Will Sam Darnold be overrated or over-hated?

Which Sam Darnold are the Seahawks getting one week from today?

If you know what to expect from Sam Darnold this season, you’re in a much different place than I am.

His breakout season with the Vikings has drawn comparisons to Geno Smith but that would be like saying that Jalen Milroe is Lamar Jackson because both of them are “dual threats”. You can get away with making these comparison in a general sense but the differences between these sets of QBs far outweighs the importance of an elevator pitch intended to tell their entire life story in a single sentence.

Darnold’s resurgence was different than Geno’s, mainly because a lot of fans don’t call it a comeback.

Geno won Comeback Player of the Year after spending the previous seven seasons as a backup. Darnold nearly won that same award after only spending one season behind Brock Purdy, and he never lost his contingent of supporters who swore through his Jets and Panthers years that he was never the biggest problem on those teams. Even at times including the Panthers:

The Panthers do not view Sam Darnold as the problem.

Darnold “will be back” in Carolina next season, general manager Scott Fitterer said Monday, not yet committing to the former Jet as the franchise quarterback, but saying he is open to the label.

“When we protect him and he gets the ball out quick,” Fitterer told reporters, “he looks like a good NFL quarterback.”

Although the Panthers did trade for Baker Mayfield months later and name him the new starter, Darnold was back under center by Week 12 and playing much better than in previous seasons.

The stats back that assertion up. Since he took over in Week 12, Darnold has completed 54-of-88 passes for 759 yards, with four touchdowns and no interceptions. He has a 104.3 passer rating over those four games.

And when you compare that to what's going on around the league, you see that just calling the guy "safe" is perhaps underselling it. Only four quarterbacks in the league have higher passer ratings since Week 12 (Brock Purdy, Trevor Lawrence, Jared Goff, and Kirk Cousins). So the guys who get recognized for being great, like Pro Bowlers Joe Burrow (101.3), Jalen Hurts (100.4), and Patrick Mahomes (100.1) are trailing him on that chart since he's been back on the field.

In the start after that article, Darnold had his most productive outing with 341 yards and 3 touchdowns, although he did turn it over three times.

Darnold has always had believers

Whether it was when he was drafted 3rd overall out of USC in 2018, doing moderately OK on a horrifically bad Jets team, or getting benched by Matt Rhule (with 2 different OCs) in his first Panthers trip, Darnold has always had fans. That’s not necessarily unprecedented for an unsuccessful quarterback, even the ones who are as bad as Tim Tebow and maybe some very modern examples that you can probably think of right now, but with Darnold you can kind of see that he’s been somewhere between a “Baker Mayfield” and a “Jameis Winston”.

If he’s not great, Darnold has at least been above-average since Carolina brought in Mayfield to replace him. Here are his stats since that happened:

• 25 starts (Panthers, 49ers, Vikings)

• Those teams went 18-7 in those games (4-3 non-Vikings edition)

• 64.4% completion rate

• 45 touchdowns, 17 interceptions, 18 fumbles, 73 sacks

• 99.5 passer rating

• 333 rushing yards, 4 touchdowns

Since 2022, Darnold ranks 8th in passer rating, 5th in Y/A and adjusted Y/A, and 2nd in TD% behind only Lamar Jackson.

That is on a smaller sample size, that is largely aided by the Justin Jefferson effect, and it is not to be expected without a talented cast of supporting players and coaches. In the same period of time, Darnold is 21st in success rate, takes too many sacks, is bad under pressure, and was so bad at the end of last season that I can’t recall another time in NFL history that a “division championship game” (Week 18 vs Lions) and a wild card loss were so heavily repeated as reasons for caution.

Every quarterback has sucked in the playoffs at one time or another. In Peyton Manning’s lone Super Bowl winning season with the Colts, he had 3 TD/7 INT/1 FUMBLE/70.5 passer rating in 4 playoff games.

Just last year, Jared Goff was arguably even worse than Darnold, he just had the better team in Week 18. And then he turned it over 4 times against the Moons at home in a playoff blowout loss. I haven’t seen that mentioned once, but I haven’t checked the Lions previews nearly as often.

He was ranked 15th by his peers on the NFL Top-100, a wide margin over Darnold at 72nd.

Overrated or Over-Hated?

Sam Darnold entered his lone season with the Vikings as “over-hated” because even though he always had those die-hard believers from the 2018 draft who never left, his signing in Minnesota for $10 million was viewed as a “backup/bridge QB” at best.

Upon the late-night announcement of the move, the general reaction from NFL fans went something like this: "They're really replacing Cousins with Darnold? What a downgrade. Justin Jefferson's gotta be pissed."

Which…I guess the bridge part is technically 100% accurate.

Many expected that J.J. McCarthy would win the QB competition until a preseason knee injury made the decision for Kevin O’Connell. But obviously Darnold was better than expected and Jefferson was not pissed, unless he hates 103 catches, 1533 yards, and 10 touchdowns.

Cut to right before the last game of the season, Darnold was almost certainly “overrated” when the Vikings were 14-2:

Then cut to after the next two games and Darnold finds out that every quarterback is allowed to have a bad week (his bad games, both on the road against 2 of the 3 best teams in the NFC, were 8 days apart) unless his name is “Sam Darnold” apparently.

“And there’s the rub. There are strong opinions regarding Darnold’s overall performance in 2024,” Baxter wrote. “While he enjoyed an incredible resurgence in large part due to O’Connell, his play in the club’s final two outings brought back memories of the issues that plagued him the vast majority of his career.”

Obviously those 2 games did not entirely negate Darnold’s 2024 career resurgence — he went from a one-year, $10m deal to a 3-year, $105 million deal — but a lot of damage was done in early January.

This may have jerked Darnold’s expectations again:

• Pre-2024 “overhated”

• End of 2024 “overrated”

• Today: Nobody knows!

Saad Yousuf of The Athletic ranked the Seahawks QB room near the bottom of the league. Chris Simms took the under on 8.5 wins. Albert Breer thinks “Seattle could get the best of Sam Darnold”. Two different analysts at Yahoo! Sports picked the Seahawks to win the division, in part because Darnold would get the job done:

“Seattle having such a sure thing on one side of the ball just edges me past them.” - Charles Robinson

“The math makes sense in my head. I can’t believe the words are coming out of my mouth either.” - Nate Tice

Conversely, all 3 people allowed to speak on The Rich Eisen Show put the Seahawks in either third or fourth, and they also all had the 49ers or Rams in either first or second.

Former Seahawk/49er Richard Sherman picked the Seahawks and 49ers to both win 11 games and had Seattle winning the tiebreaker, but insisted that it was not because of bias.

As a team, the Seahawks have gotten pretty low marks from the national media for 2025 expectations and few analysts make those decisions without first considering the quarterback situation. Even so, if someone likes Seattle’s receivers, Klint Kubiak, and thinks the offensive line is underrated, they like the Darnold addition much more than the people who see Kubiak as a nepotism hire, Cooper Kupp as a massive downgrade from DK Metcalf, and the offensive line no different than usual.

Darnold comes and goes with the tide, meaning that any prediction for him actually tends to be an evaluation of the supporting cast and coaching staff.

That circumstance in itself can mean that a quarterback is always over-hated because there are only ever 32 players in the world at a time who are allowed to have the starting role, and barely more than half of those will be invited back year after year. With such a lack of appreciation for being the 18th or 22nd best quarterback in the NFL, that sounds like “over-hated” to me.

May the Seahawks get so lucky that they too get to find out what an “overrated” Sam Darnold can do for them this season.

Where are your Sam Darnold expectations going into the season? Have you long been a Darnold fan or are you still trying to make the adjustment?

Seaside Joe 2372