It's the Year of the QB After All.
The names are just different than we expected
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There’s a great recounting of the Minnesota Vikings’ locker room scene from Sunday over at ESPN. The Vikings had just secured a huge victory over Green Bay, putting them in position to play Detroit next week for the No. 1 seed in the NFC, and they wanted to celebrate hard.
But they were missing the focus of the party, because their quarterback was still on the field doing a couple of post-game interviews. So the players, coaches, staffers, etc. — nearly a hundred of them — waited, and plotted. When the QB finally rolled through the locker room doors, he got lovingly hammered by a bottled-water cascade, then hoisted on the shoulders of his teammates.
Huge, team-building moment. Great recognition for their star.
Sam Darnold.
Sam Darnold, playing on his third team in three years. Darnold, who had made seven starts, total, in the two seasons preceding this one.
Darnold, signed by the Vikings strictly to cover a couple of games until their rookie QB was ready to take the helm.
Okay — this is not going as expected.
After an extended run of superstar-quarterback years, the NFL has landed in a weird but compelling in-between phase. Sure, Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen still exist on the elite plane, and Joe Burrow and Lamar Jackson, too. But the league this season is substantially about the grinders. It’s a great thing.
The Vikings were supposed to be all about J.J. McCarthy, their draft-pick QB out of Michigan. Darnold, fresh off a clipboard season with the 49ers in which he started one game, was the guy who was going to pull down a few starts for Minnesota while he helped show McCarthy the ropes.
Darnold was signed in March. Barely a month later, McCarthy officially went to Minnesota, the 10th overall selection in the 2024 NFL Draft. A couple of months after that, during his pre-season debut against the Raiders, McCarthy wrecked a knee.
And, you know, that was that. Sam Darnold, once projected as a top-tier QB but relegated years ago to stand-by duty and recast as a league backup, was suddenly the guy on center stage — and he has absolutely owned it. With Darnold starting all 16 games, the Vikes are 14-2. Darnold has completed 68% of his passes for a rating of 106.4, far and away the best of his NFL career. To hear his teammates tell it, the 27-year-old quarterback is the reason they are where they are.
"He's playing quarterback at a very, very high level, and has been for the majority of the season," said Kevin O'Connell, Minnesota’s head coach. “You can tell by the locker room. You can tell by the way I call plays.”
Again — Darnold came into this season with a 21-35 career record as an NFL starter. But sometimes we confuse the quarterback with the franchise to which he’s been assigned.
Baker Mayfield is having a moment, and Mayfield would be pretty quick to agree that where one lands as a player matters a bit. Here’s a QB who appeared to be wadded up and tossed after some rough, draining years in Cleveland, and it took him a few more stops (the Panthers, the Rams) before he found the right landing place in Tampa.
Now, two years in, it’s hard to imagine the Bucs doing much of anything without Mayfield, who has thrown for 39 touchdowns this season. He’s not a perfect quarterback and they’re not a perfect team, but at 9-7 after a 48-14 thrashing of Carolina in which Mayfield threw for five touchdowns with just five incompletions, Tampa Bay needs only to beat New Orleans next week to make the playoffs for the second year in a row with Mayfield in the saddle.
And look at the NFL’s pass-yardage leaderboard. It’s a collection of guys once cast off — or, for that matter, cast off more than once. There’s Geno Smith, and Jared Goff, and of course Darnold and Mayfield. The league’s more easily acknowledged stars are up there, too, like Jackson and Allen and Burrow and Mahomes — but they’re supposed to be producing.
These other guys? They came out of the dark of night.
There may be no overarching message here; after all, somebody’s got to be the passing leader every season. On the other hand, if I were, say, Daniel Jones, I might not be too quick to assume that my career has cratered simply because a bad team ejected me.
One might say the same for Justin Fields, trying to re-set his career after shuddering through years of Chicago Bears football. If I’m Drake Maye, a rookie suffering through the Patriots’ implosion, I look at Mayfield and Darnold and understand that I am in the midst of a career arc, not stuck in a dead-end job.
We’ve discussed this before, but the hard truth is that a lot of good young quarterbacks wind up on terrible teams that can neither teach them nor protect them, because it’s the crappy teams that draft highest. You get paid, but you also can get lost, and that is how many, many QB careers have begun.
They don’t have to end that way. The Vikings’ players just put Sam Darnold on their shoulders — and they haven’t even won anything ultimate yet. But one thing they’re already sure of is that Darnold wasn’t cooked, after all. He was just a pro looking for a fit, and a moment. He got both. It can happen.