The Vikings let Kirk Cousins walk and will instead turn to a combination of… no this can’t be right… Sam Darnold and rookie J.J. McCarthy? McCarthy started last season for the national champion Michigan Wolverines, and Darnold started one game for the NFC Champion San Francisco 49ers. Despite that, Sam Darnold probably threw more passes than McCarthy last year (do NOT fact-check this). With those two at the helm, how do we feel about the 2024 iteration of the Minnesota Vikings? Let’s dive right on in!
Undervalued: Jordan Addison, Wide Receiver (WR39, Pick 81 Overall)
There are a couple of things depressing Jordan Addison’s fantasy football value in 2024 drafts. First, he’s eating a suspension at some point shortly thanks to his offseason mostly spent doing things you shouldn’t be doing in cars, to put it lightly. Second, the WR30 last season was downgrading from Kirk Cousins to some amalgamation of Sam Darnold and J.J. McCarthy. Both of these are good reasons to be cautious, but I’m not too stressed about the suspension aspect of it.
Fantasy football prognosticators don’t like uncertainty, forgetting that they put their emotional stability behind a sixteen-game sample size in one of the most brutal sports in the game. If you play scared that you’re going to lose one of your players at some point this season, then you probably shouldn’t play at all. So, the suspension doesn’t mean much to me. What about the change from Kirk Cousins to those two quarterbacks?
Well, Kirk Cousins only played in eight games. That’s it, and that means that Jordan Addison has had [Not Kirk Cousins] as his NFL quarterback for more games than Kirk Cousins. With Cousins, Addison was on a roll (mostly in the touchdown department). Addison scored five touchdowns in four games before losing Cousins and averaged 4.5 receptions for 60 yards per game with Captain Kirk. With the Passtronaut (Joshua Dobbs), there was no drop-off. In the following six games (before an ankle injury forced him from the game after 38% of snaps and bothered him the next two weeks), he averaged… 4.3 receptions for 57 yards per game. It was a mere rounding error.
His time without Kirk Cousins, and before his ankle injury, also saw him with some strong peers in some advanced statistics. He was within two spots of Amari Cooper, Brandon Aiyuk, Cooper Kupp, and Ja’Marr Chase in target share, at 19.1%. His air yards share sat just below Justin Jefferson (33.2% for JJettas, and 32.9%for Jordan Addison) and he once again sat just above George Pickens and Ja’Marr Chase in those stats. So, he can, and will, have the opportunity to thrive.
Overvalued: T.J. Hockenson, Tight End (TE12, Pick 111 Overall)
While Addison was a little long, I am going to make up some space and time right now: the Vikings “hope” that Hockenson will “only” miss between 3-8 games. While I said it’s silly to worry about a player potentially missing games, I don’t think it’s particularly smart to spend a single-digit round pick on a currently injured player who his team hopes will only miss about half of the fantasy football regular season.
It’s also a roster construction reason, too. What are you going to do at tight end until Hockenson comes back? Stream? So you plan to take a player at a onesie position in a single-digit round to facilitate streaming tight end. [Walter Masterson mocking Date The Right Stuff Guy voice] Got it.
Sleeper: J.J. McCarthy, Quarterback (QB28, Pick 194 Overall)
So here’s the thing… I like J.J. McCarthy as a quarterback. Is he limited? Sure. Is he as limited as Jim Harbaugh’s “run the ball to set up running the ball” scheme at Michigan would lead you to believe? Absolutely not. He’s a better football player than Sam “Maybe we gave up too soon on Sam Darnold” Darnold, and I’m still taking victory laps over Nick Mullens not being as good as that one time you saw him shellack the Raiders on Thursday Night Football. That leaves McCarthy assuming the mantle sooner rather than later. I find camp reports to be repulsive augering, so the fact that McCarthy might end up on the bench to start the year does not shake me. Mostly because this baby is for 2QB leagues and other places where you have the roster space to let a quarterback sit and marinate.
McCarthy’s numbers don’t wow, since he was mostly there to hand it off to Blake Corum. But, he is an incredible runner on the move (something that will benefit quarterbacks early in their careers, think early Russ), and he has a big arm. Something that could find him frequently connecting with Justin Jefferson downfield. When the Wolverines let him pass, they let him really uncork one: his average depth of target was 10.3 yards downfield. To put that in perspective, this puts him between Caleb Williams (9.2), and Jayden Daniels (10.5), according to PFF.
This isn’t the only statistic that has him at or above his top-tier 2024 NFL Draft peers:
If the Wolverines let McCarthy throw, then he was good at it. When the Vikings need him to throw this season, then he will be ready to show everyone what he can do.
