A Kevin O’Connell Quarterback Answer Isn’t Fully Adding Up

Ask Kevin O’Connell and he’ll say that conducting a passer battle was the hope all along. After all, that’s what he told Dan Barreiro is a recent training camp chat.

The KFAN host lobbed a Cris Carter comment to Minnesota’s skipper, a claim that asserted J.J. McCarthy was a Kwesi Adofo-Mensah guy rather than an O’Connell guy. The implication, perhaps, is that O’Connell feels quite free to move on toward greener pastures: Kyler Murray.

O’Connell denied that claim, instead insisting that his desire back in 2024 was to see McCarthy battle with Sam Darnold. Welcoming Murray for a quarterback competition is therefore a restoration of the original vision rather than a refutation of the McCarthy decision.

In theory, O’Connell’s answer sounds good, but it doesn’t fully add up.

Kevin O’Connell and The Desire for a QB Competition

What was so striking about last season’s quarterback competition was that there wasn’t a competition.

At various points, Coach O’Connell worked through a clunky avoidance of the issue. He wouldn’t firmly name Mr. McCarthy as the starter but would (for instance) say that Mr. McCarthy was taking snaps from starting center Ryan Kelly. The odd game of cat-and-mouse eventually led to the sophomore quarterback getting named the starter. The competition was a long, awkward coronation.

Why didn’t true QB competitor get added in 2025? Per O’Connell, that’s been part of his vision from the beginning.

Maybe Minnesota felt as though they had competition in Sam Howell. That’s tough to believe, though, given how things unfolded. The former Seahawk got shown the door before the 2025 season began, suggesting that he did very little to impress the coaching staff.

Neither of the other options — Brett Rypien and Max Brosmer — were understood as competitors in the QB1 battle. They fought to be the QB3 rather than the QB1.

An obvious retort is that Minnesota made a solid effort to re-sign Daniel Jones. Doing so would have meant welcoming legitimate competition to the Twin Cities. That’s a vital detail that does carry weight and does need to be remembered.

What’s odd, though, is that Jones walked and then Minnesota did basically nothing until trading for Howell during the 2025 NFL Draft.

Refusing to sign Aaron Rodgers likely cost the team a spot in the playoffs. But, to be sure, the amount of headaches in Minnesota decreased. Rodgers likely was never going to be open to a true battle. If there was a real desire to conduct a competition, then Rodgers is the wrong guy. He’s insufferable as the QB1; imagine him being the QB2.

Why not a turn toward free agency, a spot that always has at least decent options? One such option, Mr. Carson Wentz, only got added very late. Too late, in fact, to have played a part in the competition (to the detriment of the Vikings’ ability to compete in 2025).

The point, folks, is that the Kevin O’Connell answer about wanting competition doesn’t fully add up. Quite possibly, the skipper pushed for a competitor and then had the former GM fail to deliver. If so, then O’Connell would be wise to avoid throwing his former colleague under the bus.

But then there’s another part of the mix: all of the public praise from O’Connell toward McCarthy. He hasn’t been shy about articulating his belief in McCarthy being the quarterback.

At one point, O’Connell referred to the kid as Minnesota’s franchise passer. So, too, did he posit that teams fail young passers before young passers fail a team. He’s likely very correct about at least one of those statements (franchise failure) and may end up looking a bit foolish for the other (McCarthy the franchise passer).

Looking back, the Vikings made a really poor decision when failing to introduce a true competitor into the mix last year. Doing so would have been much easier to manage in the media given that McCarthy was coming off a fully lost rookie season do the injury. Instead, the team worked through some weird, vague answers about McCarthy not being the QB1 before he really struggled as the QB1.

Hovering around all of this discussion is the possibility that Kevin O’Connell ends up rolling with the kid. McCarthy has proven to be scrappy, precisely the characteristic that makes him such a compelling option. Seeing him seize the starter’s job and never relinquish it would be the best outcome for the franchise.

The Vikings will see the pair of top arms get back into action tomorrow as the team gets back to work at practice.

Senior Editor for Vikings Territory & PurplePTSD . Twitter & Bluesky: @VikingsGazette. Email: k.joudry[at]vikingsterritory[dot]com. Canadian. Jude 1:24-25.