The Vikings Fall Short Against the Ravens, Highlighting Minnesota's Quarterback Gamble

The Minnesota Vikings continue their bleak season with a loss to the Ravens, one primarily a product of their young quarterback. Did they screw up that position?

Photo by Michael Owens/Getty Images

The Vikings briefly injected life into the fanbase with their stunning win over the Detroit Lions last week, but this week failed to repeat the effort against the Baltimore Ravens — a team with talent that is struggling to establish themselves as a dominant team despite coming off of two seasons of MVP-level performance from their starting quarterback.

Losing 27-19 in a game that didn’t suggest a one-score outcome, the Vikings repeated the failures of last week’s outing without replicating many of the successes. At the core of the problem for Minnesota was their starting quarterback, J.J. McCarthy.

J.J. McCarthy’s Bad Day

A few weeks ago, Wide Left published a small exploration on what the first two weeks told us about J.J. McCarthy’s prospects for the season, concluding that while it was very difficult to figure out his long-term career trajectory, we had a pretty good understanding that it was extremely unlikely he’d put in a good performance for the rest of the season.

Thus far, the results have borne out: McCarthy himself is unlikely to turn the season around.

When Bryce Young was benched — not for injury reasons or with any illusion of a “soft benching” — he put together about as poor of a season start, accruing minus-0.44 EPA per dropback in his first two games of the season, very similar to McCarthy’s minus-0.52 mark.

Much was made of his return to form after his unbenching, but his total performance was still lackluster; since returning to the starting lineup, he had produced plus-0.02 EPA per dropback, 23rd of 35 quarterbacks in the back half of the season. He followed that with a season that, thus far, ranks 31st of 33 quarterbacks in the same measure.

Should McCarthy, with his volatile style of play, hit that aggregate plus-0.02 mark, it would be a huge improvement. At the moment, his minus-0.27 EPA per play would rank dead last among all qualifying quarterbacks.

The future is unwritten and McCarthy could easily improve. But the path is narrow; of the 35 quarterback seasons we have going back to 2000 where quarterbacks earned less than minus-0.20 EPA per dropback inside their first 16 games before they hit their fourth year of experience, only two turned in Pro Bowl level performances: Jared Goff and Alex Smith.

We seemingly are more likely looking at a Blaine Gabbert, Jimmy Clausen or Josh Rosen.

Either way, that long-term question is down the road and not of the moment. Right now, the Vikings are struggling. The primary reason is their quarterback.

McCarthy’s performance in this game doesn’t quite align with the production metrics, but it is instructive to look at them.

We can, of course, parse fault — McCarthy was perhaps not at fault on his second interception, where Justin Jefferson fell down, but also threw an interceptable pass on a throw to Jordan Addison that was ultimately ruled incomplete.

The Vikings maybe should have benefited from a pass interference penalty for Jefferson in the end zone but also benefited from legitimate, but softer, pass interference penalties on the subsequent drive. All in all, these EPA charts give us the broad strokes of McCarthy’s play: sharp to start, then regression.