Seattle opened the season by beating New England in the NFL Kickoff Game. One week later the Seahawks are likely starting a different quarterback.
Sam Darnold sustained a hip injury in Wednesday’s practice and is not expected to play in Week 2. The timing is brutal for a team that got its season off to exactly the start it wanted.
Hip Injuries Are the Ones to Worry About
Quarterbacks can play through a lot. Thumb issues on the non-throwing hand, ankle sprains, rib soreness, all of it gets managed weekly across the league. Hips are different.
Throwing a football is a lower-body movement that happens to end at the hand. Velocity comes from hip rotation and weight transfer, not arm strength. A quarterback with a compromised hip either throws with reduced zip or compensates by muscling it with the arm, and neither version is any good.
The fact that Seattle is not even trying to spin this as a game-time decision suggests the medical staff is not close to comfortable.
What Seattle Loses
Darnold’s career arc has been one of the strangest in recent NFL memory: a No. 3 overall pick who washed out, bounced through multiple organizations, and then reinvented himself as a legitimately effective starter. Seattle bet on that version and got a Week 1 win out of it.
Losing him now, even for a game or two, stalls whatever offensive rhythm the Seahawks built in the opener. Continuity at quarterback matters more in September than at any other point in the season, because that is when timing with receivers is still being established.
The Bigger NFL Picture
Darnold joins a growing list of Week 1 casualties around the league. Texans receiver Jayden Higgins is out for the season with a torn ACL. Patriots wideout A.J. Brown has a high-ankle sprain with negative X-rays but an unclear return timeline. Michael Penix Jr. and Tua Tagovailoa are both banged up in Atlanta.
Week 1 always produces a wave of this. Bodies that spent August on a modified practice schedule get exposed to full-speed football for the first time, and things break.
What Seattle Should Do
Sit him. There is no version of Week 2 that justifies putting a quarterback with a hip problem on the field, because hip issues that get aggravated tend to turn into multi-week absences rather than multi-day ones.
The Seahawks banked a win in the opener. That buys them the flexibility to be conservative here, and being conservative with a quarterback injury in September is almost always the correct call.
Seattle’s season is not going to be decided in Week 2. It could be decided by whether Darnold is upright in December.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.