play0:36Sam Darnold throws the 1st TD of Super Bowl LX to AJ BarnerSam Darnold finds AJ Barner in the end zone for a 16-yard Seahawks touchdown.
Seahawks defense dominates Patriots to win 2nd Super Bowl (1:18)The Seahawks defeat the Patriots 29-13 to clinch their second Super Bowl title in franchise history. (1:18)
Sam Darnold throws the 1st TD of Super Bowl LX to AJ BarnerSam Darnold finds AJ Barner in the end zone for a 16-yard Seahawks touchdown.
TWO YEARS AGO, Sam Darnold sat at a small round table in a Hilton ballroom just outside of Las Vegas. Several reporters visited the table he shared with another San Francisco 49ers teammate throughout the week of Super Bowl media availability, but many more maneuvered around it on their way to talk to someone more important. Darnold was just a backup hidden in a maze of dozens of tables. He wasn’t the star anymore, and he had chosen to fade into the background for his own good.
As Darnold sat unbothered at his table, a reporter asked if he had given thought to the best way to develop a quarterback. What had he learned in the six NFL seasons after he left college early and was drafted No. 3 by the New York Jets, saw “ghosts,” got dumped by the Jets and started over twice since? What does a young quarterback need?
That combination of consistency and trust was something Darnold, who had four head coaches in his first five seasons, hadn’t known in the NFL up to that point, and wouldn’t have it until he signed a three-year contract to be Seattle’s starting quarterback in March. He was comfortable enough that for the first time, he bought a house.
The NFL’s draft structure routinely welcomes the most talented young quarterbacks to the worst-run organizations. Their rights are usually controlled by bottom-dwelling teams that lack the patience to figure out how to win, and like clockwork, the coaching staff tasked with developing them is fired. Despite the Jets’ best attempts to develop Darnold, once he left the organization, he strategically pieced together the foundation he had not been afforded at the start of his career.
When then-Niners quarterback coach Brian Griese called Darnold during the early 2023 offseason to recruit him for a reset season as Brock Purdy’s backup, Griese asked Darnold how he viewed himself coming out of the tough times.
“That really cemented for me that he was the right guy,” Griese said. “New York was brutal. … If I had sat down with him and talked with him and he didn’t believe in himself, then I don’t think we would have been interested in San Francisco. So, the fact that he went through what he did, and he came out on the other side with his emotional resilience intact, that gave him a chance.
“What he was seeing on his reads and how he was supposed to play, there was uncertainty there, and that uncertainty is a death sentence for quarterbacks. But he never lost confidence in himself.”
Although Seattle’s offense reached the end zone only once, Darnold’s escapability was the X factor for the offense in the Seahawks’ 29-13 win Sunday night. He dodged and spun out of pressure from the New England Patriots’ defense multiple times.
Those who know Darnold well say he isn’t motivated to prove the haters wrong, but to prove his teammates and family right. He found that trust and consistency that he said is crucial for quarterback development. He was a Super Bowl-losing backup quarterback then, and now he’s a Super Bowl champion.
WHEN DARNOLD’S FORMER coaches and teammates are asked to describe him, the same word continues to come up: resilient.
Darnold’s private quarterback coach, Jordan Palmer, who played seven years in the NFL, said that Darnold’s resiliency is the reason he has resurrected his career.
Quarterbacks who play through physical injuries are typically considered the toughest, Palmer said, but “I actually don’t think that’s hard.”
“Going through what Sam went through for four or five years, not all these tough guys that can take a hit can live through that. Sam’s one of the toughest quarterbacks I’ve ever been around, and it has nothing to do with his physical toughness.”
Carolina’s offensive coordinator at the time was Ben McAdoo, who, despite now working for the Super Bowl rival Patriots, still considers himself “a big fan of Sam.”
Darnold, then in his fifth season, “was still a raw player in a lot of ways,” McAdoo said. He worked with him on tying his feet to his eyes, so that Darnold could eliminate the hesitancy in his progressions and let his footwork tell him when to move off his first read.
“We tried to break the feet down, and build him back up,” McAdoo said. “Spend a little more time on fundamentals than he did in the past.”
“Everything happens faster in the red zone,” McAdoo said. “It’s a tough read and a long way to go to get through that progression, and he was on it. I was like, ‘This guy has a chance!'”
After that 2022 season, Darnold became a free agent. McAdoo said he hoped Carolina would hire interim head coach Steve Wilks permanently and re-sign Darnold to keep building off the progress McAdoo had seen, but Carolina moved on from both.
“A lot of the time, the quarterback takes the blame, and the quarterback gets the blame,” said backup quarterback P.J.Walker, who also started games for Carolina that season. “But not a lot of things was on Sam specifically. That situation was tough. It never was a mesh of offense, defense and special teams all playing well. You never could put it all together.”
AS SAN FRANCISCO’S QBs coach, Griese studied all the free agent quarterbacks ahead of the 2023 offseason. It didn’t take him long to realize Darnold was “head and shoulders above” the rest of the class, he said, and “physically, one of the top two or three throwers of the ball in the league.”
Starting quarterback Brock Purdy was coming off elbow surgery, and the team wasn’t certain when he’d be ready to play, so the 49ers needed a “bona fide” backup.
“As I started digging into his tape, I saw that there was not a whole lot of foundation and structure that he had been given in his first three, four years in the league,” Griese said. “I knew that he was made of the right stuff. I knew he had the right talent. It was just a matter of, could we convince him to come to San Francisco to be a backup?”
Griese and Palmer said Darnold had multiple opportunities with other teams that offseason to compete for starting jobs, but chose San Francisco to take a year to learn from Kyle Shanahan instead.
“He takes a huge pay cut to go there,” Palmer said. “Myself, his agent, a couple of us were big on, you need a redshirt year. It’s like going to Harvard, or night school, you need to go sit in a room with [Kyle] Shanahan.”
Griese’s pitch was convincing: The Niners’ coaching staff and Shanahan’s offensive scheme could help Darnold find confidence in what he was seeing on the field.
“I told him that he needed to refocus and take more of a 30,000-foot view of where he was in his journey,” Griese said. “To understand what his strengths were and to understand the situations that he had been in, and how we could create a foundation underneath him that was solid enough that he could see how good a player he could be. That’s what he bought into.”
Even though he was headed into his sixth season, he was only 26 years old, and the Niners’ staff still thought he had room to grow.
“He just understood, I got another 10 plus years to play, and I want to be able to be good for a long time. That was awesome, just so rare, for any player,” a source close to the Niners said.
Seattle run game coordinator Rick Dennison was the Jets’ offensive line coach during Darnold’s rookie season in 2018. During Super Bowl media availability in San Jose, California, he described that year like this: “Whereas teams figure out how to win, we figured out how to lose.”
Darnold said during a Super Bowl week news conference that his Jets era taught him to “flush bad plays, flush bad games.”
“Early in my career, I was really hard on myself,” he said. “After a bad rep or a bad practice, I would let it affect my attitude a little bit. … It’s football, we’re not always going to be perfect. Jerry Rice has a quote that he never had a perfect practice or a perfect game.”
Darnold’s detailing of his Jets trials was an important perspective for Purdy to hear, Griese says, because the second-year starter and last pick of the 2022 draft wore rose-colored glasses. Purdy started as a rookie midseason after Jimmy Garoppolo got hurt, played well right away and in his first season, the Niners made it to the NFC Championship Game.
“But we have unbelievable support systems around him from an organization standpoint,” Griese says. “It’s easy for a young player to think, ‘Oh, this is how it should always go.'”
Griese said the Niners staff saw Darnold’s potential immediately during OTAs and training camp, particularly Darnold’s “underrated” athleticism.
“His ability to roll left and to get his body in position to make throws while he’s rolling against his throwing arm was really special,” Griese says. “When you see him on these bootlegs, which Klint [Kubiak] loves to run to the left with Sam, his ability to contort his body is not natural. He makes it look easy.”
But the Commanders had the No. 2 overall pick in 2024 and would be drafting a quarterback, so Darnold chose to sign a one-year deal with the Vikings, who also would be drafting a quarterback, but later in the first round.
Then, rookie J.J. McCarthy tore his meniscus during the preseason and Darnold started the entire season, taking the Vikings to a playoff berth and his first postseason appearance.
Darnold and the Vikings won 14 games, but lost the last game of the regular season at Detroit with a playoff bye at stake. The next week, Minnesota exited the playoffs in the wild-card beatdown at the hands of the Rams, who sacked Darnold nine times.
“A lot was put on his shoulders to really lead the team to 14 wins,” then-Vikings backup quarterback Nick Mullens says. “And now that he’s got a complete football [team], I’m not totally surprised. The run game is really good in Seattle.”