How Vikings QBs J.J. McCarthy, Sam Darnold are benefiting from Josh McCown’s lengthy NFL career

EAGAN, Minn. — Josh McCown is still hearing about it, 21 years after delivering one of the most brutal gut punches in Minnesota Vikings history.

“It’s funny,” McCown said this week. “Somebody will grab me in the airport, and they’ll say, ‘Welcome to Minnesota.’ And then they say, ‘Hey wait a minute,’ and the longer we talk, the more they think it, and it’s not so pleasant. And I’m like, ‘Yeah, it happened. But for the course of my career, there’s only like five good plays, and that’s one of them. So let me have it.’ But it’s been cool. It was a crazy moment back then.”

As the Arizona Cardinals‘ quarterback in 2003, McCown threw a legendary touchdown on the final play of the regular season to knock the Vikings from playoff contention. The 28-yard strike to receiver Nate Poole elicited a memorable call from Vikings radio announcer Paul Allen, gave McCown his first win as a starter and jump-started a playing career that extended for another 17 years.

So it’s more than a little ironic that McCown’s nascent coaching journey has landed him in Minnesota, where, as quarterbacks coach, he’ll play a key role in developing rookie J.J. McCarthy and smoothing out the edges of likely Week 1 starter Sam Darnold. After a career that took him through nearly a third of the NFL’s teams, and led to him changing offensive schemes in every single season, McCown is well-equipped to relate to the challenges both Vikings quarterbacks will face.

“The best thing Josh does is he communicates in a way that is so full of information and knowledge, having been a guy that played as long as he did,” coach Kevin O’Connell said. “He really worked through a lot of aspects of the position as a player. But he’s got an unbelievable aspect of teaching, how he communicates things, how he can demonstrate things, how he can allow a player to kind of get it and understand that that next rep is either going to solidify that or it’s going to provide another opportunity to coach. Josh has absolutely been awesome from Day 1.”

That approach was evident last month on the first day of rookie minicamp as McCarthy, the No. 10 pick, worked through a rep that required a long throw toward the sideline. To demonstrate the risk involved, McCown pulled from his own career.

As both recalled later, McCown brought up a throw he made on the same route in 2015 while playing for the Cleveland Browns. Denver Broncos cornerback Aqib Talib intercepted the pass and returned it for a touchdown.

“Sometimes as a coach you’re installing plays or talking about plays and there’s like real scars there,” McCown said. “That was one for me. … I said, ‘Listen, I’m not just saying this. I tried to make this throw. It did not go well, and I watched Aqib Talib run it to the end zone. So I just encourage you, as you’re evaluating whether or not to make that throw, [to understand] how clean that needs to look for you and what that pre-snap look needs to be for you to take that chance.’

“Little things like that come up throughout the course of it. And hopefully it keeps us from speed bumps. They learn from those mistakes and we can avoid some.”

McCarthy, who won more games in three seasons at Michigan (27) than McCown won in nearly two decades of NFL starts (23), was struck by McCown’s honesty about his mistakes and shortcomings.

“He’s so vocal about it,” McCarthy said. “It’s just invaluable, and I really appreciate it.”

McCown, of course, will balance his time between McCarthy and Darnold, who was his teammate in 2018 when both were with the New York Jets. McCown was coming off a 2017 season in which he tied his career high with 13 starts, but the Jets moved the following year to draft Darnold with the No. 3 pick.

Although he didn’t retire until after the 2020 season, McCown believed at the time that 2018 would be his final NFL season. He began downloading all of his experiences, positive and negative, into Darnold. McCown joked that Darnold felt more like a “nephew” than a teammate, given their 18-year age difference, and said: “It was a time in my life to kind of get ready to leave and give everything that you’ve learned to a young guy and let him carry it on.”

Darnold recalled the oddity of their pairing, saying “we were best friends — the youngest guy on the team and the oldest guy on the team.”

The connection did not lead to much success, given Darnold’s well-known struggles in three seasons with the Jets and two more with the Carolina Panthers. But amid their reunion in Minnesota, McCown said he has already observed “how much more mature” Darnold is “and how much he’s learned from a football standpoint.”

McCown has long been considered a rising star in coaching and even interviewed to be a head coach (Houston, 2022) before taking his first job as an NFL assistant with the Panthers last year. Because he was swept up in the Panthers’ midseason firing of head coach Frank Reich, 2024 will be McCown’s first full season as an NFL assistant.

His approach, however, already seems clear. Instead of downplaying a career that had as many Aqib Talib failures as Nate Poole successes, he’ll draw on it. He’ll also apply the considerable lessons he learned about changing schemes for 18 consecutive years.

“The tricks and trades of downloading that information mentally — you can share that,” he said. “And then just building routines. I played with Kurt Warner this time and Jake Delhomme showed me this, and Jeff Blake showed me this, different guys that I was around, older guys that I pulled from and grew from. All of those things, they kind of come up organically in our meetings. Something will happen, and I’ll say, ‘I remember playing with this guy, and I learned that from him.'”