Analysis: J.J. McCarthy provides a glimpse of stability in Vikings’ win over the Cowboys

ARLINGTON, TEXAS — Had Ryan Kelly stayed in Indianapolis, the city where he’d played his first nine NFL seasons, he would have been snapping on Sunday to Philip Rivers, the 44-year-old quarterback who answered the Colts’ last-ditch call for a quarterback to save their season.

Instead, Kelly was at AT&T Stadium on Sunday night, playing his seventh game for the Vikings and snapping to a quarterback half Rivers’ age, who is younger than the Colts QB’s oldest daughter. J.J. McCarthy, Kelly understands better than most, is still a relative neophyte at the toughest job in professional sports. When Kelly left the Colts to sign with the Vikings and become McCarthy’s compatriot, he knew he was agreeing to a task that would demand his patience.

“I mean, it’s a lot,” Kelly said in the visitors’ locker room on Sunday night. “It’s not just, ‘Hey, one play, call it and go’ all the time. It’s not the easiest offense, right? It’s a little unorthodox. And so, you got to tell the guys the play, sometimes the play is this long. You got to break the huddle. look at the play clock, see whatever can/kill criteria is that up that week, remember that, remember the snap count, take the right footwork. Like, it’s a lot more than people think, right?”

Kelly knows how much time McCarthy spends at the team facility with quarterbacks coach Josh McCown and coach Kevin O’Connell talking about these things.

“Sometimes in the heat of the battle, that’s tough to do, right?” the center added. “You’re feeling the weight of the game, whether you’re behind or ahead, you’re trying to keep that momentum and to lock in and focus on small things.”

To this point, the Vikings had subsisted on snippets from McCarthy: the fourth-quarter comeback in Chicago that turned what could have been a dreadful debut into a scintillating win, the victory in Detroit that brought McCarthy back to the center of the offense after missing six weeks with a high ankle sprain. Before Sunday, they hadn’t seen their first-year starter put together consecutive respectable outings.

When blitzing safety Donovan Wilson tipped McCarthy’s first pass Sunday and defensive lineman Quinnen Williams intercepted it, it appeared they might not see McCarthy do it against the Cowboys, either.

He won for the second time in prime time and led the Vikings to their first win streak of the season in a 34-26 victory over Dallas. If his debut in Chicago flooded the Vikings’ fanbase with giddy optimism, his performance in Arlington on Sunday night provoked something closer to a sense of stability.

“I think [it’s] going through this whole year, gaining the perspective that those things are going to happen,” McCarthy said. “It’s the National Football League. There are going to be plays. There are going to be tipped balls. You can’t let that affect the next coming plays. Just being in those situations a lot in my past, it’s a great way to be like, ‘Oh, I’ve been here before. Move on to the next play and focus on that.’”

McCarthy chased the big plays that have eluded the Vikings’ offense, while playing behind a line that allowed him to get hit just once; if not for a couple missed connections with Justin Jefferson, he could have had more. But on a night when the Vikings needed points from their offense as they tried to match the NFL’s most prolific passing game, it seemed for the first time like they were approaching the standard they’ve used in the past, not trying to minimize the risk of their young quarterback making a mistake.

According to NFL Next Gen Stats, McCarthy threw for 187 of his 250 yards on 14 attempts where he held the ball for more than 2.5 seconds. He completed 10 of those 14 throws, including his first NFL completion that traveled more than 40 yards in the air. McCarthy hit Jalen Nailor for a 20-yard touchdown while drifting left; he connected with T.J. Hockenson on a 29-yard seam route that O’Connell highlighted as one of his favorites, and hit Nailor for 23 yards on a fourth-and-3 throw that had some of the touch McCarthy’s passes have often lacked.

“It was something that was difficult because I was a big fastball guy,” McCarthy said. “But [I’m] working constantly and obsessively on being a thrower of the football, a passer of the football. That was just another one of those opportunities where you put it up ... just give him a chance to catch the ball and he’s going to do it.”

“We all know J.J. knows how to throw the ball, and he knows how to get it to that spot,” Jefferson said. “It was a great throw, great spot. You know, of course I wasn’t expecting that much heat on the ball, but that’s definitely never an excuse. I always got to catch those types of balls.”

If the Vikings are going to be at their best when hunting big plays, they need Jefferson involved; the receiver has just six catches for 37 yards in his last three games (though he did have a touchdown catch from McCarthy wiped out Sunday by an illegal formation penalty). He and McCarthy are clearly still getting used to each other, as the receiver learns how to catch the quarterback’s ball and McCarthy learns how to find Jefferson in different situations.

The fact the Vikings (6-8) were eliminated from the playoff race before kickoff is a reflection of the instability of their season. The fact they won their first Sunday night road game in six years, while starting their first win streak of the season, was enough to spark some hope for Jefferson.

“I mean, it’s hard to win in this league,” Jefferson said. “It’s very hard to win, especially to be in a valuable role as a quarterback. So having a young quarterback, him just going out there with that confidence, with that focus, and just leading us to where we would like to go, that’s kind of something that we’ve been waiting for this whole entire season. So I’m so glad that it’s starting to click, and the consistency is what really matters.”

McCarthy’s best moment of the night was marked by a bit of youthful indiscretion; after executing the “guitar fake” he’s learned from watching Aaron Rodgers and getting the Cowboys’ defense to bite on his handoff action to Jordan Mason, McCarthy tucked the ball on his left hip and strolled toward the end zone almost unnoticed for the fourth-and-1 score that tied the game 14-14 in the second quarter.

“It was entertaining, I guess,” O’Connell said, with the rueful smile of a dad who’d just watched his kid nail the dangerous bike trick he’d warned him not to attempt. “We are in the entertainment business. But I would have preferred him to show that 40-[yard dash] time he likes to talk about, having never run a 40 coming out [of college], which I thought was interesting.”

Being told not to dance into the end zone, McCarthy said, made him even “more enticed to do it. So yeah, I’ll definitely get a minus for that one [on the grade sheet].”

It came at the end of a play McCarthy had executed so well that even though O’Connell knew where the ball was designed to go, he momentarily lost track of the fact McCarthy had kept it. “The action was so good, I even had to do a double take right there,” the coach said. “It’s an awesome moment.”

McCarthy did it against a Cowboys secondary that can be exploited if its pass rush is neutralized. But enough of the moments were there — the throw to Hockenson, the two touchdowns and the back-shoulder route to Nailor, the fake that showcased his ability as a runner — that if you squint, it’s possible to see the framework of an offense that could return to being an asset.

Kelly, the counterpart to so many veteran quarterbacks, could see it Sunday night.