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Sam Darnold won a Super Bowl with the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday.
But the Jets did the right thing, moving on from him in 2020 after three seasons.
Both things can be true at the same time.
It wasn’t working with the Jets. When you have a QB for three years, and nothing is getting better at the position and with the offense, wherever the blame lies, you gotta try something different.
I really don’t think he was ever taking the Jets to the Super Bowl. The chances of that happening there, the way things were going, were remote.
Darnold needs a certain infrastructure to be a serviceable NFL QB, and he got that the last couple of years, first with Minnesota and then with Seattle.
He needs great defense and special teams, along with a strong running game. I’d throw in an elite head coach as well.
If you give him this landscape, you can win with him.
Just let him throw some complimentary passes, somewhat easy passes, set up by a great play-caller (Kevin O’Connell and Klint Kubiak), with all that other stuff in place, and you can win with him.
Darnold completed 50 percent of his passes in the Super Bowl, which is far from ideal, but with all the ducks lined up perfectly around him – great defense spearheaded a defensive mastermind, Mike Macdonald, great running game spearheaded by Super MVP Kenneth Walker, great special teams (five field goals by Jason Myers), he completed just the right number of passes to compliment fantastic team football.
And Darnold’s only TD pass, a 16-yard pass to AJ Barner, was a great call by Kubiak and the tight end was wide open.
This is why Kubiak is now going to be the Raiders coach.
His play-calling this year for Darnold was spectacular.
Some of these young hot-shot offensive play-callers getting NFL head coaching jobs the last couple of years, do such a fabulous job of making the game easier for the QB – like Liam Coen in Jacksonville for Trevor Lawrence, Ben Johnson in Chicago with Caleb Williams and Kellen Moore in New Orleans with Tyler Shough. In so many games this, it was like Coen, Johnson and Moore were playing Madden in their living rooms. Awesome playing calling, dialing up incredible first reads to make the game easier for young signal-callers, not necessarily QBs who were going to get to their third and fourth reads in the progressions.
Kubiak did this for Darnold in Seattle.
I’m sorry folks, for several reasons, I don’t think this was ever going to happen with the Jets for the kid.
And most of his play during the three years in Florham Park was not very good.
It is what it is.
Whatever organization you are talking about, how many years are you going to go with a signal-caller before you hit the reset button when it’s not working at the most important position in the sport?
Seriously. Three years seemed like that with Darnold and the Jets.
The Jets needed to move on.
Darnold needed to move on.
Congratulations to Darnold, who is a great guy, who always handles himself with class.
He needs QB Utopia to be successful, and that is what Seattle provided him.
However, this perfect storm, where a QB has things laid out so ideally for him, rarely happens.
And it just never felt like it was going to happen for him in New York.
February 9, 2026
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