NFL teams that are looking for potential franchise quarterbacks are in for an interesting journey in 2025.
The upcoming draft class is seen to be meh at best, and though I think that narrative is overcooked, there isn’t a lead-pipe lock as there was in 2024 with Jayden Daniels or Bo Nix or Caleb Williams. And in free agency, you’ve got Aaron Rodgers with all his ancillary drama, and a whole lot of “Oh well, whatever, never mind” behind him. Maybe you think you can ride with a Russell Wilson or a Justin Fields. Maybe you think you can be the one to corral Jameis Winston’s rogue tendencies enough to put the hay in the barn. Maybe you believe you can “fix” Zach Wilson or Trey Lance. Or perhaps you are in Daniel Jones’ corner, though I have no idea why you would be.
Regardless, the shopping list there is going to be adequate, at best.
The odd man out in this entire process appears to be Sam Darnold. And in Darnold’s case, it seems that he’s getting battered by recency bias to an extreme degree. In the 2024 regular season for head coach/offensive shot-caller Kevin O’Connell and the Minnesota Vikings, Darnold completed 361 of 545 passes (66.2%) for 4,319 yards (7.9 yards per attempt), 35 touchdowns, 12 interceptions, and a passer rating of 102.5. Darnold was very good under pressure (13 touchdowns and five interceptions), he was lethal when blitzed (12 touchdowns and no interceptions), and he was a prolific and efficient deep passer.
The third overall pick of the New York Jets in 2018, who has cycled through multiple teams since then and had never put a definitive season together before, did just that under O’Connell’s leadership as a backup for injured 2024 first-round pick J.J. McCarthy.
Now that McCarthy is ready to go after the torn right meniscus that cost him his rookie season, Darnold may or may not be in the Vikings’ future plans. And were it not for a very rough end to the season, things could be different there. Against the Detroit Lions in a 31-9 regular-season finale loss, and vs. the Los Angeles Rams in a 27-9 Wild Card loss, Darnold turned back into the pumpkin everybody was waiting for. In those two games, he completed 43 of 81 passes for 411 yards, one touchdown, one interception, and a passer rating of 66.4. Darnold regressed in every way possible. The deep accuracy was no longer there, he was a nightmare when throwing in the red zone, and that guy who had been so good under pressure suddenly fell right out the window.
“Darnold has really played better and better every week,” Lions head coach Dan Campbell said after Detroit’s regular-season beatdown of Darnold. “It feels like he’s just continued to make this gradual climb, and continued to improve, and what you really see is, man, when he gets the play-action pass and they nudge the edges, or they’ll max protect on some of this stuff, two-receiver routes, three-receiver routes, and he can see it and has time, he’s deadly, and we could not allow that to happen.
“We didn’t feel like there was any way we could let him sit back there because we did think he would pick us apart, you know? If you give him that much time, because he was playing at such a high level with the weapons they had, and so, we knew it needed to be the right balance of coverage and pressure, and we tried to bring more than they could handle for most of it, and then we had to hold on in the back end and those guys did, man. They really, they covered their tails off for most of that game.
“And then, we were able to play enough to where we could double (Vikings WR Justin Jefferson) 18, take care of him, and we singled some guys out — like (Lions LB) Alex (Anzalone) was one-on-one with (Vikings TE TJ) Hock (Hockenson) on a number of things. And so it just worked.”
That strategy doesn’t sound too dissimilar from what Vic Fangio’s Philadelphia Eagles defense did to Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX. But as Mahomes has all the skins on the wall, that game was not a referendum on the quarterback. Darnold, still seen as a regular-season fluke by many in the know, had no such cachet. But that little disaster was more about what Lions defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn put in the playbook than anything else — just as what Fangio did to Mahomes was impossible to counter.
Sometimes, the bear eats you.
So here we are with Darnold on the open market unless the Vikings re-sign him, and a less-than-definitive answer to the question, “Who the hell is Sam Darnold, anyway?”
Through most of the 2024 season, and with O’Connell as his perfect guide to a new level of quarterbacking, Darnold had stints in which he was about as good as any quarterback plying his trade in the NFL. Yes, it helps to have a schematic and motivational genius like O’Connell in your corner, and yes, it’s nice if you have the NFL’s best receiver in Justin Jefferson. But Darnold proved to be much more than a dreaded “system quarterback” – not every good throw he made under pressure or against complex coverage would have been thee for any other quarterback below the baseline.
After re-studying Sam Darnold’s 2024 season, I feel that recency bias has severely tweaked public perception of how good he was most of the way. Now, the question is, how can he build on stuff like this? pic.twitter.com/YuEsodhGbX
— Doug Farrar ✍ (@NFL_DougFarrar) March 7, 2025
“I would be slow to say that the NFL world is giving up on quarterbacks,” O’Connell said at the scouting combine last week, when asked why people are so eager to insist that certain quarterbacks will never figure it out. “I think it’s become very popular for people to decide in the moment that people can or can’t play. They were right when they decided that about me as a player, but I think it’s always very important to evaluate each situation as its own.
“I view it more about us in regard to, what process do you have for the position? What do you ask the position to do in your offense? And then, how are you going to train it mentally, physically, technique and fundamentals to play the style that you believe will best suit them and allow them to sustain? And I think it’s hard to sustain. The greatest quarterbacks in our league, what separates them is their ability to do it week in and week out, regardless of circumstance, and it’s easier said than done, but we feel very strongly about our quarterback process that we go through.”
As he should, and Sam Darnold’s 2024 season was proof positive that O’Connell’s quarterback ideology is as foolproof as any can be for such a volatile position. Are we really assuming that Darnold will never be anything but a one-year wonder, or is it possible that what he did and what he learned about himself last season could be the springboard to the longer second act nobody expected?
Maybe other teams shouldn’t give up so easily if and when Sam Darnold is available as the new league year turns over next week.
