The Vikings have scrapped the J.J. McCarthy experience after the 2024 first-round pick made only 10 starts in two-plus seasons.
That adds McCarthy to a short list of first-round quarterbacks who, for whatever reason, didn’t last very long with the teams that drafted them.
Via Kevin Seifert of ESPN, Elias Sports Bureau identifies only four first-round quarterbacks in the past 25 years who started 10 or fewer games for the team that picked them.
Paxton Lynch, the 2016 first-round pick of the Broncos, started only four games in Denver. He never played in a regular-season game for any other team.
Trey Lance, for whom the 49ers traded up in 2021 to make the third overall selection, started only four games in San Francisco. (He has since made eight appearances with two starts for the Cowboys and Chargers.)
Johnny Manziel, a first-round pick of the Browns in 2014, started eight games in Cleveland. He never played for another NFL team.
McCarthy had exactly 10 starts with the Vikings. He won six of them. But the Vikings have opted to take a fifth-round pick in order to move on from him.
While it’s far less than the first-round pick plus more that they gave up to get him, it’s more than what they would have gotten if he’d been cut before the start of the 2026 season. Which seemed to be a real possibility in late August, especially after he slipped to third on the depth chart.
Either way, the Vikings pulled the plug. And now they’ll have to hope that McCarthy doesn’t become the latest second-act (or third-act) quarterback who becomes a star for someone else.
Sure, the Vikings would never say it out loud. They don’t need to. They know that the only thing that will make their McCarthy misadventures worse will be watching him become for someone else what the Vikings hoped he would be.