Two things can be true:
- The Minnesota Vikings are 4-0 and are sitting on top of the NFC North.
- This season has crystallised their failures.
The first three years of Kevin O’Connell’s career as head coach of the Minnesota Vikings were marked by uncommon success. In 2022 and 2024, with Kirk Cousins and Sam Darnold at quarterback, the Vikings won 13 and 14 games and had top-10 scoring teams. In 2023, they won 7 after Cousins’ Achilles injury derailed their year.
KOC was viewed as a quarterback whisperer who had middling to bad players playing the best football of their careers while throwing it to superstar receiver Justin Jefferson and having their blindside protected by superstar tackle Christian Darrisaw.
On the other side of the ball, the Vikings employed an evil genius. Defensive coordinator Brian Flores provided protection for the offence with his blitz-heavy, random pressure scheme that is designed to have quarterbacks seeing ghosts. In his time in Minnesota, the Vikings have been a good to, at times, dominant defence.
Flores and the Vikings have had a top-7 scoring defence in each of the last three years.
Put simply, the Vikings had a perfect environment to drop a young star quarterback into and have him flourish. They had it set up to do what the Chiefs did with Patrick Mahomes after Alex Smith.
They knew it, too.
Kevin O’Connell, seemingly high on his own supply of resurrecting Sam Darnold’s career, said in September 2024 that “organisations fail young quarterbacks before young quarterbacks fail organisations”.
That comment was clearly a reference to the Vikings’ decision to take the player that was the impetus of this piece: JJ McCarthy. In April of 2024, the Vikings took the plunge on their version of Mahomes by moving up from pick 11 to pick 10 on draft day to take him.
McCarthy was always a project after having barely thrown the ball at Michigan, but he was toolsy and the Vikings were viewed as the perfect place to drop him into given their seemingly perfect ecosystem. In the first year of his career, McCarthy suffered an injury and Darnold took them to 14 wins.
But Darnold imploded in the playoffs and the Vikings made the decision heading into the 2025 season that it was JJ’s show. They let Darnold walk to the Seahawks, where he promptly won the Super Bowl, and turned the franchise over to JJ McCarthy.
Through McCarthy’s 10 starts in the 2025 season, it became clear that he was unworkable despite the excellent system that he was dropped into. It felt like that scene in The Sopranos after the actress that played Livia had died where everyone was trying to work around an obvious weak link that needed to be dispensed with ASAP.
McCarthy’s play was untenable and yet they were 6-4 in his 10 games.
In January of 2026, the GM who traded up to draft McCarthy and let Darnold walk, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, was sacked. In September of 2026, after Jaxson Dart got injured, the Vikings traded McCarthy to the New York Giants for a fifth round pick because clearly the Harbaugh brothers talk.
And now the Vikings are 4-0 with Kyler Murray and Carson Wentz having played quarterback for them. The Vikings this year are last in total yards, yards per play and second last in total first downs, ahead of only Miami. They’re 28th in EPA/play and 32nd in success rate.
It feels like every time Kevin O’Connell draws up a play for one of Wentz or Murray, he’s self-flagellating like he’s the albino guy at the start of The Da Vinci Code. It’s a cruel and unusual punishment for his hubris.
Yet, as this piece started, they’re 4-0. They’re the first team since the 1934 Detroit Lions to start a season 4-0 without an offensive touchdown in two of those games. While it has been propped up by the schedule, the Flores defence has been on fire to start the year. They’re first in EPA/play, first in success rate, and first in scoring defence. They have sent a blitz on 67% of opponent dropbacks which is first in the league. Second is at about 37%. Unsurprisingly, they also lead the league in sacks, pressures, and pressure rate.
Beyond the numbers, the defence is playing perfectly with the continuity in the system fully paying dividends. The rush is in sync with the secondary and they’ve been virtually impossible to move the ball against, let alone score against.
You get the impression that quarterbacks think of Flores like Tina Gray thought of Freddy Krueger.
Their defensive success this season illustrates the unhappiness of the Vikings’ 4-0 miracle.
If they could have picked some other, better quarterback or found a way to make it work with Darnold (who won the Super Bowl with a similar system of dominant defence and good enough offence built around one superstar receiver), the Vikings would be true contenders in 2026.
But they simply aren’t. And they have no few pathways to becoming one. The defence is elite, but key players like Harrison Smith and Andrew van Ginkel are ageing and that elite defence is probably too good to have them at the top of the draft and in a position to take an elite quarterback prospect.
It’s like the Vikings made a Faustian bargain with themselves that they will always be good enough to never be in a position to draft a franchise quarterback.
That’s the unhappiest miracle of them all.