Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks generally come in one of two vintages: Hall of Famers and Ham and Eggers. The former group is self-explanatory: Roger Staubach, Tom Brady, Joe Montana, Peyton Manning, John Elway, Patrick Mahomes. These are the legends whose careers are measured not by whether they win a Super Bowl ring but how many.
But just as fascinating are the other guys, the normal fellas, the quarterbacks whose primary job is to avoid mistakes, stay out of the way and let the rest of the team, the actual championship-quality players, do their thing. The Eagles have had a couple of these in the past decade, Jalen Hurts last year and Nick Foles in 2018 (the canonical example); others include Joe Flacco, Brad Johnson, Trent Dilfer, Jeff Hostetler. Historically, these are known as “game managers,” but I prefer to think of them as efficiency experts: Minimize errors, keep the trains running on time, don’t try to be a hero. Sure, you’re no Brady, but neither are billions of other people. If you do your job, not being Brady won’t stop you and your teammates from being champions forever.
This year’s Super Bowl matchup features a budding legend: The Patriots’ Drake Maye, a clear MVP candidate, looks like a potential next coming of Brady. (He’s actually far more accomplished than Brady was when he played in his first Super Bowl, 24 years ago now.) It’s too early to call him a Hall of Famer, obviously (he’s only 23), but he’s on that road. I’m most fascinated, however, by his counterpart on the Seahawks sideline, a man who may well be creating a new paradigm, forging his own idiosyncratic path: the flameout chaos agent.
America, I hope you are ready for Sam Darnold.
If you, for whatever reason, skipped the past couple of NFL seasons, you would know Darnold primarily for two things: (1) He was the next draft disaster in a Jets franchise history full of them, and (2) after missing a series of games with mononucleosis, “Monday Night Football” inexplicably made a tough-guy graphic of Darnoldpointing at the camera next to the words “OUT INDEFINITELY, MONONUCLEOSIS,” which led a good half-decade of smirking memes. (“OUT INDEFINITELY, SCURVY.”) Darnold had a good sense of humor about the jokes, though he didn’t have much choice: People don’t have a lot of patience for surliness when you’re 21-35 as a starter your first six seasons in the NFL. Darnold got shuffled out of New York and bounced around the league for a few years, struggling with Carolina before serving as a little-used backup in San Francisco in 2023.
Then something amazing happened. After unexpectedly losing Kirk Cousins to the Falcons, the Vikings signed Darnold in a desperation move, then watched him turn his career around. In 2024, he led Minnesota to a 14-3 record through improved, if still not spectacular, play and parlayed that into an even bigger deal with the Seahawks. And while Darnold has been good this year, certainly better than he was as a youngster with the Jets, he’s hardly having an MVP-level season: His stats are down from 2024 across the board.
And the reason is clear: Darnold makes a lot of mistakes. He was third in the NFL in interceptions this year — the two men above him, the Raiders’ Geno Smith and the Dolphins’ Tua Tagovailoa, were both benched and ended up getting their coaches fired — and led all quarterbacks in fumbles. These turnovers are not exactly an accident. Darnold’s style is the opposite of an efficiency expert: His team has one of the best defenses in the sport and needs him just to play it safe and take care of the ball, but Darnold, constitutionally, cannot abide. Think of him as football’s “Tin Cup”: Darnold never wants to lay up.
The reason Darnold plays for the Seahawks in the first place is because he was miserable (and consistently inaccurate) in the Vikings’ pivotal regular season finale (costing them a division title), and he was even worse in a playoff loss to the Rams; the Vikings decided the Jets guy was back and moved on. The Vikings’ skepticism has been shared by most observers around the NFL, and why not? It’s Sam Darnold! He’s the Jets flameout! The meme guy! He always makes a mistake.
In the NFC championship game against those same Rams, though, Darnold may have had the best game of his career, throwing three touchdowns and zero interceptions, thwarting the Rams’ seemingly sound primary strategy, which was “keep the game close and wait for Darnold to mess up.” This will not deter the Patriots, one suspects, from deploying the same strategy. Darnold has moments of brilliance — it’s why the Jets drafted him so high in the first place — but they are punctuated by absolute howlers, devastating missteps resulting from his own hubris. Darnold always wants to go for it. Trent Dilfer, he is not.
This, it should be said, makes him an infinitely more compelling figure than Dilfer, or Nick Foles, or any of those drab middle-manager types: There is not much more compelling than a guy who throws caution (and the occasional wobbly football) to the wind and says, “Let’s do it and be legends.” The Seahawks need Darnold to be boring and steady, but he steadfastly refuses. This makes him mesmerizing to watch: He will either win them a Super Bowl or lose them one in spectacular fashion.
He is the chaos agent quarterback. If you’re a Seahawks fan, that might not calm your nerves. If you’re not? He’s exactly the sort of quarterback who gets your pulse racing — no matter what. C’mon, Sam, don’t check down, don’t make the safe play. This is the Super Bowl. Let’s do it and be legends.
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