The Minnesota Vikings punted on quarterback JJ McCarthy three weeks into his third NFL season, which says quite a bit about what the team thinks of its former No. 10 pick and the quarterback room moving forward.
Minnesota sent McCarthy to the New York Giants in exchange for a fifth-round pick, which is roughly the lowest trade value imaginable for a 23 year old with just 10 starts on his resumé across 37 games worth of regular season play.
“Will have A LOT more to come on the J.J. McCarthy trade this afternoon and throughout the week,” Alec Lewis of The Athletic wrote on X Monday, September 28. “Initial reaction from execs and coaches throughout the league is that this was long expected, going all the way back to the end of last season. Has been a topsy-turvy ride, to put it lightly.”
The question now is where will the Vikings go from here?
The most logical answer is perhaps a clearing of the decks come next offseason to make way for San Francisco 49ers backup QB Mac Jones, arguably the closest replica to Sam Darnold who Minnesota traded to the Seattle Seahawks ahead of their 2025 Super Bowl run in what was an obvious mistake in retrospect.
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The Vikings had quite clearly already moved on from McCarthy internally. All it takes to come to that conclusion is a cursory examination of the facts on the ground and the circumstances in the Vikings’ QB room over the coming 14 weeks of the campaign.
Neither Kyler Murray or Carson Wentz is under contract beyond 2026. Wentz is no longer a viable option as a longterm starter, while the injury-prone Murray has already suffered a concussion this season and has been bad through five quarters of action across three weeks.
And if Murray is worth bringing back next year based on the evolution of his play over the next three months, he is going to come in as a massive overpay made worse by the inherent risk of betting on an undersized QB who is dependent on athleticism, has a meaningful injury history and is entering his 30s.
Typically any franchise would salivate at the chance to potentially replace a player like Murray with a QB in his early 20s who also has a top-10 pedigree and is playing on a rookie deal.
But not the Vikings, at least not with McCarthy, which says all anyone really needs to know about how the organization truly felt regarding a player who fell from QB1 to QB3 between Week 18 in 2025 and Week 1 earlier this month.
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Jones, meanwhile, is a tall, strong-armed QB who plays from the pocket. Also a former first-round pick, as was Darnold, Jones ended up a backup after a few years and wandered the NFL landscape before having a resurgent campaign under San Francisco head coach Kyle Shanahan in 2025.
Jones completed nearly 70 percent of his passes across 11 games played for the 49ers last season, including eight starts (6-2). He threw for 2,151 yards, 13 TDs and six INTs.
San Francisco may move Jones ahead of the league’s November 10 trade deadline given that he is on the final year of his contract and will likely pursue the best offer he can find in free agency next spring.
Jones has made only about $23 million over the course of his six-year career and should be available at a bargain price on a one- or two-year contract, similar to the $10 million deal the Vikings offered Darnold following his season backing up QB Brock Purdy in the Bay Area.
Darnold turned that into a $100 million offer from Seattle the next offseason, which he then manifested into a Super Bowl ring.
Jones is smart enough to see the same opportunity for himself, potentially without ever having to leave Minnesota, as the Vikings and O’Connell are going to be looking for a franchise QB next offseason if it turns out they don’t have one in Murray — or if Murray plays well enough to price out Minnesota’s front office, which is now run by first-year GM Nolan Teasley.
Vikings’ JJ McCarthy Trade Clears Path to $23 Million QB, Next Sam Darnold