In the biggest game of his career, Sam Darnold delivered his finest performance.

Darnold threw for 346 yards and three touchdown passes and played turnover-free ball in Seattle’s 31-27 win over the Rams, vaulting the Seahawks into Super Bowl LX on Feb. 9 against the New England Patriots.

“You can’t talk about the game without talking about our quarterback,” Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald said. “I mean he just shut a lot of people up tonight, so I’m really happy for him.”

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.worldOP
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    2 months ago

    It’s wild to me, after his early career, that we have to now grudgingly concede that maybe Sam Darnold’s pretty good.

    Are there any Seattle fans on this sub-lemmy? Is he actually this good or did they just build a good team around him?

    • dhork@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Whenever an ex-Jet sees success somewhere else, I think there is an obvious explanation why we didn’t see that success earlier…

        • slingstone@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          His time with the Panthers was just another Jets situation. Remember, they had no idea how to win with Mayfield, then he immediately goes to the Rams and turns heads in a single game at the end of the season.

    • IWW4@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      No one wins a conference championship game unless it is a very good team.

      Seattle is good all around.

    • Tujio@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I’m gonna say that he’s actually pretty good. He does the easy stuff perfectly pretty much every time. He does the hard stuff perfectly most of the time. He does the impossible stuff sometimes.

      His problem is that he can get rattled. Especially when facing sustained pressure. Our O-line has been good enough to mostly avoid that.

    • Paradachshund@lemmy.today
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      2 months ago

      I am. I think he’s really come into his own over the course of the season actually. His passing looked really good from the start, but it got us into trouble, too. He had tons of interceptions early on because he would try these bullet passes into dangerous territory, or wouldn’t give up plays to a fault.

      He’s cleaned that up a lot now, and in this game specifically there were some opportunities where he let a doomed play die instead of trying to make the impossible happen. I think earlier in the season he wouldn’t have handled it as well, and would probably have made a risky play.

      Probably the biggest weakness I see in him is lack of a run game. He actually had a good run this game, but he hasn’t done much in that regard. We’ve had some strong running QBs in the past, so it feels really different without that in the back pocket.