Sam Darnold won the Super Bowl after the Vikings let him go.
At this revelation, Elliot Steeves—watching the Big Game on his phone after missing it live due to a flight back from Puerto Vallarta, where he had been vacationing amid beaches and the Lindo Mar resort—proceeded to hurl a giant bottle of Mexican tequila directly at the screen, damaging it in true football-fan fashion.
Darnold went from slinging passes to Justin Jefferson to hoisting a Lombardi Trophy with Mike Macdonald’s Dark Side defense—an annihilator of entire galaxies—alongside Kenneth Walker III and Jaxon Smith-Njigba, who, for the record, is not as good as Justin Jefferson. All of this happened while Kevin O’Connell, now alleged rather than proven quarterback whisperer, turned to the impish gremlin known as Nine the Terrible to guide him to the classic 9-8 Minnesota Mediocre record, followed by a general manager getting fired for being really, really bad at drafting players not named Dallas Turner or Jordan Addison.
For as much as the jury is still out on J.J. McCarthy—who I’ve now gone on record saying is not good—and for as much as the Vikings probably don’t win the Super Bowl outright with Darnold himself playing the way he did this year (he had a solid season on a roster featuring the league’s best defense and Klint Kubiak’s utterly punishing run game), watching it all still stung a little.
Darnold is exemplary of the fantasy America tries to conjure with its version of football: a rough-and-tumble sport where hard work is its own reward. Six years ago, in 2019, he was throwing passes directly into the hands of Bill Belichick’s defenders as the quarterback of the meme-worthy Jets, later admitting he thought he was seeing the undead.
Instead of giving up and starting a business—or a chain, or some other entrepreneurial venture around his alma mater at USC—Darnold stayed the course. He went to Carolina, where in 2022 he led the Panthers to the brink of a division title, finishing just short behind a Buccaneers team with a losing record.
Still staying the course, he moved on to Kyle Shanahan’s San Francisco 49ers. It was there that Darnold would tell you he finally had a breakthrough, backing up Brock Purdy on a team that reached the Super Bowl and lost to God-Emperor Mahomes at the peak of his unholy powers.
Then he came to Minnesota.
It was magical. He was O’Connell’s most effective quarterback to that point—more so than Kirk Cousins in 2022, who often spent games digging himself out of holes he had helped create. Darnold got rid of the ball quickly, scrambled when he had to, and most importantly cleaned up the turnovers—i.e., the paranormal visions—big time. The Vikings finished one loss short of the NFC’s No. 1 seed.
Unfortunately for Darnold, two things were also true in Minnesota: First, the final two games were a traumatic demonstration of what happens when you hold onto the ball too long against playoff-caliber defenses; Second, the Michigan Menace was waiting in the wings, fresh off a pre-torn meniscus training camp in which he was reportedly ahead of schedule.
But with the Seahawks this year, Darnold proved that the Vikings’ internal calculus—and the fan demand at the time to “go with the kid”—wasn’t actually that smart.
Sure, no one could have predicted McCarthy would be this bad, or that Darnold would be the one hoisting Seattle’s second Lombardi. But you still have to wonder what the Vikings were thinking.
Here was a quarterback who had turned a corner under two of the best offensive minds in the league, who has the exact work ethic you want at the position, a calm and calculated demeanor, and who by all accounts is a genuinely good human being. He is exactly what the NFL wants to believe in: craftsmanship rewarded over time.
And we let him walk.
Damn.