SKOL from the Sofa
2025 Week 8 – Vikings at Chargers

With a couple of losses in the books after the bye, the season is starting to head from bad to worse, but is it really all doom and gloom? In the latest Skol from the Sofa, Charles Wheeler is back to remind us all that it’s bad, but it’s not as bad as it looks for the second half of the season.

Halloween came early for the Vikes on Thursday night, as they fell 37–10 to an equally-banged-up Los Angeles Chargers, and man was it ever a horrorshow. Honestly I don’t blame you if you wanna skip this recap entirely. It’s fine. Go have a cup of tea. But if you want to go through it all and exorcise some of the vibes demons within, I’m here for you. Let’s talk. This is a safe space.

Chat, are we cooked?

It’s a quirk of slang in the year 2025 that I can say – with some confidence – that your Minnesota Vikings are completely overcooked, and yet somehow not cooked.

I’ll explain. Yes, Thursday night was a disaster game. Yes, many of the problems are persistent and troublingly replicable. The playbook has been noticeably simplified for Carson Wentz’s comfort – and not much else has met that goal – but this offense still feels like an enormous excess of thought and counter-thought when simpler concepts could do as much if not more.

Wait, is the whole thing overcooked?

You’ll hear a lot of Vikings fans, haters, and everything in between talk about head coach Kevin O’Connell and general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah as a single unit, and on this occasion there’s some merit there, because the GM’s personnel strategy has proven to have as many flaws of complexity as the offensive scheme. He traded away Harrison Phillips for a sixth-round pick, leaving us glaringly understaffed in run defense. Meanwhile, this year’s sixth-rounder, linebacker Kobe King, was unceremoniously cut pregame. The latter is not too much of an eyebrow-raiser, but if a sixth-rounder is so worthless, was it really worth blowing up our run-stopping capability to acquire an extra one, rather than keeping Phillips and letting him get cut as a cap casualty at the end of the season once we’ve had more time to figure out his successor?

So… we’re cooked?

Incredibly… no. The O-line has been atrocious, but also patchwork. Concern about snap counts for Christian Darrisaw are warranted, but if he’s not 100%, it’s better to be doing that than not. If we get this line to near-enough full strength (I very much doubt we’re seeing Ryan Kelly again given the concussion history, sadly), things can probably hold up well enough for some of the longer-developing plays KOC likes to not actually, really kill a quarterback in real life.

And, most importantly, we still have J. J. McCarthy to come back. Unproven, sure. Shaky start, sure. But it would be an astonishing implosion of his talent for him to be anywhere near as bad as Wentz, consistently, for the rest of the year, and even if he’s way behind where we’d want, he’s young enough for the development opportunity to be there. It’s worth the shot, just like it always has been. Put the kid out there and try to be a little forgiving, why not. We’re not cooked yet. But we may also not be “cooking”, per se. I don’t know. I work with teenagers and I still don’t understand this stuff.

Speaking of how bad Carson Wentz is…

…this week didn’t give us any answers about whose fault that is, really. The dude was literally being held together with a brace on his left arm, limiting his movement, in a fashion that suggested it could literally fall off at a moment’s notice. And yet, those missed throws looked exactly the same as they did when he was healthy. A couple of weeks of atrocious O-line play has crushed even the most cautious optimism we developed from the London game, with Blake Brandel looking like a possible moneyball center. That didn’t help Wentz, but he also showed absolutely nothing to suggest that he could’ve done better with better protection. Jefferson and Addison stood there wide open for half the game. Throws went three yards either side of where they should’ve. The 10-year veteran couldn’t come off his first read if his life depended on it. He’s not the answer to any questions we have, and it’s hard to think of any party that wouldn’t benefit from this being his last NFL start.

I don’t know how to explain that we shouldn’t trade everyone

I’m not gonna pull punches, the season ain’t looking good. Things can turn around but there is an amount of pessimism I’d consider fairly justified at this point. But suddenly we have a cavalcade of voices clamouring for a fire sale where we kick everyone but Jefferson out the door for whatever meagre draft picks we can get. This would be: a very bad idea.

Like c’mon. Remember the vibes of last season? Remember the locker room culture? Remember how many players were open about how badly they wanted to be Minnesota Vikings? That may not be digging us out of the current hole we’re in, but it’s also not the kind of thing that dies overnight, nor should it be given up lightly. We have a culture that can take good to elite, and I will not be dissuaded from that. It’s not taking bad to good right now, but if we let too many of its pieces walk, then we don’t have a team, we have some guys in a room. Don’t blow this up just ‘cos it went wrong once.

While I’m at it, take the tinfoil hats off please

You think the offseason is where things get silly? Boy, do I have some conspiracy theories to show you.

I’m personally still 50/50 on whether Will Reichard’s kick in London hit that camera wire. I am 100% certain that the one on Thursday absolutely, unequivocally did not. I understand the impulse to pattern-seek! I understand grasping for a fun grievance! But sorry, you’re wrong, it was a rushed field goal attempt with no timeouts and he scuffed the turf. That’s it. Chill out.

And while I’m telling you to chill out, oh my good god can we please calm down everyone who thinks J. J. McCarthy has been “soft benched”, whatever that means. I’m not gonna name the former NFL team doctor whose second career as an engagement-farming social media grifter has been shoved in our faces this week, but the theory goes that McCarthy is healthy and the Vikings are lying on the injury report because they think he’s bad.

To be clear, that’s a rules violation that can cost a team draft picks if they get found out. McCarthy is in week 6 of recovery from an injury with a 4–8-week recovery timeline. He’s the emergency third QB because in a pinch, he’d be healthy enough to play in a fashion that might hurt his development a bit (picking up bad, pain-influenced mechanics on the sore ankle, etc.). All of this is so normal and so boring, and any notion that something dark is at play is pure grift from charlatans who don’t deserve your attention for any longer than it takes you to type “man shut up” in their replies.

Okay. Some of that was about the actual game, I think. See you after the J. J. McCarthy comeback game at Detroit, which will surely be a fountain of reasonable takes.

Do you want to have your say about an upcoming Vikings game? Is something really grinding your gears? You can have your say right here in Skol from the Sofa. Just drop us an email at UKVikingsFanClub@gmail.com or send us a DM on any of our social media channels.