As November football arrives, the week-to-week vagaries of the 2025 season have complicated a lot of things. No one is entirely certain who the conference favorites are, Super Bowl contenders rise and fall on a per-game basis and the MVP race is a murky mess. On the latest episode of “The Athletic Football Show,” Robert Mays and Derrik Klassen examine how the league’s premier individual award is still up for grabs, and focus on an unlikely contender who refuses to fall back in the ongoing race: Seattle’s Sam Darnold.
Darnold’s candidacy, while unlikely, has more statistical legs than it may seem. Seattle is number one in passing DVOA, for example, and the resurrected Darnold is top three in passer rating, EPA per dropback, and completion percentage over expected while leading the league in yards per attempt. He’s been phenomenal in creating outside the pocket, and he’s on pace for 4,400 yards, 34 touchdowns and 10 picks. Moreover, his play has kept the Seahawks’ offense alive when their mercurial running game has (repeatedly) faltered, and the team is atop the NFC West because of it.
But where MVP hopefuls like Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, and even longshot Jonathan Taylor define their teams (and their teams’ success) by virtue of their singular talent, Darnold will face questions about whether he’s bringing the horses or the horses are bringing him.
“The complication is extricating what his performance has been and the structural advantages given to him by a Seattle offense that I think has done a very, very good job of easing the burden on their passing game overall. That’s always the eternal question: how well is a quarterback playing versus the circumstances that he’s being placed in? And I do think that Seattle has done a phenomenal job of getting teams into base defense, a lot of play action, just making things easier on their quarterback in every way possible,” says Mays. “At the same time, I think that if you are trying to pull apart what his role in all of this has been independent of all of that, I think he’s played really, really, really well.”
Even if Darnold is being helped by a truly great scheme, he wouldn’t be the first MVP candidate to benefit from a well-oiled offense (2018 Jared Goff immediately springs to mind). It’s true that as a pure dropback passer, Darnold has been middle of the road this season. But his work on quick drops, play action passes and outside-the-pocket throws has been truly elite.
“He is doing stuff when the plays break down that those previous ‘super scheme’ guys, the early Jared Goff, Tua Tagovailoa, whoever it was, when the play broke down, [for them] it was over,” Klassen says. “It was all clearly whatever the scheme was able to give them. Darnold — again, maybe he’s not Josh Allen — but he is making some really, really nice plays.”
Darnold leads the NFL in passer rating on deep throws, posting an astounding 150.6 when throwing more than 20 yards downfield. His EPA per dropback on play action passes trails only Jackson, and he’s averaging more than 15 air yards per play action pass, four yards more than any other quarterback.
“He is making as many high-level throws as any quarterback in the NFL this year. So even if there are some structural guardrails that have helped him here, I still think that the splashy plays that we have seen from him, along with the down-to-down consistency, it’s a combination unlike most quarterbacks in the NFL right now,” says Mays. “It is a very short list of guys who are pulling that off in this moment.”
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