Sam Darnold 2026 Season Preview — what repeats, what doesn't | Muffed

Sam Darnold started all seventeen games for the team that won the Super Bowl, threw for four thousand forty-eight yards — and drafts treat him like a backup plan: quarterback twenty-two, pick one-thirty-five. The market isn't disrespecting the ring. It's pricing eight seasons of evidence over one.

The season: seventeen starts, a sixty-eight percent completion rate — three hundred twenty-three of four hundred seventy-seven — for four thousand forty-eight yards, twenty-five touchdowns and fourteen picks, with under a hundred rushing yards all year. On quarterback scoring — standard four-point passing, same thing as Half-PPR for quarterbacks — that's thirteen-point-eight points a game, twenty-fourth among qualifiers, fourteenth in total points because he answered the bell all seventeen weeks. Seattle went fourteen and three, took the NFC's top seed, and won it all; the club's February recap and every national outlet counted the rest — a Pro Bowl nod included, per his player page.

The career explains the price better than the parade did. Nine seasons in: twelve-nine, fourteen-six, eleven-two, thirteen-one as a young Jet and Panther, a lost stretch, then the outlier — eighteen-one a game in Minnesota in twenty-twenty-four — and now thirteen-eight in Seattle. One season out of eight above fifteen points a game. The Minnesota year is the ceiling argument; everything else is the base.

The pattern read is quick, and it's the quiet kind. His fantasy profile is pure pocket: four percent of his scoring came from rushing, so the rushing-floor rule that protects the position's top prices has nothing to hold onto here — and its warning half is the relevant half: spike seasons from pocket passers are the ones that don't repeat. Our library prices continuation, and continuation says the thirteens, not the eighteen.

[[SITUATION]]

What's new is the man calling it. Klint Kubiak parlayed the title into the Raiders' head job in February, and Seattle promoted from within its coaching tree: Brian Fleury, hired February nineteenth — a first-time play-caller whose stated goal, per NFL.com, is to, quote, maintain the offense. Darnold's June assessment, per the team site: not much of a transition, a couple different wrinkles, and a coordinator whose command has been, quote, incredible. The pieces mostly return: Jaxon Smith-Njigba — the league's reigning Offensive Player of the Year, per the team's February awards coverage — Cooper Kupp retained, Rashid Shaheed re-signed for three years in March. The backfield is the reshuffle: Kenneth Walker left for Kansas City in free agency, Zach Charbonnet rehabs a January ACL, and Seattle spent the thirty-second pick on Jadarian Price. Contract mechanics say the team already voted: his fifteen-million-dollar roster bonus for this season vested in February, per ESPN, and there's no extension by front-office policy, per Seattle beat reporting.

The price: QB22 at pick one-thirty-five for the twenty-fourth quarterback by rate and fourteenth by total — the market is paying his rate stats and giving the durability away free. [pause] Our verdict: no call. Eight years of a player's own base rate beats one confetti-covered outlier, and the price sits exactly on the base. The caveat, both ways: continuity is real — same receivers, same scheme by design — so the floor is sturdier than a typical QB22; and if the Minnesota version ever reappears behind this roster, it won't cost pick one-thirty-five for long.

Watch the completion rate through September — his sixty-eight percent was the profile's engine — and how often Seattle asks him to throw past thirty attempts, because the run game's churn is the one variable the continuity plan didn't keep. [[CLOSE]] If he's one of your guys, this show exists for your whole roster — every player, every week, all season.