Before the start of last season, the Minnesota Vikings, who had just gone 14-3 with Sam Darnold at the helm in 2024, decided to release the now-Super Bowl champion in favor of a questionable prospect, J.J. McCarthy. At the time, it seemed like a no-brainer for the Vikings. But with this season’s script providing hindsight, not quite!
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Darnold’s performance against the Los Angeles Rams in the 2024 Wild Card round was abysmal. When you pair that with the high-end draft capital that the front office had just invested in McCarthy a year before, it seemed like the right decision to make.
However, a season later, the Michigan product has yet to justify both his first-round draft status and the Vikings’ decision to release Darnold. “I understand their thought process of going with the younger kid,” Darnold said in a recent interview with Colin Cowherd.
“There’s a lot of potential there, and I think J.J. is going to be a really, really good player in this league… That was a little bit of a tough pill to swallow, but when I really stood back and looked at it from afar, I really understood the decision, and I’m thankful that I landed in Seattle,” Sam added, justifying the Vikings’ decision to release him.
You won’t find any sour grapes here with Darnold… He’s likely more aware than anyone else of the amount of egg that was left on the face of Minnesota all throughout his turnover-less playoff run.
The early struggles of McCarthy, which included an 11:12 touchdown-to-interception ratio and a pass completion percentage of just 57.6%, made the move look all the more disastrous. Darnold’s words, however, show that the Seahawks star knows that there’s no need to kick a man while he’s down.
As far as his personal transition from Minnesota to the Seattle Seahawks is concerned, the 28-year-old explained that it’s a lot easier to do your job as a quarterback when you’re throwing to a player like Jaxson Smith-Njigba. “From the start of OTAs, he was special,” Darnold remarked.
“I remember we came out to L.A. in the offseason and we did some throwing with the guys right before training camp, and I had kind of seen him move around for the last couple months… One of my other buddies came to throw with us just because I needed an extra arm, and he was like ‘Dude, this guy is different,‘” Sam elaborated.
Smith-Njigba, the 2025 Offensive Player of the Year, played a critical role in Seattle’s path toward the championship. And now that we’ve seen what they are capable of, both he and Darnold figure to be at the forefront of every conversation that involves the NFC for the foreseeable future.
