In a Seattle Seahawks uniform on Thursday, Sam Darnold did something he was unable to do when he was a member of the Minnesota Vikings last season: conquer the Los Angeles Rams.
Darnold had some moments to forget during Thursday's primetime matchup, but he made the plays when it mattered the most in the game, and it eventually resulted in the Seahawks leaving the field as the No. 1 seed in the NFC after getting a 38-37 overtime win over the Rams.
Any Vikings fans who stayed up late enough to watch Darnold lead Seattle's offense on a nine-play, 65-yard game-winning drive probably spent at least half a second wondering how Minnesota's 2025 season would be going right now if he were still starting under center for the purple and gold.
Still too early for Minnesota Vikings to feel regret about Sam Darnold's success with Seattle Seahawks
As well as Darnold has been playing for the Seahawks this year, it's still too soon for the Vikings to feel like they made the wrong decision to let him walk and move forward with J.J. McCarthy as the team's starting quarterback this season.
For starters, re-signing Darnold earlier this year wouldn't have guaranteed a repeat of Minnesota's 2024 season when they finished 14-3, especially since the roster would look totally different.
To bring back Darnold this year, the Vikings would've either needed to place the franchise tag on him, which would've taken up around $40.2 million of the team's 2025 salary cap, or sign him to a new multi-year contract equal to or greater than the three-year, $100.5 million deal he received from Seattle.
As good as Darnold was for Minnesota in 2024, they were never going to be okay with paying him over $40 million this season, and it's hard to blame them for not wanting to commit to a multi-year contract for a guy who was declared a colossal bust before finally figuring things out with the Vikings in his seventh NFL season.
After selecting McCarthy in the first round of the 2024 NFL Draft, Minnesota set up its roster to be able to spend money in free agency this past offseason. All of those plans likely would've gone out the door if the Vikings re-signed Darnold, and the team would've been left scraping at the bottom of the free-agent barrel to fill important holes on their roster.
Aside from the financial impact that re-signing Darnold would've had on Minnesota this season, his performance has been trending in the wrong direction for the last few weeks, including during Thursday's contest against the Rams.
If not for a Rashid Shaheed punt return and one of the most outrageous two-point conversions in NFL history, Friday's post-game talking points likely would've centered around Darnold throwing two back-breaking interceptions in a Seattle loss.
After beginning the year with a 116.5 passer rating in his first nine starts for the Seahawks, his passer rating has fallen all the way down to 82.0 in his last six games.
Imagine this type of regression taking place with the Vikings this season, and how many of the current talking points would have to do with the team getting robbed by another mid-level quarterback less than two years after parting with Kirk Cousins.
Meanwhile, McCarthy has been trending in the right direction recently as his passer rating has gone up from 65.8 in his first four starts this year to 79.0 in his last four starts under center for Minnesota.
Would it be better to have the expensive quarterback whose performance has declined as the season has gone along, or the 22-year-old signal-caller on a rookie contract who has been making noticeable improvements in the final portion of his first season as a starter in the NFL?
The answer isn't too hard to figure out.
So, listen, it's still too early to make a definitive ruling on whether the Vikings made a mistake this past offseason by picking McCarthy over Darnold.
Until Darnold is literally raising the Vince Lombardi trophy in a sea of confetti, his ceiling as an NFL quarterback will remain lower than what McCarthy's currently is, and that is a big reason why Minnesota felt better about moving forward with its 2024 first-round pick instead of falling under the spell of another retread quarterback.