With his five-touchdown performance on Sunday afternoon against the Atlanta Falcons, Sam Darnold has cemented himself as the best story in the National Football League this season. He’s now got 28 touchdown passes, good for third in the National Football League behind Joe Burrow and Lamar Jackson, and he’s led a Minnesota Vikings team that was projected to win no more than five or six games to an 11-2 mark with four games left in the regular season.
Darnold is currently doing this on a one-year, $10 million deal that he signed in March and is set to hit free agency when the new league year starts. With his performance thus far, there have been some suggestions that the Vikings should be looking into negotiating a long-term deal with Darnold, even with J.J. McCarthy waiting in the wings for 2025.
If you’ll indulge me for a moment, allow me to explain why that’s not going to happen.
Now, I want to caveat this by saying that if Sam Darnold does, in fact, lead the Minnesota Vikings to a Super Bowl victory, all bets are off. Name a street after him, put a statue of him up in front of U.S. Bank Stadium, give him and his family free food and drink in every establishment in the Twin Cities area for life, and let him be the quarterback of the Vikings until he doesn’t feel like it anymore. This fan base would be so euphoric that I don’t think anyone would really care.
Outside of that, however, the Vikings have a plan that they’ve been following and they’re going to execute that plan.
This past offseason, from the moment the Vikings chose not to match the contract that Kirk Cousins was offered by the Atlanta Falcons, everyone knew that Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and Kevin O’Connell were going to go out and get “their guy” at quarterback. That’s what they did when they drafted McCarthy higher than the Minnesota Vikings have ever drafted a quarterback before this past April. In order to facilitate the transition from Cousins to McCarthy, they brought in Darnold. I would be shocked if the Vikings’ brass didn’t make it clear to Darnold that this was going to be a one-year engagement.
And Darnold was quite happy to take that opportunity, because this was going to be his big chance to resurrect himself. His career took him to a New York Jets team that was a mess and then on to a Carolina Panthers team that was a mess, too. After a one-year stint of mostly riding the bench in San Francisco, Darnold saw the opportunity to play with more talent than he had ever been surrounded by and, potentially, play himself into a big payday as a result.
He’s earned that payday. He’s earned every penny of it. And if a quarterback-desperate team was willing to give Kirk Cousins, who was coming off of a significant Achilles injury and is now closer to 40 than he is to 30 a contract worth $45 million a year, 27-year-old Darnold is going to be looking at huge numbers.
Which is why the Vikings can’t bring him back.
Over the first few years of the O’Connell/Adofo-Mensah era, the goal has been to clear out a lot of the big contracts that the Vikings had been dealing with at the end of the Rick Spielman/Mike Zimmer era. The Cousins contract was a part of that, as was allowing Danielle Hunter to walk away and sign with the Houston Texans. Cousins and Hunter make up two of the three biggest salary cap hits for the 2024 Minnesota Vikings, and after this year those contracts will be off the books and the purple will be flush with cash to continue building their roster with the much-ballyhooed “rookie quarterback contract” to use to their advantage.
A quarterback who has suddenly played himself into a deal that’s likely going to start with a five as far as annual value/year isn’t going to fit into that equation. Not with the team’s quarterback of the future having gotten a year to learn the Vikings’ system and O’Connell having shown that he can get the best out of just about any situation at the quarterback position. Honestly, the odds are probably higher that the Vikings will give newly-signed Daniel Jones an opportunity to show what he’s learned at the Kevin O’Connell School for Quarterbacks Who Can’t Throw Good and Want To Learn To Do Other Stuff Good, Too.
I mean, at this point, who am I to doubt them if that’s the direction this team goes in?
This is J.J. McCarthy’s team going forward. Sam Darnold will be starting for a different team in 2025. . .again, barring a Vikings’ Super Bowl victory in February. There will be some skepticism as to whether or not Darnold will be able to thrive outside of the framework that the Vikings have set up, but that will be for another team to find out about.
Everyone should be celebrating what Sam Darnold has done this season and what Kevin O’Connell has done to get him there. But it’s probably for the best for Vikings fans not to get too attached to the idea of Darnold being here beyond this season.