J.J. McCarthy and What Came First: Good Offense Or Bad Defense?

J.J. McCarthy may have revived hope with his most recent performances. But they're also two of the worst defenses in the NFL. Matt Fries investigates how much we can find out from these games

Photo by Carlos Gonzalez/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images

The Minnesota Vikings’ Sunday Night Football win against the Dallas Cowboys marked the second positive game by EPA per play of young quarterback J.J. McCarthy’s career, a great follow-up to the first such game, which came the week prior against the Washington Commanders.

For McCarthy, the strong performances were much needed after an abysmal start to his season. He’s overtaken Cam Ward in terms of EPA per dropback, per NextGenStats, and therefore is no longer dead last in that stat. But it’s also noteworthy that McCarthy’s only two high-level performances this year came against abysmal defenses.

Dallas’ defense ranks 32nd in defensive EPA per play, and Washington’s is 30th. In just passing defense, they flip spots, with Washington last in the league and Dallas 30th (Cincinnati, the only other team the Vikings have scored 30-plus points against this season, is 31st in both categories).

The schedule luck continues for McCarthy, who has another easy matchup against the New York Giants (29th in EPA per play on defense; 21st against the pass). But how do you disentangle McCarthy’s strong performance from the defenses he’s playing? Does McCarthy simply look better because he’s facing competition anyone could succeed against, or has there been meaningful improvement?

You could look at how McCarthy performed relative to other QBs. Against Washington, McCarthy’s performance was 4th 4th-best out of their 14 opponents, while his game against Dallas was 2nd out of 14 opposing QB games. In each game, McCarthy outperformed noteworthy names like Patrick Mahomes and Jordan Love. That doesn’t necessarily mean much, however, as a player like Michael Penix Jr. outperformed what McCarthy was able to do against Washington.

What might be noteworthy is that McCarthy’s drastic improvement has come immediately after Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell decided to have him de-emphasize the mechanics the team had been drilling with him all season. To the team, it seemed that overfocusing on the mechanics was causing McCarthy to play slowly and struggle to make good in-game decisions. The hope was that, in tabling that work, McCarthy would have less cognitive load out on the field, hopefully improving his performance.

Author’s note: There has been a seemingly infinite amount of ink spilled in the Vikings media space as it relates to QB mechanics and McCarthy’s throwing motion specifically. McCarthy’s throwing motion is obviously something that is still (generously) a work-in-progress, and I’m not going to focus on that aspect of his game in his piece. I will, however, talk about lower-body mechanics as they relate to processing and timing. I think McCarthy’s dropback footwork also still needs work, but we’ll get to that later.

Certainly, McCarthy has played better since the Vikings made the switch to stop having him worry so much about his mechanics. But, given the defenses he’d faced, a real chicken-or-the-egg question exists as to how real McCarthy’s improvement is. There’s a third complicating factor in terms of offensive play design to consider as well. I went to the tape to try to unravel all the threads and see if the improvement was real.

This is Bad Defense (Or, Good Offensive Design)

Going back through the tape, it is clear that the opposing defenses helped McCarthy out in a variety of ways over the last two weeks. It would be unfair to fully discount these plays, as no matter how good a defense is, it is going to occasionally allow open zones and easy completions. But for this analysis it’s important to take stock of how and when it happens so we can try to grade McCarthy on a bit of a curve.

Bad Defense

To me, a clear example of the defense making McCarthy’s job very easy was his first TD throw against Washington. On the play, you have Bobby Wagner imitating the “he froze” meme.

I mean, look at this play. Wagner is stuck in place. The outside cornerback is able to drive on the ball to contact Oliver, but he never really has a chance to make this play. It’s simply a coverage bust that McCarthy, to his credit, executed against.

Washington, in particular, gave McCarthy a number of easy, quick completions. McCarthy deserves a small amount of praise for hitting these plays, as it was something he needed to start doing more consistently, but executing these types of throws is a bare minimum requirement for an NFL QB.

There are certainly nice elements to the below plays from McCarthy, but here’s a compilation of throws that I would attribute more to the defensive performance than high-level QB play:

Good Offense

Kevin O’Connell also deserves significant credit for the passing game’s performance over the past couple of weeks. The Vikings have had a number of high-level designs that have led to easy gains. Over the past two weeks, the Vikings have gained 43 yards on 5 screens. He had another 9-yard completion to Jalen Nailor on a tap pass, as well as a pair of successful screens (one to Jones, one to Jefferson) that got negated by penalty in the Washington game.