Super Bowl 2026: Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold has grown from bust to one of best

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Sam Darnold has earned the right to make this season his revenge tour. He’s been through enough bad times with bad teams in his career that if he had walked onto the stage at the Super Bowl’s Opening Night festivities on Monday sticking his tongue out at all of those who wronged him in the past, few would blame him.

But that’s not Darnold.

For him, the past is just part of this journey, and those who gave up on him too soon simply helped make him into what he is today. There are no grudges. No hard feelings.

Not only does the quarterback for the NFC champion Seahawks no longer see ghosts, it seems he doesn’t even believe in them.

“I almost forgot about that,” he said with a shy smile last week after topping the Rams for the conference title.

He had been asked about his most infamous moment as a young Jet, the game against the Patriots in 2019 when the struggling second-year quarterback was caught on a live mic on the sideline telling his coaches that he was so confused by Bill Belichick’s defenses that he was “seeing ghosts” on the field.

“For me,” he said of that moment, “there was a lot that I didn’t know back then.”

For instance, that he eventually would get here, to the pinnacle of the sport, to a place where his face is plastered on the sides of buildings and on banners throughout Northern California to celebrate his accomplishments. Or that it would take a few more humbling stops before he arrived.

Heck, he had to remind a lot of folks that this isn’t even his first Super Bowl.

“I actually made it in ’23 when I was in San Francisco,” he said of his stint as Brock Purdy’s backup that season.

Darnold started one game that year — the last of the regular season after the 49ers secured their playoff position — but didn’t take a snap in the playoffs and watched his team lose to Kansas City in overtime in Super Bowl LVIII.

At the time, that was the highlight of his career, which says a lot about how things started for him.

Darnold was the third overall pick in the 2018 draft after two seasons at USC. He was taken behind Baker Mayfield and Saquon Barkley, thrust into an impossible task that many have been asked to accomplish and none have succeeded in doing: resurrecting the Jets.

A team that is in perpetual search for the next Joe Namath soon decided that Darnold wasn’t it, and after three seasons and a 13-25 record, they traded him to the Panthers.

In Carolina, he started off with wins in his first three games, but things petered out there, too. In two seasons, he won only eight games.

It was fair to start calling him a bust, and many did. He did not.

“The only thing that matters is if you believe in yourself,” he said Monday night. “That’s really it. I always believed in myself and I knew I could do this at a high level. That’s what kept me going. I knew at some point an opportunity would arise, but even if it didn’t, I knew that I had done everything I could to become a better player year in and year out.”

That attitude was ingrained in him early on.

“A lot of it stems from my family,” he said of his father, a plumber, and mother, a physical education teacher. “No matter what kind of days they had, they were always in the best mood for me and my sister growing up. No matter what happened that day, my dad was always out there playing catch with me after work. I feel like I just naturally learned how to be resilient and take it one day at a time.”

There were others, too.

“I always had a tight-knit, close group of friends,” he said. “When things are going well, they keep me grounded. When things aren’t going well, they lift me up. It’s important to have those people in your life.”

His early-career struggles were formative experiences for Darnold, even if no one, including the quarterback himself, realized it at the time.

“Mentally I handle it a little bit differently internally than I used to because I realize it is a part of the journey and a part of who I am,” he said last week on “The Dan Patrick Show.”

“I gave it a little more thought than I had to, I paid a little more attention to it, and I invested a little more thought into what happened in the past. ‘OK, I threw this pick against this coverage back in 2019, like, I’m not going to do that again.’

“No, it’s like, sometimes mistakes happen. You learn from it. You don’t want to make the same mistakes again, but sometimes throughout your career, especially if it is a long career, those things are going to happen.''

It was in San Francisco — coincidentally the host team of this Super Bowl — where his rehabilitation began. Learning from Kyle Shanahan and his staff in a pressure-free environment allowed him to do something he’d never been given a chance to do at any point in his playing career: watch and learn.

After that, he was ready to embark on the second arc of his career. That brought him to the Vikings, where he was signed to be the veteran Sherpa for rookie J.J. McCarthy.

When McCarthy suffered a season-ending injury in the summer, Darnold was pushed to the top of the depth chart. This time he was ready. He threw for 4,319 yards and 35 touchdowns and had a 102.5 passer rating, leading the Vikings to a 14-3 regular-season record.

His last two games with the Vikings more resembled the Old Sam than the newer version, though. He struggled through the Week 18 game against the Lions and a Wild Card loss to the Rams, and Minnesota let him walk.

He wound up signing a three-year, $100.5 million contract with the Seahawks in March. He gave them this Super Bowl run and a postseason that erased not just last year’s stumbles but those throughout his career.

“I feel that support, not only with their words but with how everyone treats everyone in the building,” Darnold said of his current team. “There is a lot of respect that goes around the building. Everyone respects the work that we all put into this great game. I’m happy to be a part of this team, man.”

And, believe it or not, happy to have been part of all of his other teams, too.

“The days in New York, the days in Carolina, those are part of my journey and they’re part of my experience,” Darnold said. “I loved every single part of it. Yeah, there were some lows that sucked. I’m not going to lie to you. That’s part of it, though. I learned so much from that.

“After every single game we lost or things didn’t go well, I was able to wake up that next day and see the sun rise and go into the building and see my teammates and have fun with my coaches. That’s a part of life. I think being able to realize that at this point in my career, it allows you to take it one day at a time and enjoy every single little moment that you get.”

The biggest lesson?

“Just being able to move on,” he said. “To learn from those experiences but move on.”