Super Bowl 2026: Sam Darnold lives up to Jets' hype at last, just with the Seattle Seahawks instead

 SANTA CLARA, Calif. — When Sam Darnold won his first start with the Jets, it was hard to hide the excitement he brought to the franchise. They had just traded up and taken him with the third overall pick, and it seemed as if they finally had their guy. The fan base and the organization were tickled about what was to come.

But the head coach at the time, Todd Bowles, wanted to pump the brakes on that enthusiasm just a bit. A few days later, he reminded everyone that it was just one start, one game, and that the true measure of the player would have to be written over time.

“I can tell you after about 100 more of them whether we have one or not,” Bowles said.

Sunday, in Super Bowl LX, was Darnold’s 101st career start.

So now everyone can agree. Darnold is a champion.

It didn’t happen with the Jets and Bowles. That experiment fizzled out after Darnold didn’t develop at a brisk enough pace for the next wave of decision-makers to stick with him. And it didn’t happen with the Panthers, the team the Jets traded him to. He got to a Super Bowl with the 49ers but spent the day on the bench as the backup behind Brock Purdy in a loss to Kansas City. Then he led the Vikings to the playoffs but couldn’t get them a postseason win.

It took a fifth team, a fifth opportunity in his eighth season, for Darnold to finally reach the top. His Seahawks beat the Patriots, 29-13, at Levi’s Stadium.

Oh, it also took one of the best all-around teams in the league. It took an offense that was able to lean on running back Kenneth Walker III (27 carries for 135 yards) and a defense that lived up to its “Dark Side” nickname with a smothering effort.

It took a different former Jet to put the points on the board early, too; kicker Jason Myers made four field goals for the first 12 points of the game and added a fifth in the fourth quarter.

This still is a quarterback-fronted league, though, and that means Darnold is the face of this victory. No one will recall that he was a pedestrian 19-for-38 for 202 yards. The details of the game will blur into time, especially given that it was a rather drab one dominated by defenses.

The result will live forever, however. And now, for the rest of his life, no one can doubt Darnold as a quarterback again.

Everyone on the Seahawks will get a ring. Darnold gets something even better: Redemption.

“The only thing that matters is if you believe in yourself,” Darnold said this past week. “That’s really it. I always believed in myself, and I knew I could do this at a high level. That’s what kept me going. I knew at some point an opportunity would arise, but even if it didn’t, I knew that I had done everything I could to become a better player year in and year out.”

He also proved something else beyond his abilities: Good guys can finish first.

That he did this with such class in the face of his many doubters is one of the reasons many Jets fans found themselves rooting for him on Sunday. Playing against the hated Patriots helped with that, too. But Darnold has never bad-mouthed the Jets nor any of his other former organizations. He understood that the arc of his career needed time to develop. He was more patient than any front office in the league when it came to that.

Early on, there was hope that Darnold could be the next Joe Namath, but he turned out to be nothing like Brash Broadway Joe. There were no guarantees in anything he did.

In the end, he wound up doing something Namath never did. Early in the fourth quarter, he threw a touchdown pass, hitting a wide-open AJ Barner for a 16-yard score that made it 19-0. Namath won MVP and immortality in his Super Bowl win, but he never threw a touchdown pass.

“We were really excited that he was available,” Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald said of acquiring Darnold in the offseason. “I felt like it was a great match from when that process started and am really happy that it worked out.”

Darnold’s main task in this game was to not make any costly mistakes, something that in his past was not always a strength.

He began the game brazenly forcing passes into tight coverage with the Patriots defensive backs jumping routes. He did have two missed chances to crack the low-scoring game open early, though. In the second quarter he took a deep shot on a pass for Rashid Shaheed that was broken up; he had Jaxon Smith-Njigba open underneath on the play. Then, just before halftime, he tried to fit a slant pass into Smith-Njigba’s hands in the end zone. The receiver was open, but Darnold’s pass was late and allowed Christian Gonzalez to catch up and deflect it. It wasn’t intercepted, and a play later the Seahawks kicked a field goal, but it could have given them a much more commanding lead.

In the third quarter, he hit a few quick passes and scrambled for a first down with a sweet juke. Still, the Seahawks had to settle for a field goal again and led 12-0.

Then in the fourth, he threw that TD pass that made it 19-0.

Patriots quarterback Drake Maye answered with a touchdown pass of his own to avoid becoming the first team to be shut out in a Super Bowl and keep things interesting, but on the next New England possession, Maye was intercepted by former Giants safety Julian Love. Seattle converted that takeaway into another field goal and a 22-7 lead. A 44-yard interception return by Uchenna Nwosu with 4:27 left sealed the result.

Darnold’s journey is far from over. He’s still only 28 years old. He is younger than Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson. He still has a lot of football ahead of him. He might even have more championship runs in him. Maybe in another 100 starts he’ll be back here, maybe sooner.

It didn’t matter on Sunday, though.

It took longer than the Jets had hoped, longer than the Panthers and 49ers and Vikings could wait, but Darnold lived up to his hype.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.