Stacy Rost: Making sense of the Sam Darnold discourse

Shortly after the Seattle Seahawks signed Sam Darnold to replace the recently-traded Geno Smith in March 2025, NFL Network’s Daniel Jeremiah hopped on Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk and asked a simple question as a litmus test for evaluating the move.

Can you win a Super Bowl with Darnold?

The answer months later is, conclusively, yes. But with doubt lingering about Darnold’s impact on that championship, the question today – Can you do it again with him under center? – feels like a bit of goalpost-moving.

It brings with it a host of new questions: Can Darnold do it without departed offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak? What if Jaxon-Smith Njigba isn’t the best receiver in football? Can Darnold make up for a defense that, surely, won’t be as dominant as it was last year? Regardless of what he’s already shown – namely that gutsy performance in the NFC Championship game – the bar inches higher.

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On the one hand… yes, of course it does. When expectations are exceeded, new goals emerge. Plus, there’s hardly anything in sports we can universally agree on; you can find someone, somewhere, I’m sure, who thinks Wayne Gretzky or Tom Brady were just a bit overrated. Inherent to our favorite bar-top debates are bits of evidence we can mount to knock down another fan’s hero.

But there’s something else we’re all doing when it comes to talking about Darnold. Or Jalen Hurts, or Jared Goff, or Brock Purdy, or Jordon Love, or Baker Mayfield. We don’t know how to talk about middle-class quarterbacks.

These are very, very good players. Darnold’s arm talent got him selected third overall, while Hurts leads all quarterbacks in rushing touchdowns since 2022. Neither sit atop rankings the way Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen have, and it’s OK that Mahomes and Allen lead those conversations – they’re undeniably elite. But the last two Super Bowls have been won by the former.

To be clear, I think three things are happening here.

First, there’s an attempt to find reason when you’re wrong. Didn’t think the Seahawks would win a championship? Surely it was luck, and that luck benefited Darnold.

Second, it takes a long time to change a narrative. Unlike the second-round Hurts, Darnold was a top pick who was supposed to be “the guy” for the Jets and saw his career (like so many Jets quarterbacks before and after him) end with disappointment. Once that book is written on a “bust,” it’s hard to add new chapters.

Thirdly, and in my opinion most interestingly, sports are all about being the best, and we have a hard time figuring out what to make of someone who isn’t.

Take last year’s Eagles. Hurts is clearly talented, but wasn’t the engine. He won on a stacked roster with a 2,000-yard season from Saquon Barkley, and the offseason leading up to 2025 was spent focused on much of the same conversation critics are having about Darnold now. In 2025, the Eagles won their division but were knocked out in the wild card round by a banged-up 49ers team. Critics certainly debated whether Hurts’ limitations contributed to that disappointing end, and maybe they did. But it turns out, “is Jalen Hurts a top-five quarterback?” matters a lot less than “can your offensive coordinator do his job?” and “is your culture healthy enough to handle stars who don’t like each other?” That’s not a sexy sports talk segment, though.

Even now, if you’re reading this as a Seahawks fan, you might be making your argument for Darnold. With more time as a starter on a good team, he could show that he’s elite! Have you seen that spin on “Hard Knocks?”

But that’s missing the point! This is exactly what we do! Darnold isn’t one of the NFL’s elite passers and that doesn’t need to – I’d argue it cannot – be a bar he clears in 2026. He’ll never make critics feel bought in. He’ll never give them the reassurance they’d feel about Allen or Mahomes.

It’s a question he can never answer definitively, and more importantly, it’s a question that doesn’t matter for the 2026 Seahawks.

Seattle Seahawks news and more

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• Brock on Seahawks: Stock up, stock down after 2nd preseason game
• What stood out in Seattle Seahawks’ preseason loss to Titans

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