It’s easier to take the high road when you’re sitting on top of the mountain.
Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold, who won the Super Bowl in his first season in Seattle, has no hard feelings about Minnesota’s decision to move on from him after a 14-3 season as the team’s starter.
“I totally understand the move to go with the younger quarterback on a rookie deal, and signing these veteran players that you can maybe pay a little bit more while he’s on his rookie deal, especially if you believe in him,” Darnold said in a recent appearance on The San Clemente Podcast. “Yeah, the business side of it, I totally understand. And like, I think J.J. [McCarthy] is a good player. I think he’s going to be a really good player in this league. I truly believe that. And, you know, for them to see that and be like, “Alright, we’re gonna, you know, Sam, that was a great year,’ but like the business part of it, it was like, ‘OK, like, you know, I totally understand.’”
It was perhaps more than a business consideration. Darnold’s performance in a Week 18, winner-take-all, game at Detroit raised questions about his ability to deliver in the biggest moments. (The wild-card loss eight days later was much more of a total-team failure, especially on the offensive side of the ball.) The Vikings ultimately had to decide whether to make the kind of commitment to Darnold that could have kept McCarthy on the bench for too long.
Still, it’s not as if Darnold broke the bank. His three-year, $100.5 million deal with the Seahawks had a one-year out, with a base package of $37.5 million paid in the first season. This year, he’s making $27.5 million. Which is well below the current market rate. (He deserves a raise, frankly.) The Vikings could have found a way to keep him, if they wanted.
There was a more political issue at play. The Vikings had traded up from No. 11 to No. 10 to draft McCarthy. They needed to see what he could do.
But, as history now shows, they also needed to have an accomplished veteran with starting experience, in the event that McCarthy was injured (he was) or struggled (he did). That’s how the 2025 Vikings season collapsed, and it surely played a role in the decision to fire G.M. Kwesi Adofo-Mensah.
The Vikings tried to keep Daniel Jones. But he didn’t think he’d win the starting job. Jones instead went to the Colts, where he was more confident he’d become QB1, and he did.
This year, the Vikings got a massive bargain in Kyler Murray as the McCarthy alternative. And the coming season will answer many questions.
Will the Vikings decide to keep Murray, who wisely negotiated a no-tag clause for 2027? Will McCarthy step up and secure the long-term job? Will the Vikings be starting over at the position?
There’s no guarantee the Vikings would have had a dramatically better season if they’d kept Darnold or Jones. Still, even with the various struggles at the most important position on the field, the Vikings nearly won enough games to get to the postseason. It won’t take much to get them over the hump, as it relates to getting to the playoffs.
The question is whether the Vikings can do more than that. They haven’t won a playoff game since 2019, and coach Kevin O’Connell is 0-2 in the postseason. For as high as the Vikings were riding through 16 games of the 2024 season, there has been a hard fall. This year, it will be critical to turn things around — and then to sustain it into the next one.
An unnamed team owner recently described the market for the Seahawks as “soft.” Commissioner Roger Goodell has taken a somewhat hard stance against that claim.
“Obviously there have been some reports that I would say are not accurate with respect to the amount of interest,” Goodell told reporters on Tuesday, after the quarterly ownership meetings in Orlando, via Mark Maske. “It’s exactly the opposite. There’s actually been tremendous interest in the team. The process is moving forward. Obviously we’re not going to be discussing that either with the membership or anyone else. We respect the process until it’s completed. Once that happens, then it will be handed over to us and we’ll work through the process of our approval.”
When the process began in February, there was an expectation that the Seahawks would generate a final offer in the range of $9 billion to $11 billion.
Although there hasn’t been a parade of names, it’s possible that someone is waiting and watching for the right time to make a move.
Jaxon Smith-Njigba’s offensive player of the year trophy had one small problem. There was a typo.
It looks like it says “Defensive Player of the Year.” (More on that in a second.) The NFL has promised to make things right.
“The league made the mistake,” chief NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said Tuesday, via Jayna Bardahl of The Athletic. “We sincerely apologize to Jaxon for the error and are in the process of creating and shipping him a new trophy. Of course, like the teams he played against this year, we know how great an offensive player he is. We just had a problem spelling it.”
The league’s position is that the trophy doesn’t say “defensive,” but that it says “oefensive.” With the mistake being an “e” instead of an “f.”
Either way, it’s the kind of error that can’t be fixed by pressing the backspace button. The only way to do it right is to send out a new trophy.
And here’s an idea for what to do with the extra piece of hardware: Auction it off, with the proceeds going to the charity of JSN’s choice.
Seahawks wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba was last season’s Associated Press NFL Offensive Player of the Year. But that’s not what his trophy said.
Smith-Njigba posted on Instagram a video that showed his trophy says, “JAXON SMITH-NJIGBA 2025 DEFENSIVE PLAYER OF THEYEAR.”
In the video, Smith-Njigba shows the trophy and says, “I really want to expose them. It’s getting disrespectful, guys.”
Smith-Njigba then pointed to the word “Defensive” and said, “Defense? Come on, bro.”
He then pointed to “Theyear” and said, “One word? Man.”
“Its getting disrespectful at this point,” Smith-Njigba posted in a caption. “Just keep the award at this point. Leave it in the history books tho.”
Although the Associated Press handles the voting for the awards that are announced at the annual NFL Honors event, PFT has been told that the NFL, not the AP, makes the trophies. So it was a mistake made by whatever engraver the NFL hired to do the job, and a mistake no one at the NFL noticed before giving the trophy to Smith-Njigba.
Smith-Njigba said they can keep the trophy, but the NFL should, of course, issue him a new one.
The 2026 regular season begins where the 2025 postseason ended — with a game between the Patriots and Seahawks.
During a Friday press conference regarding the newly-released schedule, NFL Media executive V.P. and COO Hans Schroeder explained the decision to start the year with a Super Bowl rematch despite the fact that the Super Bowl was lopsided.
“I think one of the things to go back to last year is, you’ll remember in Week 2, we actually replayed the Super Bowl — similar Super Bowl dynamic from a couple years ago, in that that Philly-K.C. game in New Orleans wasn’t necessarily a particularly close one,” Schroeder said. “But we saw that rematch, I think, did 33 million viewers in that second week doubleheader game.
“So coming out of that, and to the point of always learning and trying to see what we can learn from the data and the information we get, we thought it’d be really exciting to come back. A Super Bowl relevant rematch is never going to be more relevant than in Week 1, and sort of pick up this year where we ended off last year, had a really neat symmetry or connection to it. So we really love that idea. We looked at, you know, a number of opponents for Seattle in that window, but we think [the kickoff game is] a really big window. It’s one of those places where we think we can continue to build the audience higher and just love the idea of opening the season where we left it last year with another chance for the Patriots or the Seahawks and that game in particular.”
An immediate Super Bowl rematch has started the season only twice before, with the Panthers and Broncos meeting in the opening game of 2016 and the Vikings and Chiefs squaring off in Week 1 of the 1970 season, the first year of the merged AFL and NFL.
Since 2016, there have been four other Super Bowl rematches in the next regular season. In 2017, the Patriots hosted the Falcons in Week 7. In 2023, the Eagles visited the Chiefs in Week 11. In 2024, the 49ers and Chiefs met in Kansas City in Week 7. And, as Schroeder mentioned, the Chiefs hosted the Eagles in Week 2 last year.
This will be the fourth straight season featuring a rematch of the prior year’s Super Bowl.
Some have suggested that the NFL opted for Patriots-Seahawks as a way to lean into the story of the offseason. It’s hard to believe the league would specifically want to do that, since it’s not exactly the kind of thing the NFL would want to affirmatively showcase.
Then again, if the goal is to have the biggest possible audience for the opening game, starting the year with Patriots-Seahawks will attract plenty of the folks who may not be football fans, and who may have curiosity about New England coach Mike Vrabel, given his repeated mentions in TMZ and Page Six.
And, like a Super Bowl rematch, that storyline will never be more relevant than it will be in Week 1.
