Why the Vikings didn't place J.J. McCarthy or Andrew Van Ginkel on IR

Within all of the discussion around J.J. McCarthy's injury, which includes the "soft benching" conspiracy theory, one question comes up a lot: Why didn't the Vikings place him on injured reserve?

McCarthy's high ankle sprain has now caused him to miss four games, which is the minimum requirement when a player lands on "short-term" IR. He might miss a fifth contest if he isn't ready to play on a short week in the Vikings' game against the Chargers Thursday night. Had the Vikings placed him on IR after he got hurt in Week 2, it would've removed any questions about the timeline of his recovery and granted the team an extra roster spot to work with over the last four weeks.

There are a few problems with that idea, though. The first is that McCarthy's specific case is nuanced (and still somewhat mysterious). But before we talk about McCarthy, it's worth mentioning an NFL roster management rule that many people may not know about.

Each team is allowed to place a player on IR, with a designation to return, only eight times in a season. That number goes up to ten if a team makes the playoffs. Why that matters in this situation is that the Vikings have already used that procedure six times this year:

FB C.J. Ham (roster cutdown day, since returned)
OLB Tyler Batty (cutdown day, since returned)
LB Blake Cashman (after Week 1, since returned)
RB Ty Chandler (after Week 1)
RB Aaron Jones (after Week 2)
C Ryan Kelly (after Week 3)

That means they only have the ability to place on a player on IR with a return designation two more times this season. If you place a player on IR without that designation, their season is over.

That's also part of the reason why someone like outside linebacker Andrew Van Ginkel never went on IR. Van Ginkel missed Week 2 with a concussion, barely played in Week 3, and has now missed the last three games due to a neck injury. If he doesn't play on Thursday, he too will have missed four straight games, which will lead to more "why didn't he go on IR?" questions.

The answer is that when you've already used a big chunk of your allotment, you can't just send every player with a multi-week injury to IR in order to free up a 53-man roster spot. The Vikings' front office has to be judicious with how it uses those final two spots over the remainder of the season.

Beyond that, sometimes a part of the answer is that teams don't know exactly how long an injury is going to last, and they want to preserve the possibility of a player returning after only missing 2-3 games. It's easy to ask "why didn't he go on IR?" in hindsight, but placing a player on IR means they can't even practice until after those four games are over. Also, the flexibility of that extra 53-man roster spot is probably a bit overrated in a league where only 48 can be active on gameday.

With McCarthy specifically, an IR placement would've prevented him from getting valuable work in practice before the Vikings' bye week and last week in the lead-up to the Eagles game.

What exactly happened with McCarthy's injury and his recovery timeline remains a bit unclear. On Sunday, ESPN's Adam Schefter tweeted that it was always expected to be a six-week injury, despite the fact that, when the injury happened, he said it was expected to sideline McCarthy for two to four weeks. McCarthy himself recently said he received medical opinions ranging from two to six weeks.

Either Schefter's initial report was outright false or something changed with McCarthy's timeline, whether due to a setback or the injury simply lingering longer than anticipated. Either way, the point that matters is that McCarthy remaining on the active roster allowed him to practice over the past couple weeks, even if he wasn't ready to play against the Eagles. Had he gone on IR, he would just now be returning to practice.

There's more nuance and complexity involved in something like IR decisions than people may think.

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