Sam Darnold was an NFL castoff. Now he's in the Super Bowl.
- - Sam Darnold was an NFL castoff. Now he's in the Super Bowl.
Andrew GreifJanuary 26, 2026 at 8:21 PM
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Seattle Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold celebrates a first quarter touchdown against the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC Championship game. (Steph Chambers)
Sam Darnold's first NFL team traded him away after three years.
His second team moved on after 17 starts.
His third team signed him solely as a backup.
His fourth team won its most games in a quarter-century with Darnold as its starter. But when he couldn't win his last two, pressure-packed games, however, the team decided to go with an untested rookie instead.
Last spring, the Seattle Seahawks became the fifth NFL team to give Darnold a chance when they signed the 28-year-old as a free agent. Less than a year later, Darnold gave them a Super Bowl berth Sunday.
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In Seattle's 31-27 win over the Rams in the NFC championship game, Darnold threw for 346 yards and three touchdowns with no turnovers — the type of performance in a high-stakes game that, given the way he was traded, released and given up on by his four previous teams, few believed Darnold was capable of during his winding, eight-year path through the NFL.
“You can’t talk about the game without talking about our quarterback,” Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald said. “He just shut a lot of people up tonight, so I’m really happy for him.”
In the 103rd game of his career, Darnold has now made a Super Bowl before any of the four other quarterbacks drafted in the 2018 first round, including Most Valuable Player winners Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills and Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens.
Russell Wilson, who as quarterback led Seattle to a Super Bowl win during the 2013 season and an appearance the next, wrote on X late Sunday that "Darnold's comeback story over the past 2 years has been one of the most inspirational things to watch! Cool seeing him overcome!!!!"
When the Super Bowl begins Feb. 8 in Santa Clara, California, it will feature opponents that undertook lighting-quick rebuilds. New England was 4-13 last season before hiring Mike Vrabel as coach a year ago; Macdonald created what many statistics judged the NFL's best defense in only his second season as head coach.
The quarterback on one sideline has also taken an accelerated path to the NFL's biggest stage. At 23 years old, New England's Drake Maye will become the second-youngest quarterback ever to start a Super Bowl. Maye, the third overall pick in 2024, will be making just his 34th career start.
Six years before Maye was drafted, Darnold was selected third overall, too, by an AFC East also-ran. But to say Darnold's own journey to the Super Bowl, in contrast, was more winding would be an understatement.
“For him to overcome what he had to overcome, I’m rolling with Sam all day,” said Smith-Njigba, who accounted for 153 yards on 10 catches, and a touchdown, Sunday. “We believe in him.”
"I feel that support," Darnold said. "Not with only their words but with how everyone treats each other in the building. There's a lot of respect that goes around the building. Everyone respects the work that we all put into this great game and so I'm just happy to be part of this team, man."
Many teams had taken chances on Darnold, believing in the potential that was revealed Sunday.
Instead, after 38 games with the woeful Jets, he was traded to Carolina, where Darnold started 17 games before too many losses and injuries contributed to losing a quarterback competition to Baker Mayfield in 2022. The next season, Darnold got an up-close view to a Super Bowl appearance — as a backup in San Francisco. A year later, when Minnesota rookie J.J. McCarthy got hurt in preseason, Darnold stepped in as the starter and with unexpectedly shocking results, and led the Vikings to a 14-3 record.
He looked to be playing his way to a giant contract as a free agent until the Vikings fell apart during their last two games, with Darnold unable to reproduce his strong statistics while under constant pressure. The capper was a blowout loss in the Wild Card round to the Rams, who harassed Darnold into nine sacks.
During free agency, Minnesota judged McCarthy to be its future and moved on. Even Seattle hedged its bets on Darnold. Though the totals in his contract with the Seahawks said three years and $100 million, the fine print reportedly contained a contractual ripcord that the team could pull after just one season.
By throwing for 4,048 yards, a career-high completion percentage and helping Seattle earn the NFC's top seed in the playoffs, Darnold's season suggested his turnaround in Minnesota was no fluke. And yet, it also didn't settle questions about his postseason readiness. In two of the team's most-important games of the year against the Rams, he had thrown for just two touchdowns and six interceptions combined. And his 14 interceptions were the third-most in the NFL.
Even Seattle's 41-6 playoff-opening win last week against San Francisco spurred doubts. Darnold had played despite injuring his oblique days earlier while practicing, and in the week leading up to the NFC title-game matchup against the Rams, Darnold nursed the injury by "barely practicing," said Macdonald, the Seahawks' coach.
Had the injury occurred halfway through the season, Darnold said, he might have been concerned by the lack of practice repetitions. He felt he'd accumulated enough by the championship game to trust his preparation.
He was right.
"It's should go down as one of the best performances in playoff history, I imagine" considering his lack of practice time, Macdonald said.
One year after sacking him nine times in the playoffs, the Rams again tried to rattle Darnold with pressure that he countered by throwing three touchdowns.
It was Darnold's third consecutive game without a turnover.
Since throwing for four interceptions, without a touchdown, in a Week 11 loss to the Rams, Darnold has thrown for 12 touchdowns and four interceptions. After the Nov. 16 loss to the Rams, Darnold had impressed linebacker Ernest Jones IV by arriving early to the Seahawks' practice facility to begin working on the next week's opponent.
“Sam’s impressed me by like, he can just move forward,” Jones IV said. “...Sam trusts his arm, he trusts his ability and we trust Sam. So all you gotta do is give Sam that encouragement or whatever the case may be. Let him know that we got his back, and he’s able to lead us to a Super Bowl.”
That trust by Seattle in Darnold was apparent after getting the ball back with 4:54 left in the fourth quarter while holding a four-point lead and hoping to run out the clock. On the drive's seventh play, facing second and 10, Darnold rolled out to pass and found the NFL's leading receiver, Jaxon Smith-Njigba, for a first down. Two plays after that, on second and 7, Fox broadcaster Tom Brady expressed surprise that Seattle was putting the ball in Darnold's hands to pass on a bootleg play rather than run the ball, to try to run out the clock. It led to a defensive holding penalty.
"Courageous call," Brady said.
By the drive's end, the Rams got the ball back with just 25 seconds and were unable to drive the field in time for a go-ahead score.
In the Super Bowl, Darnold will face the same Patriots franchise that once flummoxed him so badly that cameras caught him telling Jets teammates on the sideline that he was "seeing ghosts."
Now the Patriots will be seeing a whole different quarterback.
"I almost forgot about it," Darnold said, smiling. "For me, there was a lot that I didn't know back then, so I'm just going to continue to learn and grow in this great game. There's a lot of stuff that I can be better from today, even."
Source: “AOL Sports”
