Over the past few weeks, the Minnesota Vikings have made it rather evident that they hope to select their franchise quarterback in the 2024 NFL Draft. Yours sincerely went above and beyond in the SB Nation NFL Mock Draft this year to ensure that this exact situation occurred.
The Minnesota Vikings have chosen Michigan quarterback J.J. McCarthy with the fourth overall choice in the 2024 SB Nation NFL Mock Draft, following a trade with the Arizona Cardinals.
I’ll be documenting the scenario that led to the trade up with the Cardinals in a separate post, but the terms of the deal were the Vikings sending picks 11 and 23 in this year’s draft and their 2025 first-rounder to Arizona in exchange for No. 4 overall. That probably sounds expensive on the surface, but it’s only too high a price to pay if the trade doesn’t work. If McCarthy becomes the Vikings’ first true long-term quarterback since Daunte Culpepper was in town, nobody’s going to care about what the price was.
McCarthy takes a lot of heat from the Really Smart Football People™ because he didn’t put up incredibly eye-popping numbers in Ann Arbor. Honestly, that has as much to do with the system he was in as it does anything else. Jim Harbaugh would run the ball 80 times a game if he could, and with the Michigan offensive line and running game he had the luxury to be able to do that. However, when McCarthy was asked to make plays, that’s exactly what he did. I know that wins aren’t a quarterback stat, but in his last two years with the Wolverines they did only lose one game and won the National Championship this past season, and he contributed significantly more positives to those teams than negatives.
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