The Seahawks ruled quarterback Sam Darnold out for Week 2 a couple of days ago, but his health was still a topic for head coach Mike Macdonald during Friday’s press conference.
Darnold has not practiced since injuring his glute in the team’s season-opening win over the Patriots and Macdonald didn’t provide much sense about when that would change.
“He’s on his way back,” Macdonald said. “Is it next week? Is it the week after, the week after that? I’m not sure. I’m optimistic, put it that way.”
Drew Lock will start against the Cardinals with Jalen Milroe serving as their backup.
Safety Ty Okada (hamstring) will also mean the game. Safety Nick Emmanwori (hip, ankle) and guard Anthony Bradford (knee, hip) are both listed as questionable.
Seahawks Clips
Cardinals running back Jeremiyah Love and Seahawks running back Jadarian Price were teammates at Notre Dame before they were first-round draft picks for division rivals this year. Love says the Cardinals’ defense has asked him about Price, and he’ll help the Cardinals’ defense prepare for Price in any way he can before their teams meet on Sunday.
“They’ve been asking me stuff like, What are some of his weaknesses? Stuff like that,” Love said. “J doesn’t have many weaknesses. If you can get him you got to get him. Once he gets the ball, he gets rolling. It’s hard to stop him. He’s real fast. . . . You’ve got to get him early. I think very highly of JD, so I don’t really know what to say. Got to get him. Get him before he gets rolling.”
Love said he considers Price like a brother, but that doesn’t mean he’s rooting for Price on Sunday.
“It will be a little different,” Love said. “I played with JD for three years at Notre Dame. He was my teammate. He’s not going to be my teammate this upcoming game. He’s still my brother at the end of the day, but we’re preparing to go to war, so it’s going to be him against my D and my offense against his D. I’m excited to see him. I haven’t talked to him in a minute. It will be good to compete against him and then after the game, talk to him and see how he’s doing.”
Asked whether his loyalties are with his friend or his team, Love answered, “My team.”
“This is the place where I’m at, these are the people I’m with right now, that I’ve been building bonds with,” Love said. “Me and JD have a bond off the field. Not on the field because we’re playing against each other. I would take my team over JD because it’s my team. I’m with the Cardinals, he’s with the Seahawks.”
In his Week 1 debut, running back Jadarian Price was on the field for only 24 snaps — less than half of the Seahawks’ total offensive workload.
That will be changing.
Offensive coordinator Brian Fleury told reporters on Thursday that Price will be getting more playing time moving forward.
“We were very deliberate about the reps that he was going to get, and how he was going to be used,” Fleury said. “He didn’t play in the preseason. It was the very first NFL game, huge stage. We wanted to be cautious in terms of his workload. He earned more reps moving forward, and we’ll continue to bring him along and develop him the right way.”
Fleury explained that the limited use of Price had nothing to do with “anything physical.” Said Fleury, “It’s just being a rookie.”
With Super Bowl LX MVP Kenneth Walker III gone in free agency and Zach Charbonnet out for at least the first four games as he continues to recover from an ACL tear suffered in the divisional-round win over the 49ers, Price is the top tailback.
With his 24 reps in the season opener, Price had 10 carries for 52 yards and two catches for six yards. The next opportunity comes in Arizona on Sunday, against the 1-0 Cardinals.
The Seahawks will ride with quarterback Drew Lock until Sam Darnold returns from a glute injury. And Lock’s teammates have no problem with that.
"[W]e all have faith in Drew,” defensive lineman Leonard Williams told reporters on Wednesday. “We believe that he’s the best second-string quarterback in the league. Since I’ve been here, before he went to the Giants, he stepped up big time. I remember that Eagles game a few years back where he stepped up and won us the game. He’s done it and shown it multiple times now. That has instilled a lot of trust in his teammates and his team.”
After three years with the Broncos, Lock spent two in Seattle. He signed with the Giants for 2024 before returning to the Seahawks in 2025.
And Lock did indeed have a special night against the Eagles in December 2023. Starting in place of Geno Smith, Lock threw a touchdown pass to receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba with 28 seconds to play for a 20-17 win over Philly.
“He has a little bit of swagger to him,” Williams said regarding Lock. “He’s confident, he’s ready for the moment. When it’s time for him to be called up, there’s no lag, there’s no hesitation. He’s ready for it. It’s cool to see because I can’t imagine what it’s like to be in that position as a backup quarterback. You may not see the field all season but at any moment you have to be ready to go in there and operate and lead the offense. He does a great job of that, not skipping a beat.”
This week, Lock knows he’ll be playing against the Cardinals. The duration of his assignment remains to be seen.
The Seahawks will not have Sam Darnold back in the lineup for Week 2.
Head coach Mike Macdonald said at his Wednesday press conference that Darnold has been ruled out for this week’s game against the Cardinals. Drew Lock will start in Arizona on Sunday afternoon.
Darnold left last Wednesday’s game against the Patriots in the first half with what was called a hip injury at the time and was later updated to a glute tendon issue. There was word that Darnold could miss a month or more due to the injury, but Macdonald said that the Seahawks do not plan to place him on injured reserve.
Macdonald also said that the Seahawks do not anticipate adding another quarterback to go with Lock or Jalen Milroe while Darnold is out of action.
Fredd Young, a member of the list of the top 50 Seahawks players in franchise history, has died. He was 64.
Seattle made Young the 76th overall pick in the 1984 draft. He played college football at New Mexico State.
Young made the Pro Bowl from 1984 through 1987, and he was an AP first-team All-Pro in his fourth and final season with the Seahawks.
As a rookie, he became the first AFC player to make the Pro Bowl as a special-teams player who wasn’t a return specialist.
In 1988, Young was traded to the Colts for a pair of first-round picks after a contract fight with the Seahawks. He then spent three seasons in Indianapolis.
For his career, Young appeared in 101 regular-season games with 79 starts.
The 49ers’ Week 1 win over the Rams resulted in a shift in betting odds, but perhaps not as big a shift as some would think.
The Rams remain the favorites to win the Super Bowl, as they were before the season. The Rams’ Super Bowl odds dropped to +650 from their preseason odds of +500, but they’re still the favorites to win it all.
The 49ers, however, are now the favorites to win the NFC West. The 49ers’ odds are +160 to win the division, followed by the Seahawks at +175 and Rams at +205. The Cardinals are extreme long shots at +4500.
The 49ers’ odds to win the Super Bowl are +1400, tied with the Chiefs for the fifth-best chance of winning the title.
Why would the Rams be first in Super Bowl odds but third in division odds? It’s ultimately about how good the oddsmakers think the Rams will be by the time the postseason rolls around. Right now, with Myles Garrett on injured reserve and Aaron Donald yet to play, it’s easy to see the Rams starting slow and falling behind in the division. But if they make the playoffs at all, the Rams should be a tough team to beat.
The Rams may have to go on the road in the playoffs, but no one should dismiss their chances of winning it all.
The Cardinals pulled off the biggest upset of Week 1, but Monday wasn’t a day for reveling in their 26-14 win over the Chargers.
Head coach Mike LaFleur’s message was about the next game on the schedule rather than on rehashing all that went right in his Arizona debut. The Cardinals will face the Seahawks in Week 2 and the coach said that he is drilling down on the message that the Cardinals have to start back from square one as they prepare to host the defending champs.
“Confidence is great, but like I told them today, ‘We got to reset and get right back to work,’” LaFleur said, via the team’s website. “This is a week-to-week league, and your goal is to go 1-0 every weekend. We’re not going to talk anything past that. Obviously we got the result, but we’re right back to work.”
LaFleur’s directive met a willing recipient in wide receiver Kendrick Bourne. He acknowledged that “building from success is better” than the alternative, but added that the team has to hone “little details” in order to be more than a one-week wonder.
The silver lining in the dark cloud of a quarterback injury is the potential strategic advantage it can create.
And the Seahawks seem to be leaning fully into the potential uncertainty flowing from Sam Darnold’s Week 1 mishap, which reportedly caused a strained glute tendon.
Via Andrew Destin of The Athletic, a Seahawks spokesperson said Monday that Darnold has a “very unique, soft-tissue injury.” The Seahawks call it “short term,” but they also acknowledged there is “no firm timeline.”
On Sunday, we reported that Darnold could be out four to six weeks.
The Seahawks have no obligation to say anything about Darnold, beyond the rules of the injury report. And that’s a basic, bare-bones mandate — whether and to what extent he practiced on three days before a given game (limited or full) and, in the final report, whether he’s questionable, doubtful, or out.
Teams love to force opposing defenses to prepare for multiple quarterbacks. If Darnold does enough on Wednesday, Thursday, and/or Friday to be described as participating in practice on a “limited” basis, they can keep the Cardinals guessing as to whether it will be Darnold or Drew Lock on Sunday.
And the Seahawks can keep doing that until Darnold returns.
Whatever the specific problem, it was sufficiently unique and confounding to result in up to four second opinions, as Jay Glazer of Fox Sports reported on Sunday. The thinking is they’ll be cautious with Darnold, given that their team is good enough to win without him — and given the risk that he could suffer an aggravation that extends his absence.
Now that football season has returned, so has the season of tracking the sizes of the TV audiences for football games.
The first of 283 games that count in the 2026 season — a Super Bowl LX rematch between the Patriots and Seahawks — averaged 25.1 million viewers.
The good news is that the season-opening game has exceeded 25 million viewers for four straight years, matching the same run from 2013 through 2016. The bad news is that, via Manny Soloway of Awful Announcing, the number fell 12 percent from last year’s 28.3 million who watched the Eagles host the Cowboys, and it was the lowest since 2022.
It’s fair to wonder whether the dip had anything to do with the season starting on a Wednesday. The last Wednesday night Week 1 kickoff game happened in 2012, with the Cowboys-Giants game generating 23.9 million viewers. In contrast, the Thursday night opener the prior year, between the Saints and Packers, drew 27.2 million.
That’s odd, to say the least. The Cowboys were (and still are) the Cowboys. And the Giants — in the nation’s top media market — had just won the Super Bowl. It’s lower number than would have been expected, and it could have had something to do with Wednesday vs. Thursday.
Regardless, Week 1 Wednesday is likely here to stay. Especially in the years the NFL can’t televise a game on the first Friday night of the season.
It’ll be that way in 2027 and 2028, with a Friday night Week 1 game back on the table for 2029.
By then, it’ll likely be Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday for Week 1.
