The Vikings disrespect is just flat out lazy...

Tyler Forness discusses the national media's disrespect when it comes to the Minnesota Vikings and J.J. McCarthy!

Transcript

00:00The Minnesota Vikings continue to be overlooked, but it's the why that makes absolutely no sense.

00:07The Minnesota Vikings continue to be overlooked. Yeah, they continue to be overlooked. It's really

00:13simple. The main reason why they continue to be overlooked is because of J.J. McCarthy.

00:18Yeah, there's some questions anytime a new quarterback takes over, especially one that's

00:22never played in a National Football League game. It's a fair critique. We don't know what he's

00:27going to be. We can project, we can guess, we can use our pre-draft evaluations, and all of that

00:33makes sense. But what doesn't make sense is the narrative surrounding J.J. McCarthy and the

00:39Minnesota Vikings. The narrative is that it's only going to be J.J. McCarthy that determines

00:44how good this team is. The narrative is that J.J. McCarthy's never played in a National Football

00:49League game, so we can't project these guys to be very good. We just can't do it. Plus,

00:55they play in the hardest division in the NFL. That last point is fair. It is the hardest division

01:00in the National Football League. But I'm not buying the Bears, and the Packers really didn't do a ton

01:06to improve their roster. They gave $19 million a year to an average offensive lineman. And not average

01:12as in an average starter, an average offensive lineman. Crazy money. But here's the frustrating

01:20part. Why aren't they talking about how the team can make J.J. McCarthy's performance relatively

01:27moot? It honestly doesn't matter how good McCarthy is with how deep and stacked this roster is,

01:33with how good the coaching staff is. You are looking at a roster that has potentially the

01:38best offensive line in football and a potential top five defense. It's a quarterback-proof roster,

01:43and that's before we even discuss players like Justin Jefferson, Jordan Addison, T.J. Hawkinson.

01:49You're throwing to elite weapons, guys who can create easy separation without much effort at all.

01:55So why isn't that part of the discussion? Why is it just, oh, J.J. McCarthy, we don't know,

01:59so we can't even view these guys highly? There's no effort. There's no trying. Here's the reality.

02:06When it comes to the Vikings, Kevin O'Connell has made this team in his image,

02:10and within making it in his image, he elevates the quarterback to an entirely different level

02:15that they've never played at before. He did so with Nick Mullins. He did so with Kirk Cousins,

02:20and he did so with Sam Darnold. Why are we just dismissing the fact that he could just do that

02:26with J.J. McCarthy? If McCarthy plays like an average starter this year, the Vikings could win 12 games.

02:31It's that simple. And the fact that it's not being discussed on a national level is honestly lazy.

02:39We need to do better. This team has a lot of questions, but they have a ton of answers

02:45for whatever gets thrown at them. And that is the biggest part of the discussion

02:51that nobody else is talking about. I'm Tyler Fornes with A to Z Sports. Let's go Vikings.