Sam Darnold has delivered the best season of his career, a Pro Bowl campaign that helped push the Seattle Seahawks to the NFC’s No. 1 seed. Yet the same question continues to hover over him as the divisional round approaches: can he protect the football when the lights are brightest?
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Tom Brady believes the answer lies in fundamentals, not in playing scared.
Asked this week by Colin Cowherd how to explain Darnold’s struggles with interceptions (14) in big games, the seven-time Super Bowl champion pointed to the razor-thin margin for error in January.
“It’s certainly a problem,” Brady said on The Herd. “When you get to these big moments in big games, whether that’s playoffs or games at the end of the year, the margin of error when you play good teams is just very small. That’s where the fundamentals come into play.”
Brady did not hesitate to bring up one of the gold standards at the position.
“Aaron Rodgers is a great example of that,” he said. “If your mechanics are a little off, or you’re not that accurate, and you get late in the season with wet conditions, windy conditions, you’re playing against a defense that’s got a good rush and a good coverage scheme, that’s where all the problems come into play.”
Darnold led the league with 20 turnovers this season, a statistic that stands in sharp contrast to Seattle’s otherwise elite profile. The Seahawks finished with the NFL’s best scoring defense and the highest point differential in franchise history under first-year coach Mike Macdonald. The roster is built to contend now, but the quarterback remains the X-factor.
Brady’s prescription was simple: refine technique and train for stress long before the postseason arrives.
“You need coaches that are stressing you in practice all the time so you learn to deal with the stress emotion that you feel when you need to perform at a high level,” Brady said. “If you throw it accurately and make good decisions, you’re not going to throw a lot of interceptions.”
He emphasized how difficult it is to survive giveaways in January.
“It’s very hard to overcome turnovers in the NFL,” Brady added. “You have the least margin of error in these games.”
That philosophy mirrors the approach Macdonald has taken with Darnold all year. Rather than preaching caution, Seattle’s staff has urged its quarterback to stay aggressive without becoming reckless.
“If you tell him not to turn the ball over, he’s not going to make plays,” Macdonald said recently. “We want him to be decisive and rip it and trust his training.”
The message has produced some of the best moments of Darnold’s career, including an overtime strike against the Rams in Week 16 when he stood in against pressure and delivered a hole shot to Cooper Kupp before throwing the winning touchdown. It has also come with ugly stretches, such as the four-interception meltdown against the same Rams earlier in the year.
“Obviously you’d love for those things not to happen, negative plays, but that’s football sometimes,” he said. “It’s about moving on as fast as I can and understanding why I messed up.”
Seattle meets San Francisco on Saturday night with a defense capable of carrying the team deep into January. The run game has found its rhythm, special teams are elite, and Lumen Field will be roaring. The only true variable is the man under center.
