There may not be many more than three guys who’d pick this play out of Sam Darnold’s renaissance season and recognize it as a preeminent illustration of the 27-year-old’s growth.
One would be Kevin O’Connell. Another is Darnold himself. And third would be Tom Brady.
It came in Week 17, in a massive home game against the Green Bay Packers. The Minnesota Vikings were 13–2, Green Bay came in at 11–4, and Minnesota was still chasing the Detroit Lions in the NFC North. It was second-and-4 with Darnold’s team up 20–10, the ball at the Vikings’ 47, and 3:40 left in the third quarter. The Vikings were looking to get separation they’d wind up needing in the end.
Justin Jefferson was split left, T.J. Hockenson was lined up in the left slot, Josh Oliver was the in-line tight end to the right, Jordan Addison was flanked right and, at the snap, all four guys released straight downfield. Aaron Jones stutter-stepped and leaked out of the backfield.
“We ran a four-verts concept. They bailed out into Tampa 2,” Darnold told me, late Thursday afternoon. “On my first hitch in my drop, I ended up getting it down to Aaron Jones for a checkdown and he went for like 13 yards. That’s a play I feel like I maybe would’ve tried to force a bender in there to T.J. or a hole shot to J.J. down the sideline [in the past]. We got a first down and we’re going fast. These guys are panic dropping out of there—so let me just get it to my halfback and let’s see what Aaron can do with it.
“Sure enough, he gets a first down and we keep the drive going. It’s just little things like that, that you learn as you keep playing this game.”
As Darnold said, the play was good for 13 yards. Four plays later, the Vikings scored to make it 27–10. They hung on to win 27–25, and you know how the rest of the season played out from there.
And, again, few would pick it out of Darnold’s season.
But after he did it for me, I went back and watched the play. I saw how fast Darnold recognized the coverage and got the ball to Jones, and it turns out the guy who was calling the game—who happens to be the best of all time—noticed it, too.
“K.B. [Kevin Burkhardt], that play, it reminds me, you said earlier in the game, Sam getting to a read that’s normally later really quickly, that was one,” Brady said. “They tried to take a shot down the field. [The Packers] were playing a structure that wasn’t going to allow a big play. The ball came out of his hand so quickly there to Jones, it looked like it was his first read. But it wasn’t his first read. It was his last read.”
This is the new Sam Darnold, different from the one that came out of USC seven years ago: a raw, gifted athlete who’d played in a simplistic Air Raid scheme in the Pac-12. He’s seeing the game faster, feeling it faster and, as a result, playing it faster—and a whole lot better.
This is also the guy the Seattle Seahawks are betting big on, giving him a three-year, $100.5 million deal that mirrors the one Baker Mayfield got from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Is that a good bet for Seattle to take? The above is just one reason to think it is.
Free agency isn’t over yet. But most of the headliners, save for a few big-name quarterbacks and older receivers, are off the market. So there’s a lot to account for this week, and over in the takeaways, we’ll do that with …
• A look at what Aaron Rodgers has left for the Pittsburgh Steelers, New York Giants or Vikings.
• More on the timeline ahead for Kirk Cousins and the Atlanta Falcons.
• What the Kansas City Chiefs’ and New Orleans Saints’ big restructures actually mean in the grand scheme.
And a whole lot more.
But we’re starting with a deep dive into Darnold’s rebirth, the Seahawks’ pursuit of him and what it means for the NFL going forward.
I remember having this conversation a bunch with O’Connell during the season—how it felt like everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop on Darnold, which, really, wasn’t fair.
“It’s the world we live in,” O’Connell told me in December. “When people have decided that you can’t play in their own minds, sometimes, instead of it being a product of a guy deserving the credit for playing really good football, it’s always just, When’s it going to go the other way? I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think that’s fair to him. He came here for the opp, he came here to be a Minnesota Viking, play in our offense with the players around him, and I have a blast coaching him.
“I’ve got a lot of confidence in him. There’s really not much more to it than that.”
Then, as his critics saw it, the other shoe did drop. A leaky line, beset by injury and inconsistency, crumbled in a season-ending loss to the Lions, and the Vikings’ playoff ouster against the Los Angeles Rams. Bottom line: If you were looking to doubt him, there it was.
But to steal O’Connell’s phrasing: Is it fair to do so?
If, say, Jordan Love struggled down the stretch in Green Bay (he did), or Justin Herbert had his worst game in the playoffs (that happened, too), would it lead to existential questions about the viability of the rest of their body of work? Or would it be chalked up as a bad couple of weeks coming for those guys at the wrong time? And why is the perception, from one guy to the next, so different?
I think these are all fair questions, and they bring me back to a conversation I had with ex-NFL quarterback Jordan Palmer, who’s trained Darnold since Darnold’s high school days, about reclamation projects such as Darold, Geno Smith (whom he’s replacing in Seattle), Mayfield and Jared Goff. Palmer gave me an interesting analogy on owners chasing the next great thing, with the promise of getting him on a rookie quarterback deal, rather than looking at guys who profile like Darnold.
“When you get to a certain threshold with investors who need to deploy $20 million, who need to deploy $300 million, when you get to that point, you’re no longer looking for killer opportunities that could be rad,” Palmer said. “You start shifting to distressed assets. When you have a bunch of money you have to deploy, one of the safest bets, let’s say you’re a private equity firm, or you’re a private office, you have a leadership team, you have operators, you have all sorts of resources, in-house or outsourced, is to take that distressed asset and turn it into something of value.
“In most cases, buying a business or buying commercial property, if you’re a big dog, buying skyscrapers, you look for those depreciated assets. For some reason, these same billionaires that own teams are getting talked into investing all their money in a startup. And a startup to me is taking a quarterback in the top five. You have all these data points that lead you to believe this may work. And then you have all these data points, historicals, that explain why it won’t work.
“And without the right infrastructure and the right system—so head coach, front office, scouting department, position coaches, player personnel, the guys in the huddle with them—no quarterback will survive. And if I plug the distressed asset into another crappy environment, then that asset’s not going to appreciate.”
So, Palmer continued, if you buy low on a quarterback like Darnold, the result might not just be a big pay-off in the near-term, but also the long-term. Which is where Seattle is with Darnold right now.
Remember, this sort of approach paid off for Seahawks GM John Schneider before.
The Seahawks initially signed Smith to a one-year deal in 2019. Then another one in ’20. And another in ’21. And ’22. The staff kept developing him and working with him, and, in time, he got good enough to create an invaluable off-ramp for the franchise from the Russell Wilson era. So the idea of going in on Darnold might’ve been more attractive—and feasible—to the Seahawks than it was to other teams.
And it got real after Seattle made an initial offer to Smith last month. The quarterback had been clear that he’d be looking for a commitment from the team, given how he’d played as the starter the past three years. The team put a deal in front of him that was well short of his own expectations and, facing a contractual divide of around $10 million per year (at least), the Seahawks started to consider their options.
Two got their attention. One was bringing Rodgers to Seattle. Schneider and the four-time NFL MVP were together for five years in Green Bay, and the GM thought Rodgers had plenty left to give, at least in 2025. The other was the thought of resetting with Darnold, who’d come in for less than Smith was looking for, and give the team the shot to get seven years younger at the position, while leaving room for the team to navigate looming contract talks with young stars such as Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Charles Cross, Kenneth Walker III and Boye Mafe.
The Seahawks were confident they’d be viable for either, having heard that both California natives preferred to be on the West Coast.
The coaches liked Darnold, too. Head coach Mike Macdonald remembered coaching against him, watching the tape and scheming against him—and finding there was no easy answer to defend him or obvious weakness to exploit. Then, in the teams’ Week 16 game, he remembered a two-play sequence. On the first play, the pocket collapsed, and Darnold was pulled down by his facemask by Byron Murphy. On the next snap, after a flag, Darnold stood in again in a muddy pocket, climbing through it unfazed and taking another big hit as he fired off the 39-yard game-winner to Jefferson.
The other thing Macdonald had was a new coordinator, in Klint Kubiak, who was with Darnold in San Francisco, and described this “gravitational pull” he had with his teammates, even as the backup. Kubiak remembered being stunned that the 49ers could get him as a backup after how his 2022 season with the Carolina Panthers ended. And then, after having him, he said as a player he was getting better and better behind the scenes, then proving the progress in games.
One such instance was on Christmas night of 2023. Darnold came in with the Niners down 33–12 to the Baltimore Ravens. He finished off a 12-play, 90-yard touchdown drive, then led San Francisco back into the red zone on another long march, before being picked off at the end on fourth-and-goal from the 17. Kubiak saw a guy playing fast, confident and smart.
“The cool thing was just Kyle [Shanahan] and that group’s understanding of defenses and understanding, What kind of coverages does Baltimore play? This is what they’re doing in the red zone,” Darnold says. “They just lined everything up so perfectly that, O.K., I know what they’re going to play. It’s up to me to diagnose the coverage and understand where to go with the football. That’s how it was in Minnesota as well.”
Interestingly enough, Baltimore’s defensive coordinator that night was … Macdonald.
The first thing to establish on Darnold’s free agency is that he wasn’t looking to leave Minnesota.
“We were trying to work something out in Minnesota, and it just couldn’t get done,” he says.
Really, it came down to conflicting priorities.
The Vikings, in this case, wanted to give their team, one that won 14 games in 2024, the best shot it could to win at the most important position on the field. And with the 10th pick in last year’s draft, J.J. McCarthy, coming off meniscus surgery and a subsequent clean-up procedure, keeping Darnold for another year would be a great way to do that.
The trouble was, after all Darnold had been through, in bouncing from the New York Jets to the Panthers to the Niners to the Vikings in a four-year window, he was looking for a commitment of more than just a year, which would give him a team to call his own. If he had to go somewhere on a one-year deal, Minnesota would be the best place to do it. But it’d be preferable if Darnold and his camp could do better than that.
“Just a team that could commit to me for multiple years, that would be a good thing, and a team that could be ready to win right now,” Darnold says. “Those were my two things.”
And in his words, once Seattle’s negotiations crumbled with Smith, and Smith was traded to the Las Vegas Raiders to be reunited with Pete Carroll, “Seattle skyrocketed to the top of my list.” The Seahawks, like Darnold, and different from the Vikings, loved the idea of creating a multiyear partnership through the negotiation—something that gave Darnold a leg up on Rodgers, too.
So while nothing could be official until the middle of last week, both went into the NFL’s 52-hour negotiating period with a good feeling that their interests would align. Quickly, those instincts proved correct as Seattle beat out the Steelers (Darnold really did love the idea of playing for Mike Tomlin and Arthur Smith) for the quarterback’s services with the three-year deal that would give him $37.5 million in Year 1, a $55 million injury guarantee, and early-vesting roster bonuses in of $15 million and $10 million in February 2026 and ’27.
But it was more than just that for Darnold. It was the opportunity. It was the program. It was being on the West Coast, too. It was a little bit of everything.
“There’s a lot of reasons,” Darnold says. “It’s a great culture. I like what Klint’s doing as an offensive coordinator, getting to see a couple of games in New Orleans last year. And even some of the weapons that we have, I’m very excited about some of the guys that we have here. Signing MVS [Marquez Valdes-Scantling] was huge. There are a couple really good running backs and a really good defense. There’s a lot of things to be excited about for me.”
And for the Seahawks, too.
There are probably folks out there who put more stock in the final two games of the Vikings’ season than the 16 before them, who think the ghosts (to borrow a term from Darnold’s past) still have the former No. 3 pick’s number.
The important thing is Darnold isn’t worried about them.
He’s a product of all that he’s been through, good and bad, and now is ready to take on a new opportunity the way his buddy and ex-Carolina teammate Baker Mayfield did in Tampa, and the way guys such as Rich Gannon and Steve Young did in Oakland and San Francisco generations ago. All those guys benefitted from the lessons they learned and the failures they endured, and Darnold has, too.
“For me, I was always about putting my head down and going to work,” Darnold says. “Speaking of Baker, when he came into Carolina and we were battling out for the starting job and they told me I was going to be the backup, I didn’t think twice about it. I was like, All right, that’s not exactly what I wanted, but the coaches have to make that decision and I’ll do my best to support Baker and be the best backup that I can.
“I did the same thing in San Francisco. Obviously, Brock [Purdy] was dealing with his elbow injury, and I wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to come back in time, so I was ready to start the season. Brock was able to come back and I was just there to support Brock in any way that I could. I’d like to think I was really good in that role in supporting Brock.
“When I got the chance to go to Minnesota, I knew the same thing was possible, that they were going to potentially draft a quarterback and I was going to have to go out there and play some games, not sure when they wanted the rookie to play. The biggest thing was me understanding I’m just going to do the best that I can in whatever role coaches want me to play.”
As for the specifics, he says watching Purdy taught him to play the position like a point guard does. Playing for Shanahan helped him understand what defenses were trying to do to him, and how to use those things to attack them. Playing for O’Connell showed him how many different avenues he had to go on that sort of attack.
And the result of all of it is he no longer feels like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders like he did as a high first-round pick playing in the New York pressure cooker.
He’s at peace being able to go out and just play the position to the best of his ability, because he was able, through those experiences, to “step back and realize there’s 21 other guys on the field; there’s 10 other guys playing offense.”
In other words, if the coach calls a downfield concept designed for the quarterback to take a shot, and the best play is to check it down to a running back, then so be it.
“When I started to change my mindset to that and get the ball out on time to my playmakers, it’s not that things got easier, but my eyes got a lot clearer looking down the field and understanding where my checkdowns were, understanding what we were doing and what kind of defenses we were attacking,” he says. “It makes you understand a little more what you’re doing as an offense. It gives you a lot of clarity that way.”
So that, now, is what the Seahawks are getting, rather than the kid who was just trying to figure it out after washing out of his first NFL home four years ago.
Whether it works out, of course, remains to be seen. But the Seahawks are paying more than $20 million below what a first-round pick who panned out with his first team would cost on a second contract—and, at 28, he’s not much older than some of those guys (he’s only nine months older than Herbert and 17 months older than Love).
All in all, it seems like a pretty good deal.
For everyone involved.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Why Sam Darnold and the Seahawks Are a Match for Each Other.
