There is no competition: Seahawks QB preview

Sam Darnold is the change that many Seahawks fans wanted to see in the world

Questions about Sam Darnold’s ability to replicate the top-10 season that he had with the Minnesota Vikings last year are valid, but arguing that Jalen Milroe has any chance to win the starting job are not. Milroe even being in the conversation to unseat Drew Lock as the backup seems too unlikely and unplanned to merit a discussion.

You have to give Seahawks fans the benefit of a wild imagination here because the team treats drafting a quarterback like doing a census: “About once every 10 years is good for us.”

Milroe is the first quarterback drafted by Seattle since Alex McGough in 2018 and the first legitimate quarterback prospect taken since Russell Wilson in 2012. Going back to using a third round pick on David Greene in 2005, the Seahawks have drafted just five quarterbacks in the past 20 years and only three of those, including Greene, went earlier than the sixth.

To us, Jalen Milroe might as well be Arch Manning.

To the rest of the league, however, Milroe is a faster Malik Willis.

Okay, not every quarterback turns out to be as good or as bad as they’re expected to become in the future. That’s a fact that’s true for just about every passer in the league. But right now in this moment, 100% of the talking points surrounding Milroe’s place on the 2025 Seahawks in training camp, coming from the coaches, the front office, and Milroe himself, are that he’s spending this year in development.

Just the fact that he could still get 50 offensive snaps this year as a weapon is fascinating and unique. But teams don’t put a “weapon” behind their starting quarterback on the depth chart in case he gets hurt…they put another starting quarterback back there.

The depth chart at quarterback to start the season is as set-in-stone as any other one on the Seahawks roster:

Starter: Sam Darnold

Backup: Drew Lock

QB3/Weapon for certain packages: Jalen Milroe

If Seattle goes into Week 1 with anything that isn’t this and an injury didn’t happen, it will be the biggest shock of training camp.

Programming Note: Seaside Joe is on vacation for one week. This doesn’t mean the newsletter will take a day off (days off are more of a thing you’ll see at The Athletic) but there will be some pre-written scheduled previews like this. Apologies if anything I wrote turns out to be out-of-date when it airs.

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Excitement/Worry Levels

Sam Darnold: 8/10 good

It would not have mattered to me much who the replacement turned out to be, I was immediately excited when the Seahawks made it official that they were making a change at quarterback. And that doesn’t have to mean anything negative about Geno Smith — I was also excited when the team traded Russell Wilson and I’ve been a huge fan of Wilson’s — but Seattle wasn’t retreating away from anything that had been working.

The Seahawks haven’t had a true, across-the-board, top-10 offense since 2015.

The bonus of the replacement being Darnold is that he has the chops of a former number three overall pick and the NFL resume of throwing 35 touchdowns last season; 35 touchdowns has only happened twice in Seattle franchise history, both coming from Wilson.

Darnold had 14 more touchdowns and 3 fewer interceptions than Smith did last year, and though that also says plenty about the teams that they were on, it’s still fascinating that the Seahawks got 7 years younger and significantly cheaper at the position by transitioning to the quarterback who was BETTER in 2024.

Even if Darnold is bad and gets benched midway through the season, as has happened to him several times before in his career, I still think Seattle has a really good chance to call 2025 “a successful year” at QB because they didn’t commit another $60 million guaranteed to Geno Smith at age 35 and they also got a third round pick for him.

If Darnold is merely good enough to be the starter again in 2026, then the value of the investment will be tremendous compared to his peers.

Drew Lock: N/A

It wouldn’t really matter to me if this name was Drew Lock or Kenny Pickett or Jameis Winston. They’re all backup quarterbacks and you never want to see them, but the nature of the league is that you have to sometimes.

It just makes it all the more obvious that Darnold would have to play the worst football of his career to get benched for performance reasons and his comfort in a Kubiak system suggests that won’t happen.

If we have to see Lock for any reason, there’s a chance that by then Seattle has already called around to check on the availability of someone like Jake Browning, Pickett, or god forbid Nick Mullens. Sorry, but Lock has proven too many times that he’s just not a good starting quarterback and at the very least Seattle would need an insurance policy that isn’t Milroe.

Film clip of the day: What causes interceptions?

Jalen Milroe: 9/10 excitement

Milroe would not take over a starting role with the Seahawks this year unless disasters happen (plural) or it’s December and Seattle has lost the playoff race.

But knowing that in any given week there’s a chance that Kubiak will call a play or three for the Seahawks third round quarterback and he might even run/throw for a touchdown, that’s as exciting as anything that has happened at the position for Seattle in a very long time. The only reason it’s not a 10/10 is that Milroe still has to prove that he’s more accurate than Anthony Richardson.

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