Ninety-Nine Yards and 35 Inches: A Reason to Believe

The Minnesota Vikings eviscerated the New York Giants 28-6. But the opening game of the 2024 NFL season wasn't exactly about that. Instead, it was about one drive.

Photo by Mitchell Leff/Getty Images

It’s one game against a team who are favorites to fire their head coach by January. A sober analysis of the game would tell us to be cautious; pause on any meaningful declarations about the year based on the first game of the season.

A single game sample of a 17-game population is going to struggle to tell us anything significant, but that’s particularly true when it comes to a game against a struggling team and especially so when it’s the first game of the year, known for oddities that defy the balance of the season.

But this is not about whether the opening salvo gives us enough information to predict the rest of the season and more about the anxieties that run persistently through the Vikings fanbase. Those already tense anxieties were heightened for 2024 as the previous Vikings quarterback shipped himself off to Atlanta and his rookie replacement was unceremoniously injured during a preseason game.

Yes, Sam Darnold was supposed to start and I fully believed that the Vikings were committing to Darnold for the season, almost regardless of results. But it’s sometimes difficult to reconcile beliefs based on evidence and those based on vibes – and the J.J. McCarthy vibes were strong.

Was it rational to pin one’s hopes for the 2024 season on McCarthy? Probably not. Did that stop a number of Vikings fans? That’s not what hope is about. Of course it didn’t. And, in some sense, it always felt like a security blanket for hope, a break-glass-in-case-of-melancholy move.

A losing season could be “saved” by a rookie quarterback showing up late and playing well, even if there are no postseason games on the horizon. The emotions are what matter.

Another benefit to a rookie quarterback on the bench is that a fan can insulate themselves from thinking too much about the starter. Without that frontier of possibility, Vikings fans had to confront the reality of Darnold.

To say I was optimistic about Darnold was to say I thought it was possible he was more than what he demonstrated in New York, a bust for the ages known more for seeing ghosts than seeing the post-snap safety rotation.

His play at the end of his Carolina tenure and briefly in San Francisco suggested that there was a salvageable player, someone who could steer the ship while the real deal was still cooking.

Darnold looked more than competent though, huh?

Sam Darnold Succeeded in Spite of, Not Because of, His Environment