Vikings running back Aaron Jones downplayed the significance of his shoulder injury after Sunday’s win over the Lions and the picture doesn’t look any different on Monday.
Jones had to leave the game after running for 78 yards on nine carries and picking up another 20 yards on two catches. During a Monday press conference, Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell said that the team is hopeful that Jones will be good to go for their Week 10 game against the Ravens.
“Positive news early on on Aaron Jones,” O’Connell said. “He’s sore, obviously, coming out of the game, but the evaluations have been pretty positive today. We’ll see how he does throughout the week, but expecting him to be able to kinda hopefully ramp up his workload.”
Jones missed four games with a hamstring injury earlier this season and Sunday’s game was his second since coming off of injured reserve.
The two biggest upsets of the 2025 NFL season happened simultaneously on Sunday, upending the NFC North in the process.
The Panthers were 13-point underdogs, but they beat the Packers 16-13 in Green Bay. That was the biggest upset of this NFL season.
At the same time that the Panthers were pulling off their upset, the 9.5-point underdog Vikings were beating the Lions in Detroit. That was the second-biggest upset of this NFL season. Prior to Sunday, teams favored by more than nine points were 11-0 straight up.
The Packers and Lions are the top two teams in the NFC North, and both of them losing, with the Lions losing to an NFC North rival and the Bears also winning, turned the NFC North into the NFL’s most competitive division. The Packers are now in first place at 5-2-1, the Lions are in second at 5-3, owning the head-to-head tiebreaker over the 5-3 Bears, and a game ahead of the 4-4 Vikings.
What once looked like a two-team race between the Packers and Lions now looks like a four-team race, thanks to two major upsets.
Vikings quarterback J.J. McCarthy made his first start since Week 2 on Sunday and the result was the one the team wanted to see.
McCarthy threw a pair of touchdowns and sealed the 27-24 win with a 16-yard pass to wide receiver Jalen Nailor on a late third down, but he wasn’t totally satisfied with his play in his return from an ankle injury. McCarthy finished 14-of-25 for 143 yards and also threw an interception, which is why his postgame comments focused on a desire to be even better in the coming weeks.
“I’m happy that we got the win, but I’m not proud, to be honest with you,” McCarthy said, via the team’s website. “There’s a lot of meat on the bone, and I feel like I could have played a lot better. But coming into this environment and controlling my emotions, controlling kind of my temperament going into it — I was proud of that.”
Thanks to the ankle injury and 2024’s knee surgery, Sunday’s game was just McCarthy’s third start since being drafted in the first round last year. That makes ebbs and flows in his game inevitable, and there was enough good in a road win to make the Vikings feel good about where things can go for the quarterback from here.
Lions coach Dan Campbell said his team looked unprepared in Sunday’s loss to the Vikings despite having an extra week to get ready coming off their bye, and he puts the blame for that on himself.
“We did everything we needed to do to lose that game. We made every critical error to lose it,” Campbell said. “When you did not play well in all phases that falls on the head coach. That’s me. I did not have them ready after the bye. We made too many critical errors.”
Campbell said he never expected to see his team play the way it did in the 27-24 loss to Minnesota.
“I thought we would play well, I really did. I thought we would play well. and ultimately it’s probably one of the worst games we’ve played in a long time, so it was just the opposite of that. We looked rusty, we looked out of sync,” Campbell said. “That’s evident, that I didn’t have them ready, and gotta do a better job. A much better job.”
The Lions are now 5-3 and have already lost more games than they did all of last season, but Campbell expressed confidence that they can get things turned around.
“I’ve got to clean some stuff up, and we will,” Campbell said. “I will.”
Lions left guard Christian Mahogany injured his knee late in Sunday’s loss to the Vikings.
He was on crutches in the locker room after the game, and coach Dan Campbell delivered a good news/bad news update on Mahogany’s injury.
Mahogany will miss significant time, but the injury is not season-ending. He could return in late December.
“Mahogany is going to be out for a while,” Campbell said. “Long time, probably.”
Mahogany had started all eight games.
