J.J. McCarthy went from quoting Ted Lasso to speaking Latin in 72 hours.
“In this league, things are going to go bad,” McCarthy said after his first start, where he bounced back from throwing an interception on his first drive to finish 11 of 17 for 188 yards and a touchdown. “It’s your ability to respond and navigate those waters when it does happen, just being able to have that goldfish memory to just go back out there and have that sling-it mentality, which is what I needed.”
McCarthy ostensibly referenced Lasso when he discussed having a “goldfish memory.” In the hit Apple TV+ Show, Ted Lasso implores his players to be like goldfish, who notoriously have poor short-term memory. Throw an interception? Forget about it and score on the next drive.
However, like many things in life, McCarthy’s quote looks meaningfully different, given what we know now. On Monday, the Vikings held McCarthy out of practice due to right knee soreness, which is notable because it was Minnesota’s annual night practice with fans in attendance. On Tuesday, Kevin O’Connell held an unplanned press conference to announce that McCarthy would undergo surgery to discover the extent of the injury.
Twenty-four hours later, we learned that he’s out for the year.
McCarthy used the Latin phrase Amor Fati, which means “love of fate” or “love of one’s fate,” immediately after getting injured. People use it to describe an attitude in which someone sees everything that happens in their life, including suffering or loss, as good or necessary. McCarthy used the phrase again on Instagram after learning he would be out for the season with a meniscus injury.
He used that phrase during an offseason where a lot has gone wrong for the Vikings. Cornerback Khyree Jackson died in a car accident. Mekhi Blackmon tore his ACL on the first day of training camp and is out for the season. In July, the State of California charged Jordan Addison with a misdemeanor DUI, and Minnesota’s trainers carted him off the field after its first joint practice with the Cleveland Browns.
That’s a lot to process for a team that lost Teddy Bridgewater to a non-contact injury in 2016 and Daunte Culpepper to a knee injury in 2005. It’s mid-August. The Vikings have only played one preseason game!
The Vikings must be pragmatic to have a successful season this year. Vegas set their over-under at 6.5 games this year, and they have a challenging early-season schedule. The oddsmakers may favor Minnesota against the New York Giants on the road, but they probably won’t be favorites again until Week 9 against the Indianapolis Colts.
Success this year may not mean winning 10 or 11 games and making the playoffs. It might mean bottoming out and taking a quarterback as high as possible in the draft to hedge against McCarthy. O’Connell told The Athletic’s Diana Russini that he would sleep well at night knowing the Vikings had found their franchise quarterback. Still, as good as McCarthy has looked in practice and during the first preseason game, Minnesota may need a backup plan.
It’s too early to tell whether McCarthy will become Minnesota’s franchise quarterback. He fell to pick 10 because he’s more of a project than Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels, or Drake Maye. The Vikings started 0-3 last year and faced long odds to make the playoffs. Still, they signed Dalton Risner and Cam Akers and continued to push to make the postseason.
It looked like they would go on a run after Kirk Cousins had a career game against the San Francisco 49ers in Week 7. However, he got injured a week later, and the Vikings lost six of their last seven games to finish 7-10. Nobody knew that Cousins would get against the Green Bay Packers a week after dominating the Niners on Monday night. However, the odds were always against Minnesota to make the playoffs because of how they started the season. Had they lost the Niners game, they probably would have tanked and ended up with a higher pick this year.
Every team should always have a backup plan. Few have an opportunity to draft a potential franchise quarterback who can play immediately while another potential franchise quarterback develops in the background. However, the Vikings can do that if they lose enough to get a high pick in next year’s draft. Drafting another early-first-round quarterback next year would double their odds of landing a game-changing signal-caller.
The Vikings may surprise everyone and survive their early schedule, go on a run in the mushy middle, and finish strong. However, if they lose early games to the Niners, Houston Texans, and Green Bay, they should adjust and try to land a blue-chip prospect in the draft.
Most successful people and organizations learn to control what they can control and let go of the rest. They don’t have a goldfish memory. They learn from the past, prepare for the future, and focus on the present. The past tells us that most teams need to tank to get their franchise quarterback, and there are no guarantees with signal-callers, even if they pan out.
Minnesota can plan for the future by using a lost year to draft a franchise quarterback. They can succeed in a losing season if they learn to love their fate.
Tom Schreier
Tom Schreier is the founder and proprietor of Zone Coverage. He created Zone Coverage with the goal of mixing new age media with old-school journalism. His goal was to create an economically sustainable platform for sports content for Minnesota fans. Before Zone Coverage, Tom wrote for Bleacher Report and Yahoo! Sports before joining 105 The Ticket in 2014.
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