It's wild to me, after his early career, that we have to now grudgingly concede that maybe Sam Darnold's pretty good.
Are there any Seattle fans on this sub-lemmy? Is he actually this good or did they just build a good team around him?
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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Whenever an ex-Jet sees success somewhere else, I think there is an obvious explanation why we didn't see that success earlier....
Yeah, but the difference is that he sucked on multiple teams.
His time with the Panthers was just another Jets situation. Remember, they had no idea how to win with Mayfield, then he immediately goes to the Rams and turns heads in a single game at the end of the season.
It often takes a few wash cycles to get the Jets smell to go away.
No one wins a conference championship game unless it is a very good team.
Seattle is good all around.
Fair point.
I'm gonna say that he's actually pretty good. He does the easy stuff perfectly pretty much every time. He does the hard stuff perfectly most of the time. He does the impossible stuff sometimes.
His problem is that he can get rattled. Especially when facing sustained pressure. Our O-line has been good enough to mostly avoid that.
I am. I think he's really come into his own over the course of the season actually. His passing looked really good from the start, but it got us into trouble, too. He had tons of interceptions early on because he would try these bullet passes into dangerous territory, or wouldn't give up plays to a fault.
He's cleaned that up a lot now, and in this game specifically there were some opportunities where he let a doomed play die instead of trying to make the impossible happen. I think earlier in the season he wouldn't have handled it as well, and would probably have made a risky play.
Probably the biggest weakness I see in him is lack of a run game. He actually had a good run this game, but he hasn't done much in that regard. We've had some strong running QBs in the past, so it feels really different without that in the back pocket.
Yes but... His name is still "Darnold"
The only thing I miss Reddit for is the sports stuff. r/the_darnold must be in peak form right now.
It's literally the worst English surname since Shithouse
I think Darnold is proof that you can take any mid-tier qb and make them look amazing when they’re surrounded by a great team. A qb doesn’t get to the nfl by being shitty, they’re the top .01 percent of qbs in existence. See also: Flacco, Dilfer, Foles, Mahomes (yeah, I said it, he played like shit all year before he went down. His team got shitty and then so did he).
I don't think I agree with the Mahomes take.
If you look at the drop-off without Mahomes, it's a canyon reminiscent of the time when the Colts had to go from Peyton Manning to Curtis Painter. Mahomes should win the MVP award for how valuable he is to his team.
The chiefs went 6-8 with Mahomes playing this season. That’s not a mvp anything. If he was so good, they would have gone 10-4. 6-8 is what you’d expect from a mediocre team with a mediocre qb. He even had most of his star players around from previous years.