started four of those games, Max Brosmer started the other one—the book on the then 22-year-old was written. Defensive coaches saw a quarterback who wasn’t seeing the field well, didn’t look comfortable and was taking too many hits.

Hit him enough, they’d say, and it’d be over.

This, by the way, is the case with a lot of young quarterbacks. They go out and play early, and if the effort to minimize their youthful shortcomings doesn’t work, they start to get hit too much, doubt creeps in and the problem metastasizes. The game moves at warp speed as is, and if a quarterback starts internally questioning what he’s seeing, things can go downhill fast.

And this is where you can look at McCarthy’s situation specifically and start to understand better how it happened. At Michigan, he was on the superior team most Saturdays, most play calls would go to plan, and he didn’t throw the ball as much, meaning while he had plenty of starts, he didn’t have the number of applicable reps that some of his peers did.
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His last game action as a Viking, in the preseason just last month, was a continuation of how the 2025 season had gone. After starting 5-of-6 for 81 yards in Minnesota’s second preseason game, he missed on his last four attempts, took a sack and injured his ankle badly enough to miss the preseason finale. Kevin O’Connell had already named Kyler Murray the Week 1 starter. But that night moved the Vikings a little closer to where they wound up, pushing him to third on the depth chart and further dimming his light at the end of the developmental tunnel.

Could the Giants brighten that light now and find that path out?

It’ll be tough, and it’s a bit like the situation Trey Lance—another gifted kid who came from a dominant college team with a run-based offense—found himself in three years ago.

To begin with, both guys were drafted into situations that looked perfect for a young NFL quarterback, with teams ready to win that had proven track records for maximizing players at the position. The trouble with those sorts of situations, though, is that those teams can’t ride out the struggles of a young passer the way a bad team can, nor can they throw seasons overboard in the name of developing at a single position. Both McCarthy and Lance got the longer leash once, wound up struggling and getting hurt, and then never got it again.

And what both guys really needed was just that: to take their lumps and grow. You can have them do it by sitting and learning. But eventually, they need game reps, to build up their own library of plays run and defenses seen, and the sooner those come, the more risk there is that the aforementioned lumps are going to be felt by the team, too. Also, when you aren’t the recent first-round pick anymore, it’s harder to find a team willing to go through that with you.

J.J. McCarthy traded to Giants: Will he succeed in New York?
https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/50053035/jj-mccarthy-trade-giants-vikings-quarterback-deadline-barnwell

Landing a fifth-round pick for McCarthy was an obvious call for the Vikings. Once their quarterback of the future after they traded up to take him in the first round of the 2024 draft, McCarthy had quickly and brutally fallen out of favor in Minnesota. After being the NFC Offensive Player of the Week in his NFL debut last season — an opening-week win over the Bears — McCarthy’s inability to work all areas of the field, operate within the structure of the offense or avoid negative plays frustrated a Vikings organization that had let Sam Darnold leave in free agency to hand the job to him.

The case for McCarthy
With young quarterbacks, growth isn’t linear, and what we see at the very beginning of a player’s career might not fully represent what he can be by even the end of his rookie campaign. Two picks after the Vikings selected McCarthy in the 2024 draft, the Broncos went after their own QB of the future in Bo Nix, who struggled to open his career. Across his first four starts, Nix completed 60.1% of his passes, averaged 4.8 yards per attempt and threw one touchdown against four picks.
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But over his final four starts in 2025, McCarthy was quietly … pretty good? Returning from a concussion, he oversaw four victories as the Vikings worked their way back to respectability over the end of the year. And over that stretch, McCarthy wasn’t a problem for the Minnesota offense. He completed 64.3% of his passes, averaged a robust 8.4 yards per attempt and threw five touchdown passes against two picks, adding two more scores with his legs. McCarthy’s sack rate dropped to 7.7%, which is still higher than you would like but much improved on what he had produced early in the season.

Those aren’t superstar numbers, but the McCarthy of the first six games was one of the worst QBs we’ve seen over the past decade, whereas the guy over the final four starts was completely playable. His 70.3 Total QBR over that stretch was the seventh-best mark in the league, just behind Matthew Stafford, who was finishing up an MVP season for the Rams. He was fourth in yards per dropback and eighth in passer rating.

The case against McCarthy
Well, to start, there’s a reason McCarthy hasn’t played many games: He hasn’t been healthy enough to stay on the field for any meaningful stretch of time. He missed all of his rookie year after tearing his meniscus, which required season-ending surgery. He was then sidelined for seven games in 2025 amid a high-ankle sprain, a concussion and a hand injury. It’s unclear whether McCarthy would have beaten Darnold out for the job as a rookie in 2024, but he was healthy enough to start 10 of 34 possible contests over his first two seasons in the league before the Vikings moved on to Murray this offseason.

You can’t develop as a quarterback if you can’t stay on the field to get regular reps. And while McCarthy was relatively healthy during his time under Jim Harbaugh at Michigan, he has yet to make it to a fifth consecutive start as a pro without getting hurt. The Giants were already worried about this with Dart, and now they’re acquiring a second quarterback who hasn’t been able to stay healthy or protect himself as a pro.

The numbers from that four-game stretch in 2025 are real, but they come with some incredibly large qualifiers. That run started against the Commanders, who fielded the league’s second-worst defense by QBR. It continued against the Cowboys (fourth-worst) and then these Giants (10th-worst). And it finished with the Packers, who would have been the league’s second-worst defense by QBR if we just consider their snaps without Micah Parsons on the field. (The star edge rusher missed that Week 18 matchup with the Vikings after tearing his ACL.) Total QBR adjusts for quality of opposition, but that’s a particularly friendly slate of opponents.

Even in those games, the Vikings very clearly didn’t trust McCarthy. They dialed up designed runs nearly 46% of the time, which would have been the fifth-most run-heavy offense in the NFL. The Vikings asked McCarthy to throw only 21 passes per game over that stretch, a barely-there workload for most quarterbacks, albeit one more in line with how rarely McCarthy threw at Michigan (22 times per contest). Minnesota played at the third-slowest pace in the league to try to shorten games and lean heavily on the defense, which was both smart and likely telling about how the team viewed McCarthy.

At the same time, in obvious passing situations during that stretch (where NFL Next Gen Stats projected that the Vikings had at least a 75% probability of throwing the football pre-snap), McCarthy was 21-of-31 for 291 yards with a touchdown and no interceptions. He actually had the best EPA per pass dropback of any quarterback from Week 13 onward in those clear passing situations.

Tailoring the offense to fit McCarthy, as the Vikings did by removing many of their middle-field concepts last season, is much harder to do in-season than it is with a full training camp to prepare. Winston has his own foibles, but we’re already seeing what an offense that is built for a unique quarterback looks like when a different kind of passer steps in to take his place.

The reality is that McCarthy probably just wasn’t a very good quarterback prospect to begin with. There were eyebrows raised around the league when the Vikings took him with the 10th pick given how rarely he was asked to throw at Michigan, where the offense really ran through a Blake Corum-led rushing attack. Other quarterbacks who failed after being drafted in the top 10 despite limited college experience, like Trey Lance and Anthony Richardson Sr., at least offered the promise of significant untapped upside and high-end mobility and arm strength.

Takeaways: Kevin O’Connell & Nolan Teasley Discuss J.J. McCarthy Trade
https://www.vikings.com/news/jj-mccarthy-trade-kevin-oconnell-nolan-teasley-quarterbacks-takeaways

How many Vikings get fired if J.J. McCarthy blossoms with the Giants?
https://bringmethesports.com/how-many-vikings-get-fired-if-j-j-mccarthy-blossoms-with-the-giants

One Vikings Winner From the J.J. McCarthy Trade Nobody Is Talking About
https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/one-vikings-winner-j-j-110006298.html

Ranking the 10 Biggest NFL Draft Mistakes of the Past Decade
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/25504313-ranking-10-biggest-nfl-draft-mistakes-past-decade

The Vikings were finished with J.J. McCarthy. So why did the Giants want him?
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7640655/2026/09/29/jj-mccarthy-giants-vikings-trade/

Could Vikings be on the lookout to add help at the quarterback position?
https://juddzulgad.substack.com/p/could-vikings-be-on-the-lookout-to

J.J. McCarthy trade puts Vikings on track for a dramatic 2027 QB change
https://thevikingage.com/jj-mccarthy-trade-minnesota-vikings-on-track-dramatic-2027-qb-change

The Vikings’ GM Says MIN Wants to Keep the Trade Conversations Going
https://vikingsterritory.com/2026/news/top_news/the-vikings-gm-says-trading

Yore Mock

TRADE: CIN receive: 1.21 <-> MIN receive: 1.25, 3.98
TRADE: MIN receive: 2.45, 5.151 <-> IND receive: 2.53, 3.98
TRADE: MIN receive: 4.130 <-> CLE receive: 5.144, 6.185
…
Pick 1.25 Jadan Baugh, RB, Florida: 6’1″, 237 lbs
Pick 2.45 Jayden Maiava, QB, USC: 6’4″, 220 lbs
Pick 3.85 Reed Harris, WR, Arizona State: 6’5″, 230 lbs
Pick 3.90 Princewill Umanmielen, EDGE, LSU: 6’4″, 255 lbs
Pick 4.130 John Nestor, CB, Minnesota: 6’1″, 195 lbs
Pick 5.147 Kemari Copeland, DL, Virginia Tech: 6’3″, 280 lbs
Pick 5.151 Keon Sabb, S, Alabama: 6’1″, 207 lbs
Pick 5.159 Drew Bobo, IOL, Georgia: 6’5″, 305 lbs
Pick 7.200 Arion Carter, LB, Tennessee: 6’1″, 230 lbs
Pick 7.214 Brody Foley, TE, Louisville: 6’6″, 250 lbs
Pick 7.246 Jayden Virgin-Morgan, EDGE, Boise State: 6’3″, 260 lbs