Salk: What Sam Darnold’s injury means for Seahawks season

On Wednesday night, the Seattle Seahawks winning Game 1 is the story. But guess what? By Thursday and into Friday and beyond, the story becomes their starting quarterback situation.

The latest on hip injury to Seattle Seahawks QB Sam Darnold

As head coach Mike Macdonald tells us, the news is mostly good on Sam Darnold after he suffered a hip injury on the first series of the season. He doesn’t have a broken hip. It’s not fractured. The injury seems to be more muscular.

They’ve dodged the ultimate awful bullet, but it also sounds like there’s going to be some time in which Sam is not able to go. Maybe that’s one or two games, in which case I’d say the Seahawks are in really good shape with a top-notch backup in Drew Lock, who is able to manage a game and get them through a couple against Arizona and Washington.

If it continues past that, now you’re going to start to face some of the meat of this schedule, and it is a difficult schedule. We’ve talked about that since the offseason, how many good teams they have to play from San Francisco and LA and Philadelphia, to pretty good teams in the AFC, like Denver and Kansas City back to back in October. This is not a cupcake schedule at all for the Seahawks.

How long is Sam Darnold out? Hopefully not long, because as much as there has been a debate about Sam and whether or not he’s a top quarterback, or a franchise quarterback, or a guy who’s just a system quarterback, I think we’re going to find out he is more than that. He is somebody that makes big plays when they need him to in big games.

The defense bailed the Seahawks out in Game 1 on Wednesday night. I don’t know if you can count on that moving forward. It’s going to take some big, big throws that Sam Darnold is still more capable of making.

This article is a transcript of the video at the top of the post. It is edited for clarity. Catch Mike Salk weekdays from 6-10 a.m. on Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk.

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