Sam Darnold learned to breathe again in San Francisco.
Darnold, who enjoyed a successful debut for the Vikings in last Sunday’s win over the Giants, spent all but one game last season watching a winning operation from the 49ers sideline. He credited San Francisco’s vast playbook and regimented game planning for teaching him a higher level of offense. He tipped a cap to 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy for providing an example of a quiet leader.
Darnold, the former No. 3 overall pick of the New York Jets in the country’s largest media market, said he also learned to drop the weight of the world from his shoulders. The Vikings will need to keep Darnold comfortable during Sunday’s home opener against his former team at U.S. Bank Stadium.
“When you’re at quarterback, I feel like a lot of times you can feel everything collapsing in on you,” Darnold said Wednesday. “Not just in the game, but theoretically as a whole. If things aren’t going your way, you can feel the weight of the world a little bit. At the end of the day, it’s your job to just put the ball in your playmaker’s hands and let them go make a play. It’s as simple as that sometimes. For me, it’s just being able to get the ball out and into their hands and let them go run with it.”
Darnold also learned a thing or two about the 49ers that Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell might want to learn for Sunday. Not that O’Connell, the former Rams coordinator, needs a ton of help game planning against his former NFC West rival. He downplayed the role players have in preparing for their former teams.
“Unless a bunch of them are going to end up being coaches like me,” O’Connell said. “Probably not often. But Sam’s a really bright guy and whatever we can get from him to help us as coaches, I’m going to try to do. But I also want to make sure we’re sensitive to his own process that he’s established.”
Darnold learned a lot in San Francisco, the first NFL team he got to choose during his initial journey into free agency in March 2023. The 49ers signed Darnold three days after starter Brock Purdy underwent surgery to repair the ulnar collateral ligament in his throwing elbow.
Though Purdy recovered fine, Darnold said being a backup on the sideline of a title-worthy team gave him a new perspective about how things are done in the NFL.