Sam Darnold’s New World and Why He’s No Longer a Journeyman

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On the best night of his professional career, with the confetti falling, when Sam Darnold had the right to square his jaw into all the cameras and tell the world he told them so, the Seahawks’ Lombardi-winning quarterback’s brain wasn’t rewinding through all he’d been through to get to the grand stage of Super Bowl LX.

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Yes, he was ecstatic, as any player would be. Yes, he was pumped to party with a team that had become his own, after a half decade of working to rebuild his career with four different franchises, after the Jets sent him on his way in the spring of 2021.

But there was still that little tinge that came for him with Seattle’s dominant win.

Asked about the night on a bucolic Pacific Northwest afternoon in July, Darnold explained how he thought he played against the Patriots.

“Not great,” he says. “Physically, not great. I think I made good decisions. I just … I missed [throws]. I was rolling out to the left and missed Jax [Smith-Njigba] on a touchdown. I was going that way, and it was behind him. I missed him early on. I missed ‘Shid [Rashid Shaheed] on two big posts that I feel like I could have had. And then right before the half, I missed Jax on a touchdown, one-on-one.”

Had Darnold hit Smith-Njigba on the first one, it would have been 10–0 midway through the first quarter. Similarly, the first post to Shaheed could’ve blown the game wide open early in the second quarter. The second, coming with Seattle leading 19–7 with 11 minutes left, would’ve been a final dagger into the Patriots. The play before the half would’ve given Seattle a 13–0 lead, rather than a 9–0 edge.

Thankfully for Darnold and his teammates, the Seahawks had plenty of margin for error against the Patriots. But two weeks earlier, against the Rams, they wouldn’t have. And if the 29-year-old’s path has taught him anything, it’s that these things, all of them, matter.

“There are a lot of balls I’d like back in the Super Bowl,” he said. “But I think I made the right decisions; I went to the right guy. It’s just a matter of putting the ball on the spot. Those are the things, to be honest, that drive you crazy as a quarterback. You dream of winning the Super Bowl. But I didn’t dream of winning the Super Bowl that way, if that makes sense. I wish I had played a little bit better.”

This steady approach has served Darnold awfully well.

It helped him dig out of the mess in New York, where by the time he was headed into his fourth season, the Jets had hired his third head coach, who would, in tandem with his second GM, trade him to make way for Zach Wilson. It gave him the wherewithal to work through a weird circumstance in Carolina. It steeled him to learn under Kyle Shanahan in San Francisco, then come alive again as a starter for one season in Minnesota, and then in Seattle.

What the world thinks of his road to this place, really, is immaterial to Darnold.

He’s in the best place he’s been as a pro. This will be his ninth season. He doesn’t turn 30 until next June. In 2024, as a Viking, he started every game of a season for the first time. He did it again last year. And now, for the first time, he gets to return after a year like that, with the same team, in the same system, with a chance to build off all of it.

Darnold proves he can handle pressure

After Darnold was traded by the Jets, the idea of building something in the offseason for him meant something different every year. His first OC under Matt Rhule in Carolina was Joe Brady, who was fired during a Week 13 bye and replaced by Sean Ryan. The next year, 2022, Darnold was the backup, playing late in the year for new OC Ben McAdoo. Then, he was with Shanahan in ’23, Kevin O’Connell in ’24 and Klint Kubiak last year.

Of course, that isn’t exactly a recipe for great quarterback development. However, it forced Darnold to find silver linings-and one was a key in his broken-road journey.

“It’s the same thing my dad used to tell me when I said, When am I ever going to have to use the Pythagorean theorem?” he said. “He was like, It’s not what you’re learning; it’s how you learn. You’re learning how to learn is what he would always tell me. For me, it was learning football year after year, hearing all these coaches talk about schemes. Having a bank of coaches talking about different schemes has a benefit.

“Obviously, you want stability. And it’s great to have, to be in the same system for 20 years like Tom [Brady] was in New England. It’s a glass-half-full kind of thing. You can always look at it in a positive light, which I always have. Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand that’s not ideal. But the coolest thing was just being able to hear different perspectives from coaches.”

The flip side is what crushes so many quarterbacks in these situations-the crisis of confidence that can set in when teams give up on you. For a guy drafted as high as Darnold, to go from having a team all-in on you to fighting for your career can be jarring.

It didn’t take the Seahawks long to see that Darnold could handle it.

They knew, as well as Darnold played in Minnesota, there’d be doubts due to the Vikings letting him go. And the public’s doubt, outside of the building, surfaced quickly, even if the organization itself never wavered on its decision to make Darnold its quarterback last year.

“They were asking if he was going to be the starter after he threw like one pick in the second OTA,” Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald said. “He laughs stuff off. You respect that about him because a guy in that position, with all the things that have gone into his career and the storylines, it’s just so easy to fall into the trap where your mind’s racing. He keeps it so simple, so steady. It’s pretty cool.”

Even cooler was when he showed that same quality with the bullets flying.

The Seahawks rode a four-game winning streak into a Week 11 game against the Rams at SoFi Stadium. Darnold had five incompletions in the previous two games combined. And then, both the team and its quarterback felt the effects of jumping up a weight class.

When Seattle got the ball at its own 16 with six minutes left, the Seahawks were down 21–12, Darnold was 29-of-44 for 279 yards and four picks, and his last snap was a Jared Verse strip-sack that would’ve finished the visitors had it not been overturned. About everything that could go wrong was going wrong. Any lingering doubt was resurfacing.

Darnold responded by hitting five consecutive completions for 62 yards to fuel an 11-play, 84-yard drive that drew Seattle to within two. The Seahawks then got the ball back at their own 1 with 1:41 left and one timeout, and Darnold drove them to the Rams’ 43 to at least give Jason Myers a shot at a game-winning field goal-Myers’s 61-yard attempt was wide right and fell short.

The Seahawks didn’t lose again, beating the Rams twice as part of a 10-game win streak that ended in Santa Clara. The latter win over L.A. came with Darnold throwing for 346 yards, three touchdowns and no picks in the NFC title game to deliver Seattle to the Super Bowl.

Darnold’s development

It’s easy to forget that when Darnold got to the NFL, he was only five years removed from having entered his sophomore year of high school primarily as a linebacker. To some degree, when the Jets drafted him, he was still that big, athletic kid figuring out quarterback. Then, through a toxic mix of circumstances, his development took a back seat.

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But when it became a priority, we started to see what he could be, first with flashes in Carolina and San Francisco, and then with the flourish in Minnesota and Seattle.

Even now, Darnold, as you’d expect, is drilling down on what went wrong and how he can fix it, which is how he made it through his first eight NFL years the way he did. This offseason, that meant working mostly on his base. In his words, “I’m a good rhythm passer,” so when his back foot hits and the play is there, like a lot of quarterbacks, he’s on target. Conversely, what he found last year was that when he had to throw off two or three hitches, as the year went on, his base would widen, which threw everything off.

It hurt him on the deep ball. It affected his accuracy. It affected his sequencing. It got worse when he hurt his oblique in a Jan. 15 practice leading up to the divisional round. And in the Super Bowl, as he saw it, it was a part of the story on the aforementioned misses he regrets.

“The mechanics, there were some things that as the season went on, and my base got wider and wider,” he said. “And for me-Drew Brees, if he ever sees this, is going to hate me for this, because he loves his wide base-I fight to get narrow. Because if I can stay narrow, my hips rotate better, and it’s better for my frame. So I’d get really wide as the season went on, especially late in the season. And then the oblique happened. That was kind of the main root of it, when I really looked back and studied it, the accuracy stuff later in the season.”

Then, there’s the loss of Kubiak, which is, to be sure, a blow.

Kubiak and Darnold were together for the 49ers’ Super Bowl season of 2023, and as such Kubiak was a key figure in Darnold coming to Seattle in the first place. The good news is that he’ll be replaced by another alum of that Shanahan staff, Brian Fleury, creating a level of continuity the brass promised Darnold it would pursue if Kubiak landed the Raiders job.

“That was always the plan,” Darnold said, “to keep it in the same family.”

As a result, this time, even with some turnover, he won’t have to start over again.

And neither will Fleury. He could call just about every play the Seahawks ran in 2025 and not just understand what Kubiak was doing, but why. And that didn’t just allow for him and Darnold to hit the ground running, but it also set the stage for Fleury to give the ninth-year quarterback more ownership of the offense, something that was impossible for Darnold as he was switching teams every year.

“It’s suggestions, too,” Darnold said. “I think, suggesting stuff to the coach, suggesting things to Fleury, [pass-game coordinator Jake] Peetz. And then the other thing that I’ve noticed in myself is talking to guys in the huddle before the play call. Like, Hey, cheat on this one. If you feel like the safety’s in the box, don’t be afraid to short yourself down and dig out on a run play. It’s little things like that, where maybe last year when I was still trying to learn Klint’s system and the formations and the run game, I was calling the play and putting the onus on the receivers to block guys.”

So where he’d already seen growth in key areas-“One thing I was proud of, and this is going to sound corny, and my friends are gonna give me s—, is game management, and understanding situations”-there are more untapped areas, even at 29 years old, nine years in, to harvest. And that’s, again, because of the unorthodox path Darnold’s walked.

‘He was incredibly steady’

In so many ways, Darnold personified the unflappable nature of Macdonald’s team last year that won 14 regular-season games and then three more in the playoffs.

“He was incredibly steady,” Macdonald said of Darnold. “It’s a long season, and there are different responses based on a good game, or after a good practice, or after a bad practice, or maybe he makes mistakes in practice that he’s not happy about. Everyone talks about the Rams game. But so many other up-and-down moments happened throughout the year. He’s unfazed by all of it. And his approach is always so steady, which is such a calming feeling that gives your team.”

So in the Super Bowl, when he missed the first-half throws to Smith-Njigba, his ability to stay the course helped keep the team on task. The Seahawks had outgained the Patriots 183–51 at the break, had 10 first downs to New England’s four, and four trips into Patriots territory, while New England crossed midfield only once, getting to the Seattle 44. And yet, the score was 9–0, something that might’ve frustrated another team.

Darnold continued to keep firing, delivering a touchdown throw to A.J. Barner to create separation at the start of the fourth quarter. The defense then closed out New England, showing the synergy that developed, but Macdonald admitted, in an honest moment, he couldn’t have predicted.

“I mean, it makes sense now,” the coach said, laughing. “It’s not like you’re going in and saying, I need these characteristics in the quarterback. A lot of that stuff you don’t know. I’m going in like, O.K., who’s on our team? Let’s coach the heck out of them and let’s rock and roll. I wish I could say, Oh yeah, Sam’s available. It’s exactly what we need for our team to go to the Super Bowl. It’s using the best information you can to make the best decision you can.”

“Everyone talks about the Rams game. But so many other up-and-down moments happened throughout the year. He’s unfazed by all of it. And his approach is always so steady, which is such a calming feeling that gives your team.”Mike Macdonald

The important thing now is that the Seahawks and Darnold are here together.

At one point on that July day, our conversation was interrupted by some loud noises coming out of the Seattle weight room. Darnold smiled. “I think that’s Mike’s son Jack,” he said. “It should be a fun team meeting later.”

Darnold knew what would come next because he went through it last year. And that should give him what any quarterback wants, which is a chance to make the team his own.

Along those lines, some of the conversations he’s had this summer have extended to discussing the scheme with his defensive teammates, digging through what they’re seeing, and then helping them with what he’s seeing. This is a new world for him.

Keep doubting him if you want. As he sees it, this figures to be the beginning of where he can go with this new lot in life, which means his best football might well be yet to come.

“Yeah, I think you always have to feel that way,” he said. “The more you play football, the more experience you get as long as you’re good physically and you can play at a high level. As long as you have an arm attached to your shoulder, I feel like you can always go out there and continue to build off your experience and learn from the mistakes that I made last year and build off the success we had as a team and an offense.”

This article was originally published on www.si.com as Sam Darnold’s New World and Why He’s No Longer a Journeyman.

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This story was originally published September 9, 2026 at 2:00 AM.