Apologies to my readers who can’t stand the NFL, but last night’s game between the Minnesota Vikings and the Chicago Bears was one of the most “tales of two halves” I’ve ever watched. I missed most of the first offensive series, but I don’t think it would have been any more enjoyable than the rest of the first half of football. The Bears under quarterback Caleb Williams really were the better team on the field over the first 30-45 minutes of play (and I hate to admit it, but it was true). Williams completed his first ten pass attempts, which is apparently the first time that had happened for a Bears quarterback since the 1970s, and his amazing ability to avoid sacks kept the Vikings offense off the field. Even when they got on the field, they were not very effective, not making a first down until late in the first half.

Coming into the game, I was expecting a much more aggressive performance from the Vikings, but it was the Bears who surprised me with patient, competent work on the field. The nadir for the Vikings was a J.J. McCarthy pass intended for Justin Jefferson that got picked off and run back for a touchdown by a player who’d been on the Vikings practice squad last year. But it got better from there:

J.J. McCarthy’s first NFL interception had just been returned 74 yards for a touchdown. The fans he’d once accompanied at Soldier Field were now exulting in his misfortune.

But when the Vikings huddled deep in their own territory in the third quarter on Monday night, down 17-6 to the Bears, their quarterback eyed his teammates and said, “Is there any place else you guys would rather be?”

It required little creativity to think of places the Vikings would rather be. They would have preferred, for example, not to be trailing their division rivals by double digits, as Caleb Williams turned Soldier Field’s new turf into a schoolyard for his own personal catch-me-if-you-can game with Vikings defenders.

They would have wished linebacker Blake Cashman had not pulled his right hamstring in one of those chases. And they would have hoped for more productivity from an offense that grasped for answers against the Bears defense.

It all became the backdrop for McCarthy’s stage, his chance to show that ineffable something that’s always seemed to make the difference during his football career. On Monday night in his hometown, he turned his NFL debut into a cinematic comeback.

McCarthy completed eight of his 11 passes for 95 yards and two touchdowns after the interception and put the Vikings up by 10 with a 14-yard touchdown run with three minutes to go. Those three touchdowns, all in the fourth quarter, propelled the Vikings to a 27-24 season-opening win.

At Purple Insider, Matthew Coller summed up the game:

The bottom line …

The first three quarters looked like they were played by a first-time starting quarterback and a team that was unprepared to be playing with a first-time starting quarterback. But once McCarthy shook off his first big mistake, he showed all the reasons that the Vikings placed their bets on him this offseason. He was in command, made plays with his athleticism and remained confident despite the tough start.

McCarthy is hardly the only one who sucked it up and pulled out the W. Mason proved that they can have a nasty run game. Jones showed his talent for catching the ball. The defense chased Williams and shut him down in the second half.

In the end, it was a gritty win. It won’t be the last that they need this year.

In the free-to-cheapskates portion of his post on Wide Left, Arif Hasan considers the statistical oddity of head coach Kevin O’Connell’s record in one-score games:

The 2025 Minnesota Vikings are 1-0 in one-score games.

It is a benign fact that NFL teams cannot replicate their close-game success. It is a startling reality that the Minnesota Vikings have defied that logic; they, under Kevin O’Connell, are 27-9 in one-score games, a .750 winning percentage that exceeds all other NFL teams in the O’Connell era except the Philadelphia Eagles. The only other team close to the Eagles and Vikings in this statistic is the Kansas City Chiefs.

Two teams atop the heap, members of NFL royalty. And the Vikings. The Eagles and Chiefs fan bases share a number of things, but one element that runs through both fan cultures is an unerring trust in one player: the quarterback.

The Vikings, in that same span of time, have not had a Jalen Hurts or a Patrick Mahomes. They have had a Kirk Cousins, a Joshua Dobbs, a Nick Mullens, a Jaren Hall, a Sam Darnold and now, a J.J. McCarthy.

Nevertheless, the strong sense of belief runs through the franchise – one that defies understanding and expectation. In some ways, it is an oasis of belief amidst a desert of broken hopes and dreams.

If any fanbase can be excused for not having belief, it is the Vikings fanbase – one that so habitually sees its hearts broken that the phrase that gives its title to this newsletter may not even be one of the ten most dreaded phrases in the fanbase’s heartbreak lexicon.

We cannot know if McCarthy is “the answer” in any meaningful sense. We probably won’t know for at least a full calendar year, if not longer. But games like this season opener, a Monday Night Football affair that happened to double as McCarthy’s NFL debut, produce the building blocks that turn belief into trust.

Update: The NFL, being the NFL, doesn’t allow me to embed this but if you go to this link you can see Kevin O’Connell’s post-game speech to the team in the locker room at Soldier Field.