In the fourth week of the 2016 season, Clay Helton turned his football team over to an 18-year-old freshman. Amid the chaos at Utah’s Rice-Eccles Stadium outside of Southern California, the coach wanted to make sure he was entrusting his future to the right people. Helton saw Sam Darnold’s face mask. “You always look at it through the quarterback’s eyes,” Helton said. “I’m either a deer in the headlights, or I’m looking at you like it’s a workout. He’s always had the attitude, “Don’t worry, Coach, I can do this.” And he was right. He was always like that.”Helton’s statement earlier this NFL season raises important questions for a league that has always struggled to develop quarterbacks. Has Darnold always had it? Why did he lose it? And how did he get it back?
The recapture will not be completed after two weeks. But Darnold’s first two weeks as the Minnesota Vikings’ starting quarterback could be the start of a comeback. Darnold was once drafted third overall in the NFL and twice went undrafted by a franchise in disarray. He is one of the team’s best rushers this young season, leading the Vikings to a 2-0 victory over the Houston Texans on Sunday. On the 27-year-old’s fourth team, Darnold threw for 9.5 yards per attempt (third in the NFL) and had a passer rating of 111.7 (fifth). Pro Football Focus ranks Darnold as the fourth best quarterback in the NFL. He led Minnesota’s offense to Sunday’s 23-17 victory over the NFC champion San Francisco 49ers even after star quarterback Justin Jefferson went down with an injury. Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell, who is also an NFL tight end, got choked up when he started praising Darnold during a press conference Sunday afternoon.
“It’s the amount of work that goes into that position when everybody decides you can’t play,” O’Connell said. “I always believed in him. “It was great to see him do that.”NFL teams understand that their quarterback is their lifeline. They prepare earlier and pay more than other players. But the league does not know how to identify and nurture them. The latest evidence came Monday when Bryce Young, the Carolina Panthers’ 2023 first overall pick, had less than 20 career games. Will Young be the last Panthers player to start before the disastrous franchise deal? Darnold was benched after a 4-2 loss that nearly sent Carolina to the playoffs.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield, a classmate and teammate of Darnold’s in Carolina, had this to say after his defection: “Being a quarterback is hard work, especially for young players, if you’re not surrounded by pieces and you don’t have opportunity to succeed.” Cleveland. “Boys are often talented. He might have brains. “But they don’t have the right opportunities and the right opportunities.”Like Mayfield’s resurgence in Tampa in 2023, Darnold’s early success in 2024 offers hope that there is life after the bust. His career is a collection of ill-considered lessons. He was thrust into the limelight too quickly, coached too poorly, thrust too quickly and out of the limelight for too long. The New York Jets drafted him at 20, set off a whirlwind of poor development with his offensive system, and fired him at 23.
The Panthers acquired Darnold, but saw him as an injury-prone stopgap. Any success was considered temporary. Each fall was considered a confirmation of the previous failure. He sat out halfway through his first season in Carolina and sat out his second. Darnold spent 2023 as a backup for the San Francisco 49ers before the Vikings offered him a one-year, $10 million contract. Received first round pick J.J. McCarthy suffered a knee injury in the offseason. “I’m glad he’s on the road,” said Helton, now the head coach at Georgia Southern. “He appreciates being part of a really good organization, a great coaching staff and great players around him. Sometimes it’s just the right time and the right place. “That’s what happened to that person now.”
I could write a book on the differences between good and bad NFL quarterback situations. “It’s not as simple as Kevin O’Connell and Justin Jefferson, to name five,” said personal trainer Jordan Palmer, who counts Darnold among his many NFL clients. But the Vikings certainly gave Darnold a platform he never had before. He provides support for a strong offensive line to Jefferson’s elite wide receivers. He plays in O’Connell’s fullback system, as does O’Connell’s former boss Sean McVay. We operate a franchise based on a stable and capable infrastructure. Palmer was confident Darnold would make it. This week, he highlighted the essential characteristics of a successful NFL quarterback. In other words, they don’t cut corners in their work. It changes direction every season. Their motives are pure. They have the necessary skills and intelligence. Darnold checked all the boxes.
“It’s not a big group,” Palmer said. “Ikatter of time and place and you get into a situation where you have to do everything you can, and that means you can’t score every game. It’s done. It’s only a matter of time. We see it in Geno Smith. We see it in Baker Mayfield. We’ll see that with Derek Carr.”
