J.J. McCarthy, Justin Jefferson at a crossroads as the Vikings prepare for the Bears

The clips resurfaced this week, as digital keepsakes from the greatest respective moments the quarterback and the receiver have experienced in a Vikings uniform.

J.J. McCarthy was a sophomore at Michigan on Nov. 13, 2022, on the opposite side of Lake Erie from Justin Jefferson, when Jefferson leaped for Kirk Cousins’ fourth-and-18 pass in Buffalo and secured a catch that would become part of his legacy. The catch was honored as the NFL’s play of the year before the Super Bowl, the same night the receiver was named the league’s Offensive Player of the Year.

As the play reached its third anniversary on Thursday, Jefferson sounded almost wistful when reflecting on the moment and its meaning.

“I just want to get back to that kid phase of loving — I still love football — but overly loving football, overly loving being out there on Sundays and making the big plays and just being a part of this great organization," he said. “So I just want to get back mentally into that mode.”

Jefferson was on the backside of the Vikings formation on Sept. 8 when McCarthy pulled the ball from Jordan Mason on a zone-read play and surged between two tacklers for a touchdown that sealed the Vikings’ fourth-quarter comeback at Soldier Field. McCarthy won NFC offensive player of the week honors after the game, as Jefferson had done after his catch in Buffalo, and the Vikings returned home from Chicago reverberating with optimism about their 22-year-old quarterback.

While Jefferson’s catch returned this week as a flashback, McCarthy’s TD in Chicago resurfaced in film study, as the quarterback prepared for the first NFC North rematch of his career with the Vikings’ 2025 season at a tipping point. It’s also an important moment for the quarterback-receiver partnership the Vikings hope will carry them through the rest of the decade.

McCarthy is the youngest of the six quarterbacks to throw Jefferson a pass since Cousins tore his right Achilles in October 2023, and his early struggles have been exacerbated by the issues he’s had targeting Jefferson. McCarthy’s 49.4 passer rating when targeting Jefferson is the lowest by any Vikings QB who’s thrown to the receiver. Four of his six interceptions are on passes thrown for Jefferson, including the two he threw in Sunday’s 27-19 loss to the Ravens, where the receiver’s nonchalance in pursuit of the intercepting player invited questions.

Jefferson, too, continues to chafe at the overattentive coverages he faces from defenses that make stopping him their top priority; defensive coordinators tell him so in postgame handshakes, he said. His average separation of 3.3 yards from the closest defender is actually the largest of his career, two-tenths of a yard better than his 2024 average, but when teams regularly use multiple defenders against him, it presents a confounding picture for a young quarterback who’s never faced anything similar.

“Obviously, J.J. hasn’t played with anyone with as much attention as I’m getting. So it takes some time to figure those things out,” Jefferson said. “I mean, Kirk had to take time figuring that out as well. Sam had to take time figuring that out. This job is hard, especially at quarterback. So the connection will continue to grow and get better.”

As the Vikings sit at 4-5, last in the division and 10th in the conference, their star receiver wants to recapture his youthful energy at the same time their 22-year-old quarterback looks to prove he can scrub some blemishes out of his game.

“The biggest thing that comes to mind is just consistency,” McCarthy said. “The name of the game in this league, and any real profession, is just, how can you be consistently great over and over again?”

McCarthy, making his fifth start on Sunday, is still trying to show he can handle all the intricacies of a scheme that’s produced two of the four best regular seasons in Vikings history while sending his veteran predecessors to Pro Bowls, but can be daunting to an inexperienced quarterback.

The quarterback’s studiousness and command of concepts, O’Connell has said, means the Vikings don’t worry about how much he can handle, but his classroom time far exceeds his on-field experience. And as McCarthy leads an offense full of veterans who return from a 14-win team, offensive coordinator Wes Phillips said this week “it wouldn’t be fair to the other guys” if the Vikings simplified their game plan to reflect the quarterback’s youth.

“I don’t think we ever go into a game saying, ‘Hey, this is about J.J.’s development in this game,’ ” Phillips said. “We’re trying to set up the best plan for the guys we have, J.J. included, but it wouldn’t be fair to anyone else on our football team to hold back on anything that we felt we needed to go win a football game.”

While O’Connell said he tries to call plays in a sequence that will help McCarthy find a rhythm — comparing it to Stephen Curry rediscovering his shot at the free-throw line after several three-point misses — the Vikings seem disinclined to dilute their offense for the sake of McCarthy’s education.

McCarthy, the youngest starting quarterback in the NFL, doesn’t think that’s unfair.

“It makes it easier when the standard I have for myself is the standard that the team has,” McCarthy said. “At the end of the day, yes, we’ve got to be realistic and understand there’s a lot of growth in my development, but I’m doing whatever I can to make sure it’s a championship-worthy performance week in and week out.”

O’Connell said the Vikings have checked out of runs on multiple third-and-short plays or called a run-pass option where they’ve converted. “We look at those as statistically part of the run game,” he said.

And while he said he analyzed the decision to throw deep for Jefferson on a third-and-1 late into the evening last Sunday, O’Connell maintained he’d give McCarthy (whose pass was intercepted by Marlon Humphrey) the same opportunity each time he got another chance at it.

“I can’t really make the decision based upon missing an open player or having Justin one-on-one for really the only time all day,” O’Connell said. “The last thing you think that’s going to do is end up in an interception, where you have that run play in mind for fourth-and-1 [if the pass is incomplete]. It’s a results-based thing, play to play, game to game. I’m well aware of that. ... The last thing you want to do is just [run] it for the sake of doing it, and then have it be not as productive as you would hope.”

McCarthy has a 65.8 passer rating through the first four starts of his career, which puts him 60th among the 77 first-round quarterbacks in this century. The two names behind him on the list are Matthew Stafford, who won a Super Bowl with O’Connell as his offensive coordinator in 2021, and Jared Goff, who’s since gone to four Pro Bowls and finished fifth in the NFL MVP race last year with the Lions.

Bo Nix, who was drafted two spots behind McCarthy, is 67th on the list. Josh Allen, the reigning NFL MVP, is 70th.

The quarterback’s career is at a tender spot, even as McCarthy pledges to meet the standard required to take a veteran team to the playoffs. It’s an unusual arrangement that demands patience from the Vikings’ experienced players, particularly Jefferson, whose record-breaking career doesn’t include a playoff win.

Jefferson acknowledged his role in the offense has changed. “I feel like [that will happen for] any person that’s part of a offense that has a new quarterback,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if he’s a 10-year vet or if he’s a second-year quarterback. I’m always going to try to better myself and better our relationship in any way I can.”

The clip of the Bills catch this week, he said, reminded him how fast his career has reached its sixth season. He remembers the 2022 season as a simpler time, before efforts to clamp down on him on the field and “just different things going on in my life” gave his relationship with football a different feel.

He spoke Thursday of returning to “that savage mode, just going out there and killing it, not worrying about the plays, not worrying about anything else that I can’t control.”

For McCarthy, Jefferson wants to be a mentor.

He’ll try to recapture his youth at the same time the Vikings hope for McCarthy to mature quickly — “A lot to ask,” O’Connell acknowledged, “in the midst of games.”

“There’s been a lot of encouraging things to go along with some things we can improve on,” the coach said. “And he knows that. We know that. That’s where I get to be, as far as the space that I’m in. Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion.”

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