Kevin O'Connell's play calling could make or break J.J. McCarthy in final 10 games of season
The Vikings coach must keep his focus on developing his young quarterback, and that will mean adjusting his play calling to make sure McCarthy is put in position to have success.
Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell’s decision to leave Carson Wentz in to take a beating against the Los Angeles Chargers remained the topic du jour at the coach’s press conference on Wednesday. However, this is the NFL, where players on injured reserve are considered old news in the upstairs offices.
So while the outside world’s attention remained on Wentz’s soon-to-be surgically repaired left shoulder, the Vikings’ focus was on the return of J.J. McCarthy on Sunday against the Detroit Lions. O’Connell and McCarthy have spent time together working on everything from the quarterback’s mechanics to watching the film from the two games he played against Chicago and Atlanta to open the season.
It was in that Falcons game that McCarthy suffered a high right ankle sprain late in the third quarter and continued to play the rest of the way. McCarthy has missed five games and six weeks since that start, and he now has a 10-game opportunity to prove that 1) he can stay healthy, and 2) he can be consistently effective.
There’s plenty at stake here. If McCarthy continues to struggle — as he did for three quarters of the Bears game and the entire Falcons game — there will be legitimate questions about whether he’s the right guy for the job moving forward.
This puts pressure not only on McCarthy but also O’Connell. O’Connell has become known as a quarterback whisperer, but he will be in jeopardy of losing that title if McCarthy doesn’t show substantial improvement over the last two months of the season. Given how long it can take for a young quarterback to develop that might not be fair but that’s how this league works.
O’Connell had the luxury of taking over as the Vikings coach with veteran Kirk Cousins as his quarterback in 2022. O’Connell made Cousins into a better quarterback, but Cousins also had been around long enough that he could execute what O’Connell wanted without getting overwhelmed.
Sam Darnold stepped into the starting role last season, and while he had struggled for much of his career, he also had six seasons of NFL experience and was mentally in a place to digest the intricacies of what O’Connell called for him to do. Darnold also had the arm strength to put on an aerial show.
McCarthy isn’t at a similar place as Cousins and Darnold and at 22 years of age that shouldn’t surprise anyone. What will be required is for O’Connell to not just show patience with McCarthy during the practice week, but also in how he calls plays for the 10th pick in the 2024 draft.
O’Connell needs to tailor his play calling to McCarthy’s strengths and not O’Connell’s wishes — at least for now. Will this enable McCarthy to throw the ball as much as O’Connell wants, or make the best use of wide receivers Justin Jefferson and Jordan Addison deep down field on a consistent basis? Probably not.
But the goal here isn’t style points. It’s getting wins — the Vikings need a bunch of them considering their 3-4 record has them in the basement of the NFC North — and making sure McCarthy is given every chance to show that he can be the Vikings’ long-term solution at one of the toughest positions in sports.
“I think you’re always trying to match what the player can go out there and (succeed) with,” O’Connell said when asked about balancing what he wants to call with what he should call. “What do they do well? Not only the quarterback but our whole group. Ultimately figure out the best way to try to attack what you’re getting from a defensive standpoint to try to put your players in a good situation. That may be different from Carson to J.J. based upon their ability to execute some things.”
That’s easy to say on a Wednesday afternoon and probably pretty easy to script for the first 15 plays of a game. But when things get hectic, that’s when play calling gets more difficult. Especially when it’s the head coach doing it and he already is in charge of a multitude of other things.
O’Connell said that in rewatching the Vikings’ 27-24 victory in Week 1 over the Bears, he and McCarthy saw the quarterback they envision during the fourth quarter. The Vikings scored 21 unanswered points in that quarter as McCarthy threw two touchdown passes and rushed for another in the final 15 minutes. That made him the first quarterback in league history to account for three touchdowns in the fourth quarter of their NFL debut, according to ESPN.