Sam Darnold helped Seahawks avoid NFL's MAJOR QB problem

Philip Rivers returning to the NFL is another sign of how bad it's gotten

I hope Stetson Bennett is getting warmed up in the bullpen. Does the Rams’ third-string quarterback realize that the Seattle Seahawks are on a generational run of unexpected QB matchups? If the Rams were smart, they might wanna bench Matthew Stafford this week just to be safe and make sure he’s healthy enough for Thursday.

With only one quarterback on the 53-man roster — an injured Riley Leonard who is week-to-week with a PCL sprain — the Colts signed Philip Rivers to the practice squad on Tuesday. Rivers, who is so “experienced” that one of his first NFL teammates was Doug Flutie, a quarterback who was drafted in 1985, hasn’t played in five years. But based on all the circumstantial evidence that retirement is going to turn into an “employment gap” when the Seahawks face the Colts on Sunday in Seattle.

Signing Philip Rivers to start or be ready to go into the game at any moment says more about the state of professional football development than it does about the 44-year-old retiree.

How did the Colts — and the NFL — get here?

Let’s review the options that Indianapolis had because it could tell us just as much about Seattle’s future at the position as it does their important game in Week 14.

Colts 2025 quarterbacks:

Daniel Jones - a relatively decent option (#RELATIVELY)

It’s so fitting that we’re talking about Jones today because the 2019 draft is probably a good tipping point for when college stopped producing great quarterback prospects. The league has drafted 66 quarterbacks since 2019 who have appeared in a game, including 24 first round picks. Twenty-four first round picks!

Most fans have it in mind that “first round QB” = “franchise QB” so why do I not sense that 24 teams have a franchise quarterback?

We know that it’s too soon to judge a lot of these quarterbacks but the bust label has already come for Kyler Murray (1st overall), Zach Wilson (2nd), Trey Lance (3rd), Anthony Richardson (4th), Daniel Jones (6th), Justin Fields (11th), Dwayne Haskins (15th), Mac Jones (15th), and Kenny Pickett (20th). Skating on thin ice: Trevor Lawrence (1st), Bryce Young (1st), Tua Tagovailoa (5th), Michael Penix (8th), and J.J. McCarthy (10th).

Setting aside other players drafted in 2024 and 2025, we are only left with Joe Burrow (injury prone), C.J. Stroud (is he actually good?), Drake Maye, Justin Herbert, and Jordan Love. With a crop of first rounders like this, the new bar for “acceptable” isn’t if the player is great, it’s if the player is great every other week. Between Stroud, Herbert, and Love that seems like what we get from the draft’s BEST QB picks since 2019. These are the BEST!

If you think that’s bad, don’t look past the first round because then you’ll risk losing all hope:

• Jalen Hurts (who looks awful this season) is by far the best

• Brock Purdy is by far the second best

• I shit you not that Gardner Minshew is the third-best non-first round QB drafted in the last seven years

I don’t know if Shedeur Sanders or Spencer Rattler are going to steal that “title” from Minshew, but you have to draft quarterbacks in the first round. (Jalen Milroe felt like a freebie because of the Geno Smith trade so I get it.)

Jones → Colts

Feeling like they were left with no other choice, the Colts signed Daniel Jones less than six months after he was released by the New York Giants even though the team still owed him a lot of money because that’s how bad he was. Not even the Vikings wanted to keep him after a short stint on the practice squad and we see how ill-prepared Minnesota was going to be with McCarthy.

For two months, it appeared that Jones was going to be the “good enough QB” for Indianapolis and people overreacted about that …

Realistically though, Jones probably didn’t play any better this season than he did with the Giants in 2022 but fans are prone to overreactions when a quarterback is merely acceptable. Jones got a lot of bonus points for the fact that the Colts were winning games and he wasn’t turning over the ball, which is exactly the same type of play that got him a contract extension in 2023.

It’s just that the bar is now so low that we’re talking about “MVP” for a quarterback who was averaging 1.6 touchdown passes per game during Indy’s 7-1 start. Jones was playing good enough to win…

Daniel’s first 8 games

Until he wasn’t.

Daniel’s last 5 games

This is when the light bulb hits: The Colts have a great supporting cast. Jonathan Taylor is the league’s leading rusher (1,356 yards, 16 TD) and Alec Pierce leads the league in yards per catch (20.2) and Tyler Warren is the frontrunner for Offensive Rookie of the Year (699 yards) and LT Bernhard Raimann+LG Quenton Nelson could be the best left side in the NFL.

They carried Jones until they couldn’t anymore. That’s why I don’t necessarily think that the Colts are mourning the loss of Jones or afraid of the unknown when it comes to Rivers. Yeah it’s weird that Rivers is potentially going to start this week but because the crop of QBs seems so much worse than it did 20 years ago, it’s not nearly as surprising as it should be.

Rivers was sadly the best option on the market and that may have been as true in March as it is in December.

Anthony Richardson - this is what’s wrong with the draft

A prospect who so clearly did not even know how to play QB in college was the 4th pick and a popular name among Seahawks fans/media going into the draft because social media decided it “had to be true so therefore it is”’; “He just needs time.”

What are quarterbacks doing for the first 21-23 years of their lives now? Just playing video games until they get to the NFL and then they’ll start to learn how to read defenses? Richardson was not even a division-I caliber quarterback but the Colts drafted his tools and assumed that everything else would fall into place once he got NFL coaching.

Teams should stop making assumptions with their $25 million investments. Especially now that quarterbacks are often already millionaires by the time they get to the pros. Have they lost all motivation to even try and get better after college?

Not only did Richardson play as bad as expected, he is far more injury prone than anyone predicted. (Injury prone can sometimes = unprepared, unmotivated, not doing the homework.) He was unavailable to replace Jones because even though he lost the starting job he somehow still ended up on IR.

Riley Leonard - the new normal in college

It’s now standard for college QBs to transfer at least once in their careers. Leonard was a surprising standout for Duke in 2022 but an ankle injury cost him half of the 2023 season and then he transferred to Notre Dame in 2024 after the Blue Devils underwent a coaching change. There’s no blanket answers for whether or not transferring is right/wrong or good/bad, but I do think it’s indicative of a new culture in which players would rather leave a school than rise up to a challenge where they are.

When I see Cam Ward’s journey in college I see a player who was at a tiny FCS school who had played himself into an opportunity at WSU and then he needed to go to Miami to build a resume for being a number one pick because sadly the Cougs are in a constant state of flux. I see Ward’s transfer journey being GOOD for his career.

But Leonard wasn’t playing that well when he left Duke and then he goes to Notre Dame, a school with much better recruits, and he parlays one season into being a sixth round draft pick. To me this process could have led to 6th round picks also being worse than 6th round picks used to be.

No we never expected much of sixth round picks anyway, but what if now most of them aren’t even good enough for a practice squad? You saw Max Brosmer two weeks ago…

Brosmer was undrafted but HOW did he get into an NFL game? HOW? Because the NFL is scratching at the bottom of the earth’s crust for answers.

Philip Rivers

The Colts knew that Richardson was a bust so they had to make a change and they also decided to part with Joe Flacco because, well, I guess they never thought it would come to Philip Rivers. Relevant to our conversation today: FLACCO IS A BETTER QB THAN ALMOST EVERY OPTION UNDER 35 AND WE KNOW THAT BECAUSE TWO DIFFERENT TEAMS WANTED HIM TO START AND HE WAS DECENT.

(Flacco had more TD passes just with the Bengals than Stroud, Penix, Purdy, McCarthy, Jaxson Dart, Cam Ward, Jayden Daniels, Fields, and Rattler have had all season.)

In seeking out other options, the Colts decided on Jones, who was the third-highest paid free agent QB in the league behind Darnold and Fields. All things considered, it’s hard to fault Indy for the signing because it probably was the second-best one after Darnold.

Perhaps hesitant to piss off Richardson, the team didn’t get anybody else except Leonard and Jason Bean. (They also have Brett Rypien on the practice squad.) Not Minshew, Tyler Huntley, Trey Lance, or Drew Lock. Not Jameis Winston, Mac Jones, or Cooper Rush. And I can’t really fault them for that either but just look at how much worse off Indy is in December because they drafted a quarterback in 2023 who they felt bad for I guess?

It makes Seattle’s decision to sign Darnold AND Lock AND draft Milroe look all the better!

Rather than go for an option on another team’s practice squad like Sam Ehlinger, Bailey Zappe, Trevor Siemian, Kyle Trask, Mike White, Jake Haener, or C.J. Beathard the Colts believe that a 44-year-old with no playing experience in the last five years is BETTER than options who have played recently…including some experience with the Colts. And I can’t find fault in that…they’re right! These quarterbacks are NO GOOD.

My ‘NO THANKS’ List!

I wonder if football has an immaturity and arrested development problem that’s impacting players as they go from high school to college to the NFL. As such if I’m looking for players to add to a roster in the NFL, these conditions would at least be “tie breakers” (if I’m deciding between 2 players in the draft, these factors could break the tie) if they’re not deal breakers:

• No gamers (Kyler Murray)

• No podcasters (Travis Hunter)

• No social media addicts (too many to name)

• No celebrity chasers (Travis Kelce)

• No reports of skipping meetings, practices, and workouts (Jalen Carter)

Already this season we’ve seen the Bills sit first round receiver Keon Coleman and the Giants sit third overall pick Abdul Carter over disciplinary reasons like missing meetings and oversleeping. Carter was asking for Lawrence Taylor’s number in May but now he’s being held back from starting because he’s seems disinterested in what it takes to become great.

I’ve never heard of anything like this before! Not from top draft picks expected to be franchise players in their ROOKIE season! And I’m not kidding about gamers—they leave work and go straight to a couch. It is NOT A COINCIDENCE that Murray can’t stay on the field. The Cardinals put that clause in for a reason. Players are distracted, they’re rich, they’re famous, and they just don’t seem to care as much as they used to.

Sam Darnold’s ‘disadvantage advantage’

I’ve really warmed up to the fact that the Seahawks signed a QB this year who was already called a “bust” multiple times over. Darnold hit rock bottom with the Jets, hit it again with the Panthers, and then a third time when the Vikings lost their last two games last season. I kind of think being a bust is working out really good for him because now Darnold really understands what kind of commitment it takes to block out the distractions and become a great quarterback.

It seems to have worked out for him long enough to believe that the change is real — 47 touchdowns since 2024 and a 24-6 record with two different teams — but if it’s not…what’s Matt Hasselbeck’s number?

Seaside Joe 2472