Sam Darnold\u2019s redemptive rise began before he joined the Seahawks last year, but the quarterback hit new heights in the last few weeks. <\/p>\n
An overtime win over the Rams in Week 16 and a Week 18 wipeout of the 49ers made Seattle the NFC West champs before a rout of the 49ers sent them to the NFC Championship Game against those same Rams. Darnold dealt with an oblique injury all week, but went 25-of-36 for 346 yards and three touchdowns in a 31-27 win that will go down as his finest NFL hour. <\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t take long for a reminder of his earlier struggles to surface, however. Darnold began his career as the second overall pick by the Jets in 2018 and the lasting memory of his three years with the team was a four-interception game against the Patriots on a Monday night in 2019. Darnold wore a microphone for that game and was captured telling coaches he was \u201cseeing ghosts\u201d on the field during the 33-0 loss. <\/p>\n
During Sunday\u2019s postgame press conference, Darnold was asked about the journey from that point to facing the Patriots again in Super Bowl LX. <\/p>\n
\u201cI almost forgot about it, so thanks. No, you\u2019re good,\u201d Darnold said, via a transcript from the team. \u201cI think for me, there was a lot that I didn\u2019t know back then, so I\u2019m just going to continue to learn and grow in this great game. There is a lot of stuff that I can get better from today even. I feel like I missed some throws out there that I shouldn\u2019t miss. There were some things offensively that I feel like we can do better. So we\u2019re always looking to get better. I\u2019m always looking to get better. That\u2019s the great part about this game is you win an NFC Championship and you win games throughout the season, but there is always ways that you can look to get better.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n No one was predicting trips to the Super Bowl for Darnold when he was melting down against New England or when he was struggling with the Panthers, but the door opened for him with the Vikings last year. A late-season swoon marred that comeback, but Darnold kept getting better in Seattle and he could finish his improbable career reinvention at Levi\u2019s Stadium in two weeks. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Darnold\u2019s redemptive rise began before he joined the Seahawks last year, but the quarterback hit new heights…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":430981,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-430980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}