Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I really hope we get more than one good game in the next round of the NFL playoffs.
In today’s SI:AM:
🐏 Rams moving on
🤠 Cowboys candidates
😈 Duke’s hot streak
He just cost himself a lot of money
If that was the end of Sam Darnold’s tenure with the Minnesota Vikings, he went out with a thud.
The Vikings were eliminated from the playoffs on Monday night with a 27–9 loss to the Los Angeles Rams, bringing a surprisingly successful season to a disappointing end.
Darnold struggled for the second game in a row, completing 25 of 40 pass attempts for 245 yards with one touchdown and one interception. Worst of all, he was sacked nine times, tying the record for sacks taken in a playoff game. One of those sacks was a strip sack, with the Rams’ Jared Verse returning the fumble 57 yards for a touchdown.
“Clearly just didn’t play good enough the last couple weeks,” Darnold said. “Just, like I said, left too many throws out there that I would usually make and gotta take better care of the football, today especially.”
Darnold had been the unexpected engine of Minnesota’s offensive success this season, stepping into the starting role after rookie first-round pick J.J. McCarthy went down with a season-ending knee injury in training camp. Darnold’s career had stagnated after stints as the backup with the Carolina Panthers and San Francisco 49ers. He appeared destined to bounce around the league as a backup for the rest of his career until he exceeded all expectations this season and led the Vikings to a 14–3 record.
Because he’s on a one-year deal and the Vikings already have their quarterback of the future in McCarthy, Darnold always seemed certain to hit the free agent market after just one year in Minnesota. Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell sure sounded like he wasn’t expecting Darnold back when he spoke about his quarterback on Monday night. Based on his play in the first 16 games of the season, Darnold was in line to earn a healthy payday this offseason But in the final two games, Darnold looked more like the player who the New York Jets gave up on three years after taking him with the No. 3 pick in the draft.
The Vikings could have earned the No. 1 seed in the NFC and a first-round bye if they beat the Detroit Lions on the final day of the regular season, but Darnold had perhaps his worst game of the season (166 passing yards on 18-of-41 passing with no touchdowns) in a 31–9 blowout loss. That, combined with the egg he laid in his first career playoff start, could prove costly for Darnold.
A quarterback-needy team like the New York Giants or Las Vegas Raiders might have been willing to pay handsomely for the version of Darnold we saw in the first 17 weeks of the season. It isn’t often that a 27-year-old Pro Bowl quarterback hits the open market after leading a team to a 14–2 start. While Darnold will still be the best quarterback on the free-agent market, his lousy end to the season will make teams pause before opening their checkbooks.
Darnold was the worst version of himself on Monday night, showing the troublesome combination of indecisiveness and poor decisionmaking that plagued him at previous stops. The interception came when he telegraphed a pass to a blanketed receiver, and it wasn’t the only pass he forced into coverage. The offensive line certainly deserves part of the blame any time a quarterback gets taken down nine times, but Darnold is responsible for his fair share of those sacks. On multiple occasions he simply held onto the ball for far too long.
Hoecht throws up the "LA" after the Rams latest sack
— NFL (@NFL) January 14, 2025
📺: #MINvsLAR on ESPN/ABC
📱: Stream on @NFLPlus and ESPN+ pic.twitter.com/iWM1Pofp0U
Darnold had a great season for Minnesota—potentially a career-saving season. Taken as a whole, his performance should be good enough to earn him a starting job in 2025. Unfortunately for him, though, his last two games were a reminder that he still has plenty of flaws.
The best of Sports Illustrated
- Gilberto Manzano broke down the Rams’ thorough win over the Vikings and how the team was able to stay focused amid the wildfire crisis that forced the game to be moved.
- Sam Darnold wasn’t the only quarterback whose perception changed drastically during the wild-card round, Manzano writes.
- Albert Breer looks forward to the divisional round with 10 story lines to keep an eye on this weekend.
- Conor Orr put together a list of 13 potential candidates for the now-open Cowboys head coaching job. (Yes, Deion Sanders is on there.)
- The Duke men’s basketball team is riding a 10-game win streak after a so-so start to the season. Kevin Sweeney has more on how the Blue Devils turned things around after dropping two big games in November.
- Notre Dame and Ohio State have one thing in common as they prepare for next week’s national title game: They both have losses that would have knocked them out of the playoff in recent years. Pat Forde looks at how each team rebounded from their biggest disappointments of the season to get to this point.
- Japanese pitcher Roki Sasaki has reportedly narrowed his list of teams as a decision is expected this week.
The top five…
… things I saw last night:
5. Matthew Stafford’s perfect back-shoulder throw to Cooper Kupp.
4. Devin Vassell’s big dunk right on Anthony Davis’s head.
3. Jared Verse’s fumble return for a touchdown.
2. Sam Reinhart slicing through three defenders for a short-handed goal.
1. Back-to-back threes by Malik Beasley to seal the Pistons’ win over the Knicks at the Garden.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Sam Darnold Turned Into a Pumpkin.