If we are to take stories first from Sportico's Michael McCann and Robert Raiola and later Forbes' Nathan Goldman as actual factuals, and all involved have made their reputations on knowing the whatabouts and whereabouts of money, Sam Darnold's greatest moment as a professional athlete gave us one answer to the question, "What price glory?"
The answer here is apparently 70 grand. That may seem a relatively small cost, given the reputational boost Darnold has just received for helping to guide the Seattle Seahawks to Super Bowl victory, especially given the fact that his current contract is worth a little over $100 million. But the point of the Sportico and Forbes stories is that, because of California's particularly strident "jock tax," Darnold will pay that much more in taxes to the state that hosted his greatest moment than he got paid for having played in that game. Frankly, there's a mathematical case to be made that he should have tanked the NFC championship game just to keep the money.
The explanations for how and why this particular bill came due are somewhat byzantine, as all tax laws tend to be, but the nut of it is that California's 13.3 percent jock tax on money earned while in the state, when combined with Darnold's salary means, that he will pay roughly $249,000 for the right to make $178,000 based on the eight work days he spent in California preparing for the Big'Un. I mean, Darnold could sell his Super Bowl ring and come out ahead, we suppose, but then he'd end up looking like a worse version of the chump people imagined him to be as a Jet, Panther, Viking, and 49er. In fact, his year playing for San Francisco must have been a total loss leader based on that logic.
But nobody was making that case in 2023 when Darnold was backing up Brock Purdy, because nobody much worried about Darnold at that point. His career as a starter looked to be pretty well at an end, and he was making only $4.5 million on clipboard duty in Santa Clara. Hell, he was probably getting rebates from the state.
Now we don't know how you spend your time at H&R Shoesqueezers or whatever online tax joint you use, but losing $70K a year to work seems an odd business plan—so odd that former NFL quarterback and current WFAN macaw-in-residence Boomer Esiason suggested that the players union should rise up and demand that no more Super Bowls be played in California. This suggestion should play well, since Bowl 61 is going to be played next year in Los Angeles, which by some readings is even more California than San Francisco.
It won't matter, of course, because the league buys into the same logic athletes always do—the trophy is always worth everything you can give, plus a side of brain damage, which makes $70,000 a rounding error in the grand scheme of things. But what seemed at first glance like Esiason going off on some unhinged right-wing rant about the evils of the Golden State is also simply Econ 101—you don't pay to work, you get paid.
NFL owners may push for this inverted pyramid of subsidy in the next CBA, padlocking the gates until the players accept pay to play and using Darnold's experience as its logical leverage. Frankly, you can almost expect Woody Johnson to bring it up in March—"a team as shitty as mine should compensate me for sullying my name, not the other way around," or something to that effect. Just thinking about a salary cap based on limiting how much owners can take in from their own players is its own mental piefight. The union, in its own turn, could try to make Super Bowl paychecks tax-free, which of course would cause the owners colonic paralysis, and who can't see the comedic benefits of that?
But we're getting ahead of ourselves, perhaps, or given the anal-cranial inversion required to make these arguments, simultaneously ahead of and behind ourselves. The funny part is imagining Darnold being handed a lien on his Super Bowl ring because he hasn't yet made the payments on his own redemption. The funnier part is imagining the owners for next year's game deciding to stay at home rather than get taxed on the eight days they spend here next February. Even Jerry Jones would reconsider flying out to watch the Dallas Cowboys in the first Super Bowl in three decades if he knew it would cost him $3.5 million (based on eight days' worth of his 2024 revenues, anyway).
We won't argue for the virtues or vices of the jock tax either way; it's shakedown season for everyone, and we all end up pantsless in the end. Worrying about Sam Darnold's tax bill is indeed one of the silliest notions regular civilians can engage in. He's never been more highly regarded, even though his own stats Sunday were among the worst of his entire season, all because he chose (or was given, more like) the right horse to ride in the right year. He's taking this deal every chance it comes up, even if they hold Super Bowl 65 in Truckee during a blizzard. Given the happy turn his career has taken, he'd pay $70K every week and still have $574,000 left over to cover the Saturday grocery run. I mean, these guys all say they'd play for nothing when asked to utter a ridiculous platitude that they don't believe. Sam Darnold just got the chance to prove it.
