Sam The Franchise? Darnold Ignites Seahawks 4-2 Start, Push For NFC West Title
Nursing a slim eight-point lead with under three minutes left to play, the Seattle Seahawks could have broke the huddle three consecutive plays with run calls to force the Jacksonville Jaguars to burn all three of their timeouts, especially when their previous possession ended with two clock-stopping incompletions by Sam Darnold.
But on the heels of four consecutive drives that ended with a punt, with a chance to put the game away, offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak wasn’t about to take the ball out of his trusty quarterback’s hands. Running a condensed 3x1 formation with two inline tight ends flanking the left side in 12 personnel, Kubiak dialed up a play action pass on 1st and 10 for Darnold, who rolled out to his left off the play fake before stopping the bootleg with an oncoming rusher to shuffle back to his right.
Resetting his pocket, Darnold’s eyes shifted towards AJ Barner, who sold a corner route before working his way back across the field on a deep drag route wide open with no defenders in his vicinity. The quarterback lofted a downfield throw right on the tight end’s hands and he turned upfield with tons of grass in front of him, rumbling 29 yards after the catch for a back-breaking 61-yard gain down to the Jaguars’ 12-yard line, forcing the home team to burn their first timeout.
Three Zach Charbonnet runs and a Jason Myers’ field goal nullified by a defensive penalty later after Barner hauled in the longest catch of his career, Darnold took a trio of knees and the Seahawks headed for the locker room with yet another significant road win, hanging on for a 20-12 victory once again spearheaded by the quarterback’s budding superstar turn as he finished with 295 passing yards and two touchdowns, headlined by a 61-yard bomb to Jaxon Smith-Njigba for six points in the second quarter.
“We have 100 percent confidence in Sam,” Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald said of his team’s aggressiveness throwing the football late. “He makes great decisions. He's done that since he showed up, and he's playing great football.”
“There's a ton of plays we can go to, but that's a play that AJ does a really good job at,” Darnold added, crediting Kubiak for the play call. “Really all of our guys do a really great job of those routes. Got our defense a couple of times in training camp as well on that. It was a great job by not only AJ, but the offensive line and the other tight end, it might have been Sauby [Eric Saubert] over there on the defensive end just holding him up a little bit so I could get that one off.”
Coming to Seattle as a free agent after a breakthrough 2024 season in Minnesota where he made his first Pro Bowl roster and led the Vikings to a 13-4 record, nobody knew what to expect from Darnold as the successor for Geno Smith, who the Seahawks traded to the Raiders before the start of the league year in March. Some wondered if he could replicate his success with a different coaching staff away from offensive guru Kevin O’Connell and without elite receiver Justin Jefferson to throw to, while others worried he’d regress back to the player who struggled his way out of New York and Carolina earlier in his career.
But since his arrival, the Seahawks have lauded Darnold for everything from his leadership to his arm talent to his competitive nature, with Macdonald saying he had some “s*** to him” during training camp. Demonstrated again in Jacksonville, those traits have manifested into All-Pro caliber play on the field with the former top-five pick further elevating his game in Kubiak’s offense and leading his new team to a 4-2 start, including a perfect 3-0 record in opposing stadiums.
While Darnold completed just 59 percent of his passes on Sunday, easily his lowest rate in a single game this season, he still averaged a staggering 10.9 yards per attempt without a single turnover. He made the most of his 16 completions, completing six of them for at least 18 yards, including four such passes to Smith-Njigba, who became the first receiver in franchise history to eclipse 600 yards in the first six games after scorching cornerback Greg Newsome on a skinny post for the 61-yard scoring strike from his new quarterback.
“We got a certain look where I'm kind of alerting the post on that, was able to just throw it up, and Jax made a great play tracking it,” Darnold explained. “That was something we worked on OTAs, training camp, even throughout this week in practice, and we made it come to life in the game.”
Such results have become the expected at this point from Darnold, who has played at an MVP level orchestrating Kubiak’s offense while busting out the dynamite as often as any other signal caller in the league, particularly when targeting Smith-Njigba. According to Pro Football Focus charting, he leads all quarterbacks with 15 completions traveling 20 or more air yards, ranking second in completion rate (71.4 percent), second in touchdown passes (four), and first in yards per attempt on downfield throws (26.5), posting a staggering 45.5 percent Big Time Throw rate as the cherry on top.
But while Sunday’s performance proved to be a bit more feast-or-famine than the first five weeks for Darnold, at least in terms of accuracy, his numbers have been elite beyond simply airing it out vertically to Smith-Njigba and the rest of his skill players. He has been equally potent attacking the intermediate level of the defense on 10-19 yard throws, ranking seventh in yards (424), third in completion rate (73.7 percent), first in touchdowns (seven), and fifth in passer rating (138.6).
As far as his biggest improvements from last year’s breakout, after struggling against pressure for the majority of his career, including taking nine sacks in Minnesota’s wild card defeat last January to Los Angeles, Darnold isn’t “seeing ghosts” these days in Seattle. Or if he is, he might as well be inducted as a new member of the Ghostbusters alongside Peter Vinkman or Egon Spengler, as he has excelled at moving the pocket to evade oncoming rushers and delivering strikes while under duress.
Per PFF, Darnold currently ranks in the top 10 among qualified quarterbacks in yardage (414), touchdowns (four), and yards per attempt (7.5) on pressured drop backs. By most metrics, though he has thrown all three of his interceptions against coordinated pressure, he has been even better against the blitz with five or more rushers sent after him, throwing for 645 yards and a league-best 11.3 yards per attempt and six Big Time Throws.
Most notably, Darnold has taken another step forward protecting the football. With the Vikings, he finished with a 3.7 percent turnover-worthy play rate, tied for 12th worst in the NFL, along with ranking sixth in interceptions (13). Through the first six weeks of the 2025 season, he’s on pace for less than 10 interceptions and his 1.1 percent turnover-worthy play rate ranks first among qualified quarterbacks, further bolstered by not putting the ball at risk against an opportunistic Jaguars defense that entered Sunday with 14 turnovers created in the first five games.
“Jacksonville had done a great job all year of taking the ball away from teams, and that was a huge emphasis for us to be able to take care of the football and for runners to be able to take care of the football in the open field. I feel like we did a good job of that today,” Darnold said.
Just six games into his tenure as Seattle’s starting quarterback, Darnold sees plenty of areas for continued improvement, seeming to take the brunt of the blame for a mostly poor second half that included four punts on six offensive possessions. He also understandably wasn’t happy at all with the team’s third down woes, as they only converted one out of 12 opportunities on Sunday, seeing that as, at least in part, as a reflection of his play orchestrating the offense and failing to keep the chains moving.
Of course, Darnold can also point to two missed opportunities in the Seahawks’ pair of losses, as he lost a game-ending fumble in the red zone against the 49ers in Week 1 and had his final pass attempt bounce off a defender’s helmet and into the hands of linebacker Lavonte David for an interception late in regulation to seal a three-point defeat to the Buccaneers.
But as Smith struggles mightily in Las Vegas, Seattle’s decision to pivot to Darnold this offseason becomes a shrewder move by the week, as he should only get better as he continues to build chemistry with his receivers and grow into Kubiak’s offense. Assuming his play doesn’t taper off much, if at all, with him currently ranking in the top five in every major passing category and leading a budding playoff contender, he not only looks the part of a long-term franchise quarterback for the franchise, but a legitimate MVP front-runner capable of leading the team to great success in January.
