Are the Vikings making a mistake by eliminating J.J. McCarthy from QB competition?

It is over! The Minnesota Vikings are supposedly not going to let rookie J.J. McCarthy compete for the starting quarterback job with newcomer Sam Darnold. ESPN’s Kevin Seifert hinted that McCarthy is miles behind Darnold on the Minnesota quarterbacking depth chart. This all seems to be part of the Vikings’ elaborate plan to build a championship-caliber team around McCarthy, but it might not work.

For as much as I may have liked the Kevin O’Connell hire at head coach, I have been a staunch critic of most things general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah has done up to this point. I will give him credit, though. He had a fantastic draft. McCarthy may be the ideal candidate to lead the Vikings to the promised land a few years from now, but I do have some reservations about having him ride pine.

These reservations are all about what I have seen out of Darnold thus far in his turbulent NFL career. I thought the guy was never going to bust coming out of USC. To this point, I have never been more wrong about a quarterback. His career has been more disappointing than even the high hopes I had for Blake Bortles coming out of UCF to play for the Jacksonville Jaguars. Is Minnesota right in all this?

Just because I am no longer a fan of Darnold’s game anymore doesn’t mean I think this is a mistake.

While I am all for competition, this is the right move to make for the Vikings for one simple reason: The roster is not quite good enough to be anything more than a fringe playoff team. I think for that reason, I have a strong inclination that they will finish in fourth place in the deep NFC North. Although they might be good enough to finish in second place some years, their rival teams are all menacing.

Because McCarthy is a tad raw coming out of Michigan, it serves the Vikings to let Darnold take a beating before inserting their prized first-round rookie into the line of fire. Darnold may have been more talented than McCarthy coming out, but his inherently reckless nature has made his NFL career a shell of what it could have been. He is Carson Wentz without that 12-game stretch back in 2017…

By letting Darnold quarterback this team that isn’t quite there, McCarthy will be gaining valuable experience on the bench, learning from Darnold’s mistakes, and getting constant coaching from O’Connell throughout. By this time next year, McCarthy will be the starter heading into training camp. Waiting for him to gain experience, plus another offseason’s worth of weapons, will greatly serve him.

The Vikings signed Darnold to be their starter this year, so they might as well see it through then.