Souhan: J.J. McCarthy breathes life into a stale Vikings season

That kid who played quarterback for the Vikings on Sunday — the 22-year-old with the frizzy hair, baggy clothes and unspoiled grin — could change everything.

Let’s not leap to dreams of Super Bowl championships. That’s an unfair burden to place on someone who looks like he spends his spare time searching under his couch for a PlayStation controller.

Let’s view the belated-yet-sudden rise of J.J. McCarthy in a different and better way.

Let’s view him through the prism of fun.

Fun. Isn’t that what sports are supposed to be? An entertaining escape from reality, an escape from the mundane to the sublime?

We don’t know what the future holds for McCarthy or this Vikings regime. We already know, after three games, that the kid who doesn’t comb his hair is more fun than tax refund day.

He needed to produce a game like the Vikings’ 27-24 upset of the Lions in Detroit to highlight his likeability. Christian Ponder was likeable, too, and that didn’t matter when he revealed that he wasn’t an NFL quarterback.

He’s a nice kid. You can see it in the way he treats teammates and staff, and writers from Michigan, and the way he handles himself when under scrutiny.

But “nice” can be a meaningless compliment if that quality isn’t paired with other football necessities, like talent, toughness and charisma.

After three starts and two clutch wins, McCarthy looks like he has the goods.

This isn’t an exhaustive analysis of his football skills. He has much to learn, and he hasn’t earned the right to be compared to the best quarterbacks in the game. Let’s let him throw for 200 yards in a game before we start searching for comparables.

This is more about McCarthy becoming an air freshener for what was becoming a malodorous season.

When the young quarterbacks fail and the veteran quarterbacks come with expiration dates, optimism about the position always felt forced.

With his physical talent, winning pedigree and buoyant personality, McCarthy is something unique in recent Vikings history: a young quarterback who has a chance to be an ideal franchise quarterback, for the long haul.

Rich Gannon wasn’t Rich Gannon when he was with the Vikings. Daunte Culpepper had a moment. Ponder failed. Teddy Bridgewater was never a supreme talent, just an admirable game manager, until that awful knee injury altered the arc of his career.

McCarthy is different. He’s a top-10 draft pick in a league where young quarterbacks can thrive. He has a strong arm. He can run. Perhaps much more important, he seems to have the ideal attitude for a public figure.

The NFL is all about tough results — big losses, little losses, big hits, injuries, constant roster change. McCarthy hasn’t let any of that diminish his personality.

He seems to hover above all of the daily worries that infuse an NFL franchise.

Sunday afternoon, after he led the Vikings to an upset of the Lions in Detroit, McCarthy almost cried when talking about overcoming injuries. He raved about his teammates, and his time at Michigan.

So often, in the NFL, structured interviews feel scripted. You can see them checking off the talking points. The more clichés, the better, the league seems to believe.

When McCarthy speaks, you sense that he’s a happy guy who actually loves playing football and has no use for excuses. While the entire organization chafed at the silly conspiracy theories about the Vikings inventing an ankle injury to take McCarthy off the field, McCarthy himself seemed unfazed.

After one of the Vikings’ practices in London, McCarthy walked the path from the field to the locker room, bumping fists with everyone he saw, whether he knew them or not.

Watch the latest episode of Access Vikings: