Sam Darnold threw 51 passes on Thursday night, completed 27 of them for 278 yards, and finished with zero touchdowns and two interceptions. Seattle lost 17-14 in overtime to Denver on a Wil Lutz 53-yarder set up by one of those picks.
On Friday, Mike Macdonald was asked whether he was considering a quarterback change. He said no. Darnold remains the starter.
He is right, and the reasons are not flattering
The easy read is that Macdonald is protecting his guy. The more useful read is that there is nothing behind Darnold worth the disruption, and that the game Seattle lost was not primarily a quarterback failure until the very end.
Look at the other side of it. Bo Nix went 17-of-27 for 107 yards with no touchdowns and no interceptions, the lowest passing output of his season, and his team won. Denver won that game with a defense that intercepted Darnold twice and a kicker who made a 53-yarder in overtime.
Jaxon Smith-Njigba caught 12 passes for 134 yards for Seattle. The Seahawks moved the ball. They threw 51 times because they could not finish drives, and then Darnold handed the game away at the worst possible moment.
Fifty-one attempts is the actual problem
A quarterback throwing 51 times in a 17-14 game is a symptom. Seattle is 3-3 and has spent the season asking Darnold to carry volume that no team’s game plan should require against a good defense.
The interceptions prompted a round of jokes online about Darnold seeing ghosts, a reference that has followed him since his Jets years and which he is never going to outrun. It is a cheap line. It also describes the ending of Thursday’s game accurately enough that Seattle fans used it too.
What benching him would actually accomplish
Nothing. Seattle signed Darnold to be the starter and has no alternative on the roster who changes the team’s ceiling. Benching a quarterback in Week 7 of a 3-3 season, with no clear successor, is a move teams make to show a locker room that someone is being held accountable. Macdonald has not run his program that way and there is no reason to start now.
The Seahawks have a defense that just held Denver to 17 points in overtime and a receiver who caught 12 balls. They lost because of two throws and a field goal. That is a correctable loss, and the correction is not a new quarterback.
The honest version
Darnold has been, over a season and a half in Seattle, a quarterback who can win games when the structure around him is good and who gives games away when it is not. Thursday night was the second kind.
Macdonald saying he is not considering a change is not blind loyalty. It is an accurate statement about his options. Seattle’s season is going to be decided by whether its defense keeps playing like it did Thursday and whether the offense can stop requiring 51 throws to score 14 points. The name under center is the least adjustable part of it.
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.