TWO YEARS AGO, Sam Darnold sat at a small round table in a Hilton ballroom just outside of Las Vegas. Several reporters visited the table he shared with another San Francisco 49ers teammate throughout the week of Super Bowl media availability, but many more maneuvered around it on their way to talk to someone more important. Darnold was just a backup hidden in a maze of dozens of tables. He wasn’t the star anymore, and he had chosen to fade into the background for his own good.

As Darnold sat unbothered at his table, a reporter asked if he had given thought to the best way to develop a quarterback. What had he learned in the six NFL seasons after he left college early and was drafted No. 3 by the New York Jets, saw “ghosts,” got dumped by the Jets and started over twice since? What does a young quarterback need?

“Just consistency in the organization, and trusting, too,” Darnold said in 2024. “If things don’t go well — which, having a rookie quarterback — they’re not all going to be C.J. Stroud. You’re not just going to go out there and ball out. It takes a really special coach and leadership to be able to have trust and keep everything together for at least a couple years. Let the kid grow into his skin, and after a couple years, you kind of know, if everything’s the same and if you have the same people, GM, coaches.”

That combination of consistency and trust was something Darnold, who had four head coaches in his first five seasons, hadn’t known in the NFL up to that point, and wouldn’t have it until he signed a three-year contract to be Seattle’s starting quarterback in March. He was comfortable enough that for the first time, he bought a house.

“You’d like to think patience is the lesson [from Sam’s career],” Seattle offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak said, “but the NFL is not about patience. It’s not a fair league. … Sometimes, you get your tail fired, and then you get to go try somewhere else, and you just make sure that you got better from that last experience. … That’s what Sam’s done.”

The NFL’s draft structure routinely welcomes the most talented young quarterbacks to the worst-run organizations. Their rights are usually controlled by bottom-dwelling teams that lack the patience to figure out how to win, and like clockwork, the coaching staff tasked with developing them is fired. Despite the Jets’ best attempts to develop Darnold, once he left the organization, he strategically pieced together the foundation he had not been afforded at the start of his career.

When then-Niners quarterback coach Brian Griese called Darnold during the early 2023 offseason to recruit him for a reset season as Brock Purdy‘s backup, Griese asked Darnold how he viewed himself coming out of the tough times.

Griese said Darnold answered, “I like who I am.”

“That really cemented for me that he was the right guy,” Griese said. “New York was brutal. … If I had sat down with him and talked with him and he didn’t believe in himself, then I don’t think we would have been interested in San Francisco. So, the fact that he went through what he did, and he came out on the other side with his emotional resilience intact, that gave him a chance.

“What he was seeing on his reads and how he was supposed to play, there was uncertainty there, and that uncertainty is a death sentence for quarterbacks. But he never lost confidence in himself.”

Although Seattle’s offense reached the end zone only once, Darnold’s escapability was the X factor for the offense in the Seahawks’ 29-13 win Sunday night. He dodged and spun out of pressure from the New England Patriots‘ defense multiple times.

Those who know Darnold well say he isn’t motivated to prove the haters wrong, but to prove his teammates and family right. He found that trust and consistency that he said is crucial for quarterback development. He was a Super Bowl-losing backup quarterback then, and now he’s a Super Bowl champion.

WHEN DARNOLD’S FORMER coaches and teammates are asked to describe him, the same word continues to come up: resilient.

Darnold’s private quarterback coach, Jordan Palmer, who played seven years in the NFL, said that Darnold’s resiliency is the reason he has resurrected his career.

Quarterbacks who play through physical injuries are typically considered the toughest, Palmer said, but “I actually don’t think that’s hard.”

“Going through what Sam went through for four or five years, not all these tough guys that can take a hit can live through that. Sam’s one of the toughest quarterbacks I’ve ever been around, and it has nothing to do with his physical toughness.”

Palmer thinks Darnold first started improving in 2022, during his second season in Carolina, which gave up a second-round pick in a trade for him despite three subpar seasons with the Jets. Darnold lost the QB competition to Baker Mayfield and started the season on injured reserve because of an ankle sprain. Coach Matt Rhule was fired, and then Darnold came back from injury to go 4-2 as the Panthers’ starting quarterback for the final six games of the season, and kept Carolina in the hunt for the NFC South title.

Carolina’s offensive coordinator at the time was Ben McAdoo, who, despite now working for the Super Bowl rival Patriots, still considers himself “a big fan of Sam.”

Darnold, then in his fifth season, “was still a raw player in a lot of ways,” McAdoo said. He worked with him on tying his feet to his eyes, so that Darnold could eliminate the hesitancy in his progressions and let his footwork tell him when to move off his first read.

“We tried to break the feet down, and build him back up,” McAdoo said. “Spend a little more time on fundamentals than he did in the past.”

McAdoo said Darnold proved to him that he could reclaim his career during two plays in Carolina’s Week 17 game at Tampa, with the NFC South title on the line. The Panthers lost the game, but Darnold threw a touchdown pass to receiver DJ Moore on third down from the Buccaneers’ 24-yard-line, a pass that McAdoo said was a checkdown off his first read. And later in the red zone again on third down, Darnold made “a tremendous read” to find Shi Smith, his third option, on a dig route for another touchdown.

“Everything happens faster in the red zone,” McAdoo said. “It’s a tough read and a long way to go to get through that progression, and he was on it. I was like, ‘This guy has a chance!'”

After that 2022 season, Darnold became a free agent. McAdoo said he hoped Carolina would hire interim head coach Steve Wilks permanently and re-sign Darnold to keep building off the progress McAdoo had seen, but Carolina moved on from both.

“A lot of the time, the quarterback takes the blame, and the quarterback gets the blame,” said backup quarterback P.J.Walker, who also started games for Carolina that season. “But not a lot of things was on Sam specifically. That situation was tough. It never was a mesh of offense, defense and special teams all playing well. You never could put it all together.”

AS SAN FRANCISCO’S QBs coach, Griese studied all the free agent quarterbacks ahead of the 2023 offseason. It didn’t take him long to realize Darnold was “head and shoulders above” the rest of the class, he said, and “physically, one of the top two or three throwers of the ball in the league.”

Starting quarterback Brock Purdy was coming off elbow surgery, and the team wasn’t certain when he’d be ready to play, so the 49ers needed a “bona fide” backup.

“As I started digging into his tape, I saw that there was not a whole lot of foundation and structure that he had been given in his first three, four years in the league,” Griese said. “I knew that he was made of the right stuff. I knew he had the right talent. It was just a matter of, could we convince him to come to San Francisco to be a backup?”

Griese and Palmer said Darnold had multiple opportunities with other teams that offseason to compete for starting jobs, but chose San Francisco to take a year to learn from Kyle Shanahan instead.

“He takes a huge pay cut to go there,” Palmer said. “Myself, his agent, a couple of us were big on, you need a redshirt year. It’s like going to Harvard, or night school, you need to go sit in a room with [Kyle] Shanahan.”

Griese said he was honest with Darnold during his recruiting call about what he needed to improve. Darnold turned the ball over — a lot. He threw 55 interceptions and fumbled 35 times in 46 games during his first five seasons.

“He was erratic at times,” Griese said, “and it’s impossible to play this position in the NFL when you have any uncertainty or any doubt in your mind. I could see that on the tape, and we talked about that, and he confirmed it.”

Griese’s pitch was convincing: The Niners’ coaching staff and Shanahan’s offensive scheme could help Darnold find confidence in what he was seeing on the field.

“I told him that he needed to refocus and take more of a 30,000-foot view of where he was in his journey,” Griese said. “To understand what his strengths were and to understand the situations that he had been in, and how we could create a foundation underneath him that was solid enough that he could see how good a player he could be. That’s what he bought into.”

Even though he was headed into his sixth season, he was only 26 years old, and the Niners’ staff still thought he had room to grow.

“He just understood, I got another 10 plus years to play, and I want to be able to be good for a long time. That was awesome, just so rare, for any player,” a source close to the Niners said.

In the Niners’ first QB meeting during the offseason program, Griese said he asked the QBs why they play. When it was Darnold’s turn, Griese said he talked about his relationships with his teammates during his Jets career and how hard it was to come back into the locker room week after week after losing games. “When you work your ass off as hard as you possibly can, and you don’t see progress and then the scaffolding around you starts to fade and crumble and crash,” Griese said.

Seattle run game coordinator Rick Dennison was the Jets’ offensive line coach during Darnold’s rookie season in 2018. During Super Bowl media availability in San Jose, California, he described that year like this: “Whereas teams figure out how to win, we figured out how to lose.”

Darnold said during a Super Bowl week news conference that his Jets era taught him to “flush bad plays, flush bad games.”

“Early in my career, I was really hard on myself,” he said. “After a bad rep or a bad practice, I would let it affect my attitude a little bit. … It’s football, we’re not always going to be perfect. Jerry Rice has a quote that he never had a perfect practice or a perfect game.”

Darnold’s detailing of his Jets trials was an important perspective for Purdy to hear, Griese says, because the second-year starter and last pick of the 2022 draft wore rose-colored glasses. Purdy started as a rookie midseason after Jimmy Garoppolo got hurt, played well right away and in his first season, the Niners made it to the NFC Championship Game.

“But we have unbelievable support systems around him from an organization standpoint,” Griese says. “It’s easy for a young player to think, ‘Oh, this is how it should always go.'”

Griese said the Niners staff saw Darnold’s potential immediately during OTAs and training camp, particularly Darnold’s “underrated” athleticism.

“His ability to roll left and to get his body in position to make throws while he’s rolling against his throwing arm was really special,” Griese says. “When you see him on these bootlegs, which Klint [Kubiak] loves to run to the left with Sam, his ability to contort his body is not natural. He makes it look easy.”

Darnold only played one game that season, a meaningless Week 18 matchup against a Los Angeles Rams team that was also resting its starters, but he’d shown enough that season in his support role that multiple sources said Niners assistant general manager Adam Peters, who was hired that January as the Washington Commanders general manager, tried hard to sign Darnold with his new club.

But the Commanders had the No. 2 overall pick in 2024 and would be drafting a quarterback, so Darnold chose to sign a one-year deal with the Vikings, who also would be drafting a quarterback, but later in the first round.

Then, rookie J.J. McCarthy tore his meniscus during the preseason and Darnold started the entire season, taking the Vikings to a playoff berth and his first postseason appearance.

Darnold and the Vikings won 14 games, but lost the last game of the regular season at Detroit with a playoff bye at stake. The next week, Minnesota exited the playoffs in the wild-card beatdown at the hands of the Rams, who sacked Darnold nine times.

“A lot was put on his shoulders to really lead the team to 14 wins,” then-Vikings backup quarterback Nick Mullens says. “And now that he’s got a complete football [team], I’m not totally surprised. The run game is really good in Seattle.”

The back-to-back losses in the most important games of the season tested the Vikings’ trust in Darnold, as many analysts began another round of questioning whether Darnold could ever win a big game.

“It was not only Sam’s fault,” Mullens says. “To say that two weeks before those games, he was a top desired, top-dollar free agent, and then he plays two bad games after winning 14, and then he’s, a ‘I don’t know if he truly is the guy or not.’ To go from that high to that low, I think, is an unfair judgment.”

Minnesota let Darnold leave after his career year and decided to roll with McCarthy for 2025. Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell said Darnold had “​​earned the right” to explore free agency.

“Man, to win 14 games in the NFL and not know if you’re good enough?” Mullens says. “That’s brutal. Like, what do you want, undefeated?”

ON SATURDAY NIGHT before each game, Darnold, Seattle backup quarterback Drew Lock and QB3 Jalen Milroe get together at a table in the team hotel ballroom about an hour before the team dinner opens. The three quarterbacks review each play on the call sheet together, especially the ones that aren’t printed on the wristband.

“I’ll call it out to him,” Lock says. “He’ll call it back to me, and we’ll talk through all of our cans and alerts. I would vouch for any quarterback to do it.”

The group Saturday night study session is new to Lock. Before this season with Darnold, Lock used to study on his own at home in the afternoon before reporting to the team hotel.

Wide receiver Cooper Kupp comes an hour early too, and brings the quarterbacks each an order of pho, the Vietnamese soup dish. Kupp is responsible for finding the pho spot for each road trip, and the group ranks and reviews Kupp’s choices like a trio of food critics after they’ve finished reviewing the call sheet.

“We get another dinner together,” Lock says. “It’s also good because a lot of guys get there early and they see you working, putting a little extra time in.”

Griese said Darnold picked up the QB group study habit from Purdy’s preparation during his year in San Francisco, and he has taken it with him since.

“What does a guy that has been in the league five years and experienced what [Sam] has, have to learn from a second-year player?” Griese says. “But Sam did that.”

In March, Seattle general manager John Schneider traded quarterback Geno Smith to the Raiders and signed Darnold in free agency, a move that wasn’t unanimously seen as an upgrade.

“All I knew is that people were writing him off,” said Seattle linebacker Ernest Jones IV, after Seattle won the NFC title game. “Once he signed to us, we were immediately supposed to be worse than we were the year before.”

Jones — and many of his teammates — have taken on the role of Darnold defender. Kupp wore an “I <3 Sam Darnold” shirt to a Super Bowl media availability. When Darnold threw four interceptions against the Rams in Week 11, Jones dropped an F-bomb to let everyone know how serious he was about Darnold.

“Sam’s been balling,” Jones said postgame. “If we want to try to define Sam by this game, Sam’s had us in every f—ing game. So, for him to sit there and say, ‘That’s my fault,’ no it’s not.

When Darnold’s high school football coach Jaime Ortiz saw the clip of Jones IV, he mailed him a San Clemente Tritons football T-shirt with a note that said, “Thanks for having Sam’s back.”

“Watching a guy stand up for Sam, it was good to see, because Sam takes ownership when his team doesn’t do well,” Ortiz said.

“He’s my QB, you don’t put hands on my QB,” Jones said during Super Bowl week. “From the first day we met him, regardless of what he was labeled as before he got here, he got a clean slate with us and he has shown and proved why we believe he would get us to this point.”

On the Thursday ahead of Seattle’s first playoff game against San Francisco, Darnold injured his left oblique at practice. Lock says he didn’t throw again until the game, and Macdonald said he barely practiced the following week ahead of Seattle’s NFC Championship Game win against the Rams when he threw for three touchdowns and 346 yards. He was limited in eight practices until the Thursday before the Super Bowl.

Lock has had a similar oblique injury, so he has an appreciation for what Darnold has been playing through.

“You feel it in everything you do,” Lock says. “Especially throwing. We were both front side obliques, so pulling into it, turning into it, it’s gnarly.”

Lock said his own oblique injury was bad enough that he took a Toradol shot on gameday even though he was a backup — just in case he had to play. “Those obliques are nothing to mess with.”

Because Darnold has played well through the injury and downplayed it publicly, Lock said no one outside the team is appreciating what Darnold has done in the last two games before the Super Bowl. “You can tell how good Sam is mechanically, to be able to go out, trick your brain into thinking nothing’s going on, and still be able to deliver the football,” Lock says. “It’s extremely hard.”

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Sam Darnold throws the 1st TD of Super Bowl LX to AJ Barner

Sam Darnold finds AJ Barner in the end zone for a 16-yard Seahawks touchdown.

THE VIKINGS FIRED general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah the Friday after Darnold went toe-for-toe with Matthew Stafford and led his team to a Super Bowl appearance. The suspiciously late timing of the firing, after Adofo-Mensah spent the week at the Senior Bowl, made it impossible not to connect the dots with Darnold’s success for another club. Since Adofo-Mensah’s firing, several Vikings players, including receiver Justin Jefferson, have done press tours singing Darnold’s praises and wishing he were still their quarterback.

“I definitely feel like we would have done better [with Darnold],” Jefferson told USA Today.

“I felt like we had everything we needed [last year],” Vikings running back Aaron Jones said on the Nightcap podcast. “But we are not GMs, that’s outside of us. When you got a group of guys behind a QB, and he wants to stay somewhere, I think you should try to make it work.”

Jamal Adams, who played with Darnold his first two seasons in New York, called Minnesota’s decision a “headscratcher.”

“Why would you let him go?” he told ESPN.

And former Jets GM Mike Maccagnan told ESPN, “You would think, after winning 14 games, they would’ve figured out a way to hold on to him. I personally would’ve done that. At the end of the day, you can’t have enough good quarterbacks.”

There’s a lesson in Darnold’s career for both clubs and quarterbacks, if they’re open to receive it.

“You can’t write him off right away,” says the source close to the Niners. “The Baker Mayfields and Sam Darnolds and those guys that have that confidence, the belief in themselves and the mental toughness. If they have the talent, don’t give up on them.”

“It’s easy to say, this guy’s a bust,” says the same source close to the Niners. But the whole environment around him plays into why he didn’t have initial success.”

Darnold didn’t let the turbulent situations doom or define him. He looked inward, had hard conversations with the people who supported him and came to tough conclusions. Eight seasons later, he saved himself by finding patience in his own development and trust that his unconventional choices would work.

It’s not a coincidence that Mac Jones, another first-round pick (2021) and “bust” who is represented by the same agency as Darnold, is following the same playbook as a Niners backup quarterback.

And for those who are still unconvinced, Darnold isn’t bothered, and his Darnold defenders know there’s more to come.

“This is not out of nowhere,” Palmer says. “It started out his last year in Carolina. It led into what he did every day in practice. You talk to the Niners guys off the record, they’re like, yeah, we thought this would happen. We watched him every single day in practice. Everyone was trying to get Sam that year, and he chose the Vikings, and then Kevin O’Connell gets [NFL] Coach of the Year and gets all the credit. How about some credit for Sam?”

“This is a repeatable pattern. Wait until you see how good the Seahawks are going to be in three years when he’s not learning the system like he did all offseason. Anybody who thinks it all came together this year, no, this is how dynasties start.”

–ESPN Jets reporter Rich Cimini contributed to this story.