When Monday night’s game was over, Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell admitted that being down 17-6 in the fourth quarter on the road with a quarterback making his first NFL start was not where he wanted to find his team.
J.J. McCarthy threw an interception that the Bears returned for a touchdown and generally struggled to move the team in his first meaningful game since winning the national title with Michigan after the 2023 season. O’Connell said “you hope to not have this chapter be the first chapter” while discussing his feelings at the moment, but a major plot twist was coming.
McCarthy threw a touchdown to Justin Jefferson to close the gap to five points, found Aaron Jones to give the Vikings their first lead of the night, and then ran for his first NFL touchdown on the way to an improbable 27-24 comeback. O’Connell said that while he wouldn’t draw it up that way, there was a lot to like about how McCarthy and the rest of the team responded to an adverse situation.
“There’s no way to deny that we don’t win this game unless J.J. plays the way he did in the second half, and, most importantly, kept the belief of his football team behind him,” O’Connell said in his postgame press conference. “And now we know it’s possible. We hope to not be in these circumstances very often, but this team’s made of the right stuff. Players have built something special within that locker room and on that sideline. I’m just very, very proud of them.”
The NFL said McCarthy is the first quarterback to come back from 10 or more points down in the fourth quarter of his debut since Steve Young in 1985 and the only one to do it on the road since 1950. No one with the Vikings was looking to make that kind of history when the game kicked off, but they’re hoping it was the start of something big in Minnesota.
