Building Belief: How the Vikings Beat the Bears on Monday Night

The Minnesota Vikings authored a riotous comeback to knock over the Bears in their season opener. And the way they did it might tell us everything we need to know about who the team is.

Photo by Patrick McDermott/Getty Images

The 2025 Minnesota Vikings are 1-0 in one-score games.

It is a benign fact that NFL teams cannot replicate their close-game success. It is a startling reality that the Minnesota Vikings have defied that logic; they, under Kevin O’Connell, are 27-9 in one-score games, a .750 winning percentage that exceeds all other NFL teams in the O’Connell era except the Philadelphia Eagles. The only other team close to the Eagles and Vikings in this statistic is the Kansas City Chiefs.

Two teams atop the heap, members of NFL royalty. And the Vikings. The Eagles and Chiefs fan bases share a number of things, but one element that runs through both fan cultures is an unerring trust in one player: the quarterback.

The Vikings, in that same span of time, have not had a Jalen Hurts or a Patrick Mahomes. They have had a Kirk Cousins, a Joshua Dobbs, a Nick Mullens, a Jaren Hall, a Sam Darnold and now, a J.J. McCarthy.

Nevertheless, the strong sense of belief runs through the franchise – one that defies understanding and expectation. In some ways, it is an oasis of belief amidst a desert of broken hopes and dreams.

If any fanbase can be excused for not having belief, it is the Vikings fanbase – one that so habitually sees its hearts broken that the phrase that gives its title to this newsletter may not even be one of the ten most dreaded phrases in the fanbase’s heartbreak lexicon.

We cannot know if McCarthy is “the answer” in any meaningful sense. We probably won’t know for at least a full calendar year, if not longer. But games like this season opener, a Monday Night Football affair that happened to double as McCarthy’s NFL debut, produce the building blocks that turn belief into trust.

What happened?

J.J. McCarthy

The fourth-quarter heroics of McCarthy are going to be compared to historical greats for the next week, none captured perhaps more hyperbolically than by the Monday Night Football broadcast itself, which dug up a statistic indicating that McCarthy is the first quarterback to overcome a ten-point deficit in his debut in the fourth quarter since Steve Young’s arrival onto the scene against the Detroit Lions in 1985.

Living in the shadow of Tom Brady at Michigan and now the fragile hopes of a Vikings fanbase close to perfection with Fran Tarkenton, Daunte Culpepper, Randall Cunningham, Brett Favre and yes, Case Keenum, McCarthy has been comfortable looking up – not to admire, but to aspire.

It’s not that it’s fair or unfair to compare McCarthy to quarterbacks who have achieved the most or have fallen just shy of immortality. It’s that these comparisons are natural and inevitable to any quarterback with any sense of ambition. And McCarthy, holder of national championships at the high school and college level, has ambition.

It is within the borders of these impossible dreams that McCarthy threw the most catastrophic pass either quarterback would manage all night.

In many ways, McCarthy was the perfect player for that moment. As Luke Braun’s piece profiling McCarthy points out, he’d been here before.

Michigan entered the 2022 Fiesta Bowl with sky high expectations, heavily favored over Texas Christian. But a catastrophic mistake put them in an early hole. McCarthy, known for his rocket arm, trusted it just a bit too much on a quick out. TCU corner Bud Clark jumped right in front of it and waltzed into the end zone.

That pass not only put Michigan in an early hole, but it completely shattered McCarthy’s confidence.

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As a heavy favorite after a 13-0 season, J.J. McCarthy cracked open like an egg. From that moment on, to some, he became a laughingstock. The overwhelmed, baby-faced nepo baby that couldn’t get going when the going got tough.

But that’s not the lesson McCarthy took away from that game. After a winter and spring spent ruminating on failure, the lasting lesson didn’t come from what went wrong. It came from how close Michigan got to winning that game. The Wolverines clawed back after that back-breaking pick-six, keeping the game competitive until the final minute.

Sure, they fell short, but they found ways to move the ball and score despite McCarthy’s worst mistakes. He learned how much a single mistake can blend into the background of an entire game.

That pick-six, thrown to former Viking Nahshon Wright, was the biggest play of the night by any measure. It provided the Chicago Bears with 9.7 “net expected points” – tacking six actual points onto the scoreboard with another one likely coming on the point-after attempt. The remainder comes from what the Vikings would likely have scored without that disastrous throw. The next-largest swing was a play worth a mere 2.8 expected points.

By win probability, the pick-six swung the Vikings from 53 percent favorites to 24 percent underdogs. A swing of 29 points in win probability was more than any other individual play could manage.

It dwarfed the rest of the game.

It blended into the background of the game.