Darnold led the Seahawks to a Super Bowl win last season, but where does he rank among his peers entering the new year?
The 2025 season for Sam Darnold as the quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks will always be seen as the year he ended all the narratives surrounding him.
A 14-3 regular-season record and then three playoff games where he didn't have a turnover en route to a Super Bowl win, Darnold has done something Lamar Jackson, Joe Burrow, and Josh Allen haven't done.
But we know when ranked up against the other quarterbacks in football, Darnold isn't in the elite bracket, right?
Matthew Stafford, Allen, Jackson, Burrow, and Patrick Mahomes are the ones who are in a whole other stratosphere.
But if we did rank the starting quarterbacks ahead of the new season, where would Darnold sit?
As it turns out CBS Sports' Bryan DeArdo has done just that, and for Darnold, he's landed in the second-best tier of DeArdo's ranking, called borderline stars.
"After a tumultuous start, the former No. 2 overall pick resurrected his career," DeArdo wrote. "Darnold delivered a Pro Bowl 2024 season with the Vikings, and he reached the mountaintop with Seattle in 2025. He begins the 2026 season as the starting quarterback for the defending Super Bowl champions."
So, is Darnold a borderline star?
Well, he is a Super Bowl champion, and over the past two regular seasons, he's 28-6. That's a good sample size, I'd say. Plus, in those two years, he's thrown for 8,367 yards, 60 TDs and 26 interceptions.
Darnold is in a tier that has Jalen Hurts, Dak Prescott, Caleb Williams, Bo Nix, Jayden Daniels, Jared Goff, Brock Purdy, Jordan Love, Justin Herbert, Drake Maye, and Trevor Lawrence.
So that is a good group to be mentioned among, and Darnold will enter the 2026 season as a defending champion and has a chance to further push his case to be higher on these sorts of lists next offseason.
One can only imagine if he leads Seattle to back-to-back Super Bowls. Then he might have a case to move up a tier into the elite of the NFL.
But for now, Darnold has to be content with being a borderline star, and the upcoming season could see his already soaring stock go higher than anyone thought possible.
