Sam Darnold’s surprisingly very good season for the Vikings in 2024 generally boiled down to this: He was at a stage of his career and in a system that allowed him to generate more positive than negative plays with his considerable arm talent.
Darnold was tied for third in the NFL, according to Pro Football Focus, in the category of “big-time throws” with 33 of them. That’s a bit of a subjective category, but then again so is this one: he was tied for the NFL lead with 24 “turnover-worthy plays.”
There are more ideal ratios (Justin Herbert, for instance, had the same number of big-time throws with just 13 turnover-worthy plays), but it was notable at least for Darnold that the good outweighed the bad. That was not the case early in his career with the Jets; from 2018 to 2020, his first three years in the NFL, Darnold combined for 45 big-time throws and 61 turnover-worthy plays.
Darnold’s regression at the end of last season shows up in those numbers: one big-time throw and five turnover-worthy plays combined in crushing losses to the Lions and Rams.
The Vikings reportedly had some interest in bringing back Darnold for a second season, but he ultimately signed with Seattle. They’re handing the keys to second-year QB J.J. McCarthy, whose development Chip Scoggins and I talked about on Wednesday’s Daily Delivery podcast.
A lot of us tend to think of big-time throws as deep balls, but there is more nuance than just long bombs. Sometimes it’s fitting an intermediate throw into a tight window, something Darnold was usually pretty good at last season.
It could be an area where McCarthy struggles, at least initially, particularly against faster and more varied NFL defenses.
“Where there’s a void and there’s a vacancy,” Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell said this past weekend, talking about how McCarthy is working on improving his touch on certain throws, “but there might be a defender in front and a defender behind, and we’ve got to find a way to get that ball completed. That’s probably the biggest difference between college football and the NFL, at least with a lot of the passing attacks that I’m familiar with.”
