Sam Darnold 'going back to Cali' completes full-circle journey of a career rebuilt from the ashes

SEATTLE — By the time the locker room opened Sunday night, Sam Darnold was leading a parade of joy inside a cloud of cigar smoke.

Hug. Cigar. Hand slap. Photo. Cigar. George Halas Trophy. More photos. More cigar.

Overhead, speakers very deliberately boomed Notorious B.I.G.’s “Going Back to Cali,” providing a soundtrack to some career symmetry for the Seattle Seahawks quarterback. He’d just played arguably the game of his life — inarguably in the biggest moment of NFL career. Seattle had beaten the Los Angeles Rams 31-27, salting the victory away with some key completions by Darnold late in the fourth quarter. Now he was heading to the Super Bowl as an NFC title winner, taking the game’s biggest stage on Feb. 8 in Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.

Sam Darnold is going back to Cali.

Where he starred at San Clemente High School. Where he became a coveted NFL Draft prospect at the University of Southern California. And lest anyone forget, where his pro football career was rebuilt from ashes on a San Francisco 49ers practice field that sits next to Levi’s Stadium. This is what Sunday’s NFC title win has delivered to Darnold: A chance to complete a football circle and then put that circle on his finger in the form of a Super Bowl ring — representing his rise at USC, his fall with the New York Jets and Carolina Panthers, and his career resuscitation as a 49ers backup and then starring turns with the Minnesota Vikings and Seattle Seahawks.

It’s the kind of journey that seemed to have the Seahawks enjoying both the Super Bowl berth distinctly for themselves, but also very much collectively for Darnold. Largely because the quarterback’s return from the football abyss has continually been dogged with criticism that he couldn’t win big games. Even heading into the NFC championship, doubters pointed to a steamrolling 41-6 divisional round win over the San Francisco 49ers and lamented that Darnold hadn’t carried the load. He threw only 17 passes in that game, which reduced Darnold’s contribution to a backhanded slap from critics: He didn’t win the game for Seattle. He simply got out of the way and didn’t screw it up.

That bothered Seattle’s players. It bothered the Seahawks coaches. Then came Sunday, when he not only threw for 346 yards and three touchdowns, but was also relied upon by the coaching staff to make plays throwing — when Seattle easily could have run the ball exclusively and burned clock, leaning on the defense to deliver the win.

This after Darnold threw six interceptions against two touchdowns in a pair of regular season games against the Rams, which resulted in a 21-19 loss in Week 11 and a 38-37 overtime win in Week 16. In those two games, Next Gen Stats noted that Darnold had thrown zero touchdowns and three of his six interceptions when he was under pressure. On Sunday, he completely turned that stat inside out, throwing all three of his touchdowns under pressure — which is a new career high — against zero interceptions.

“Can’t talk about the game without talking about our quarterback,” Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald said. “He shut a lot of people up tonight, so I’m really happy for him. … Every time they went and scored again, he came back. He made some big-time throws on third down. The two-minute drive, the four-minute drive. The guy barely practiced all week. I’m just really happy for him. He deserves it. He’s just been a rock for us all year.”

This wasn’t coach speak after a win, either. It was one voice in a chorus of praise.

“I’m so happy for him,” wideout Jaxon Smith-Njigba said, sitting across from Darnold in the locker room and nodding in his quarterback’s direction. Later, speaking to reporters from a podium, he went further.

“True leader,” Smith-Njigba said. “True competitor, leader. He led us today. Can’t say enough about Sam, man.”

Added safety Julian Love, “‘You probably just got lucky today’ — that’s what [critics] like to say, right? I have a perspective on Sam because I started my career in New York [with the Giants]. He got a bad rap early, and I think that’s not fitting for who he is as a person or player. He shows it when he works hard. He’s humble about it. He takes no shortcuts in the process. Everyone in the building loves him. He’s just a good guy. … All that criticism is not warranted. He showed up when it mattered and he won us a game today.”

Love’s context of having his career overlap with Darnold in New York conjures a memory of his frustrating end with the Jets. A few months after Darnold was traded to the Carolina Panthers in 2021, Jets general manager Joe Douglas met with Yahoo Sports during the ensuing training camp. Revisiting the trade, Douglas continued to describe Darnold’s failure as organizational.

“I still think he’s going to be a good quarterback,” Douglas said at the time.

Two years later, after Darnold had flamed out with the Panthers and then surprisingly won the backup job with the San Francisco 49ers — leading the 49ers to trade Trey Lance — head coach Kyle Shanahan and general manager John Lynch both told Yahoo Sports they believed Darnold could still develop into a successful starting quarterback.

Ultimately, Douglas was right. Shanahan and Lynch were right. Even the Minnesota Vikings were half right, signing Darnold to a one-year bridge starter deal that ultimately cemented him as a legitimate quarterback again — only to let him leave for Seattle last March in free agency.

Now Darnold becomes the first starting quarterback from a celebrated 2018 NFL Draft class to make a Super Bowl — getting there before the Buffalo Bills’ Josh Allen, the Baltimore Ravens’ Lamar Jackson and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ Baker Mayfield. (Darnold was on the 49ers roster in 2023 when San Francisco made the Super Bowl, but he didn’t appear in the game.)

He did it going through the same 49ers regime that helped him reclaim his career, and the same quarterback in Brock Purdy that he backed up in 2023. He did it against the Rams, out dueling Matthew Stafford, who is likely to win the league’s MVP award in two weeks. And he did it with an oblique injury that has caused him to miss significant practice time over the last two weeks. So much so, he was asked Sunday if he’d ever practiced less during a full week and still started a game — to which Darnold replied, “I don’t think so.”

In whatever vantage you want to view it, this has been the longest way back to Cali for anyone on the Seattle roster. And the entire Seahawks organization is here for it.

“We’ve got one more to go, but for him to overcome what he has to overcome, I’m rolling with Sam all day,” Smith-Njigba said. “We believe in him. This building believe in him. This city believe in him. It’s awesome to run out on the field with him.”

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