You could see what the Patriots were up to from the first drive of the game. They blitzed Sam Darnold without hesitation and instructed the defensive backs to undercut routes as much as possible. A wager was being made: If we make this guy as uncomfortable as possible, eventually the old Sam Darnold will reappear.
It wasn't a bad bet. Yes, Darnold led his Seahawks team to a 14-3 record and then all the way to the Super Bowl, but he also turned the ball over 20 times in the regular season, and last season's playoff meltdown against the Rams was hard to forget. So too were all those infamous seasons with the Jets, when Darnold was fighting for his life and "seeing ghosts." Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel and his staff took all this into account, and reasonably concluded that the best way to win Super Bowl LX was to break Darnold.
For a while it felt like Vrabel's bet might hit. Even as the Seahawks kept chipping in field goals, the game was screaming for a momentum-shifting strip sack or interception. Who better to serve one up than the guy who was defined by such mistakes throughout his first six seasons as a pro, and who was now facing a ferocious defense that had tilted all of its focus towards creating a turnover? The few times the broadcast zoomed in on Darnold's face prior to the snap, you could see his wild eyes darting across the line of scrimmage, and it was fair to wonder if the ghosts were back.
Darnold never lost his nerve. Nobody will tell stories about how he completed 19 of 38 passes for 205 yards and a touchdown, but neither will they be telling stories about how Darnold cracked under the Patriots' pressure. The story of the Seahawks' Super Bowl win belongs to their own incredible defensive performance and Kenneth Walker's casually destructive runs, but it can't be told in full without mentioning how Darnold displayed quiet competence in a desperate situation. Every blitz he avoided, every check-down he completed, every ball wisely tossed out of bounds—all of this eventually sucked the air out of the Patriots' defense. Darnold didn't necessarily punish the Patriots for their aggression (if he'd hit a few wide-open receivers down field, the game would have been even more of a laugher), but he didn't reward them, either. For all that effort the Patriots put into cracking Darnold, he ended the game with zero turnovers and only one sack.
Perhaps this feels like I am damning Darnold with faint praise, but I think this was the ideal way for him to win a Super Bowl. He now is in possession of one of the strangest, most fascinating career arcs in NFL history, and a game like this was the perfect note on which to complete his redemption story. He was a third overall pick who busted in memorable and humiliating fashion, and then he became a regular-season monster who still crumbled when the games actually mattered, and now he's a guy who won a Super Bowl thanks to his resolve.
Darnold would have surely preferred 350 yards and five touchdowns, but what he got was a more satisfying exorcism. Darnold never quite got away from those ghosts—the Patriots put them all over the field on Sunday—but he finally figured out how to look past them. Eventually, they stopped being so scary.
