Jump to a topic
- Sam Darnold knows himself
- Early signs of Seahawks’ success
- Similarities between Seahawks’ championship teams
- Seattle’s defense made Drake Maye pay
- Nick Emmanwori shines
- Seahawks’ schemes
- Klint Kubiak’s replacement
- Patriots’ defensive coordinator
- Mike Vrabel on player competition
- Kenneth Walker III’s future
With the dust settled on Super Bowl LX, here are some notes from the cutting room floor following the Seahawks’ resounding win over the underdog Patriots …
Sam Darnold knows himself
One of the things I included in my postgame column that merits a little more fleshing out is this comment from Seattle coach Mike Macdonald on his quarterback Sam Darnold winning it all: “It’s probably the happiest I’ve ever been for somebody.”
Macdonald’s reasoning for feeling this way is perhaps unsurprising. For the amount of scrutiny and criticism Darnold received, he’s remained the same guy throughout.
Under fire all year, and endlessly ridden for the “seeing ghosts” comment he made six years ago, and the Minnesota meltdown at the end of 2024, Darnold has maintained the kind of square jaw that would make his Marlboro Man grandfather proud. You’d have to do a lot more than call him a sidecar to the Seahawks’ success, or a beneficiary of a great team, to shake him.
He knows what he is.
His teammates know too, which is why they love him, and have his back relentlessly.
“He’s a ballplayer,” Macdonald told me. “He’s not like a ‘quarterback’—he’s a ballplayer, you know? And so he’s one of the guys. And I think that’s what the team saw in him. What he did every day, it was magnetic.”
Contagious, too. The quarterback was so steady that when waters got choppy, no one else had an excuse not to be their most resilient. Which became a hallmark of this Seahawks team.
According to those on the team who know him best, it was easy enough for Darnold to pull it off because this was just Darnold being himself. After all, if seeing two coaching staffs fired in his three years on the Jets, then going to another unstable situation with the Panthers didn’t shake him, it’s hard to see what would.
“I was around him at USC. I was around him a little bit on the Jets as well,” star defensive lineman Leonard Williams told me. “And what’s really stood out about him to me is just his unwavering personality and character. He’s had a lot of doubters throughout his career, had a lot of people who didn’t believe in him. He’s bounced around a few times, people calling him a bust or whatever you want to say.
“And I think because he didn’t let that affect him, it’s allowed him to get to the position he’s in now. And he’s come over here, and right away the team embraced him as our leader, as our quarterback.”
Darnold kept returning to his parents, Mike and Chris, and his fiancé Katie, to explain how he’s been able to keep his head down through each rocky patch. He referenced something PGA star Scottie Scheffler said—“Winning lasts two minutes, but family is forever”—to illustrate how those around him have helped ground him.
And it’s why, after the final gun on Sunday, simply finding those people made him break down.
“Seeing my family was huge, being able to spend time with Katie, and just being able to hug my dad and tell him the reason that I’m here is because of his belief,” Darnold said. “And that might have made him kind of cry a little bit, which I’m going to call him a wuss later on for doing that. But he was pretty emotional. It was interesting. He doesn’t cry very often, but it was awesome, man, to be able to just tell him that in that moment, because it’s true.
“Without their belief in me, I don’t know if I would have ever believed in myself the way that I did.”
That belief, as Darnold will tell you, endured a lot over the past few years. It also wound up living in a Seahawks team that took on its quarterback’s steady way over the course of the 2025 season.
And in the end, it proved that the marriage between Darnold and the Seahawks was the right one, well before any trophies were won.
“It was cool watching Sam interact with the new offensive staff,” said GM John Schneider late Sunday night. “And the way he assimilated with his teammates so quickly, I was like, Woah.”
It was at that point that Schneider thought to himself that maybe, just maybe, Seattle could replicate for Darnold what he had in Minnesota. Little did he know they’d do so much more.
Early signs of Seahawks’ success
I remember Schneider telling me over the summer that he really liked the way his roster fit the vision that Macdonald had worked to put in place. It wasn’t that he knew they were going to win it all, more just that the pieces fit together nicely, which he thought would give the Seahawks the chance to make a real dent after a 10-win season in 2024.
I brought that up to Macdonald on Sunday night, wondering if there was a point where it clicked for him that his team was getting it.
“I don’t know if you’re going to believe this, but I didn’t know,” he said. “You’re just trying to do the best you can with the type of team you want to create. It’s really that simple. I think when you don’t have all those expectations, like, Hey, what timeline are we on?, it’s like, No, we’re just trying to nail it every day with a vision of what we want to create and where we want to go. This group just kept hitting it; everything we asked them, they just nailed.
“You go to Green Bay for a practice. Have a great practice. You go to Kansas City, we want to work on this, they nail it that way. You have a bad day at practice. What are we gonna do the next day to rebound? They rebound. They just always answer the bell, no matter what we ask them to do. I think once you’ve gotten to a position where we’re making a run at the playoffs, you’re just thinking, what are we gonna do to go try to win the next game? I think that moment-by-moment mindset is really what got us here.”
Macdonald then conceded that the consistency is what made the group he had uncommon, which, to me, is an affirmation of what Schneider was saying.
“That represented Sam’s resiliency,” said Schneider.
And the personality of the whole team, too.
Similarities between Seahawks’ championship teams
Schneider, the NFL Executive of the Year, has now built two championship teams, with different coaches, different quarterbacks and completely different rosters.
That’s an accomplishment very few executives have accomplished. In my years covering the league, Baltimore GM Ozzie Newsome would be the closest to doing what Schneider did, and Newsome had at least one very important link (Hall of Famer Ray Lewis) between his championship teams. That, of course, also gives him great perspective on the similarities and differences between Pete Carroll’s 2013 team and Macdonald’s team this year.
And there are a few parallels, per Schneider.
“Their swag on defense—with Spoon and Sherm,” said the GM, referencing corners Devon Witherspoon and Richard Sherman. “The way we ran the ball tonight, [Kenneth] Walker and Marshawn [Lynch]. They play for each other. They’re swaggy. They’re not as much us-against-the-world as those [2013] guys were. Those guys were way more chip-on-their-shoulder. Not that that team didn’t play for each other, but those guys were kind of like, I’m a fifth-round draft pick, but I’m better than that. They kind of had that kind of swag.
“These guys are like, If we can do this together as a team, we can dominate everybody.”
In that regard, they surprised even their GM. Because I asked if he was surprised it came together this fast, and he quickly and succinctly answered, “Yes.”
Drake Maye struggled against Seattle’s stout defense in the Super Bowl. | Jamie Schwaberow/Sports Illustrated
Seattle’s defense made Drake Maye pay
One thing that was abundantly clear: The Seahawks had a ton of respect for Drake Maye.
But they knew going into the Super Bowl that there were going to be ways to challenge him mentally, where they could take advantage of his relative inexperience. The feeling was that if they could do that effectively, they could make him hold the ball, and if he held the ball, the Patriots’ offensive line wouldn’t hold up against the Seattle rush.
The Seahawks clearly won that bet.
“You don’t have that long of a time to hold on to the ball against us,” DeMarcus Lawrence said. “And, I mean, in my head clock, he definitely took longer than three seconds [to read plays out]. So that’s a big factor when you talk about a dominant front four. I believe when I played Matt Stafford last week, it was about 2.3 [seconds], of the ball getting out of his hands. So, just being a young quarterback, we took full advantage of it today.
“But I think through this, he’s going to learn a lot, and he’s going to be a lot better next year.”
Macdonald emphasized that last point to me, saying of Maye, “What is he, a vote away from winning MVP? That’s not fake. The guy’s a great player. And when we weren’t on our P’s and Q’s today, he made us pay. The guys played a phenomenal game on defense.”
Nick Emmanwori shines
Another element of the defense that shouldn’t go overlooked is the play of rookie hybrid Nick Emmanwori (who’s become what Kyle Hamilton for the Ravens and Derwin James is for the Chargers, in a similar Baltimore-style scheme).
And this one really starts with the Patriots’ intentions. New England knew that generating 10-, 12- or 14-play scoring drives against the Seattle defense would be a tall order, so the Patriots wanted to focus on dialing up explosive plays. And one way to do that would be to run at the Seahawks’ nickel defense and force them out of those two-high looks that had safeties Julian Love and Coby Bryant deep, and Emmanwori underneath.
The thought may have been that a hobbled Emmanwori would give them a chance to do it. But the rookie (and the Seattle front) didn’t let it happen. The Patriots had just 79 yards on 18 carries for the game, and just 57 yards on 16 carries after three quarters, despite the fact that Seattle had all three safeties on the field for 70 of its 71 defensive snaps.
“For us, it was just seeing if we could play the run in split safety, as we have all year. And saying, ‘Can we limit explosives?’” defensive coordinator Aden Durde told me. “Let the guys do what they do up front and then take targeted shots to take our chance to rush, and blitz.”
And with the run effectively stopped by that stout front, and Emmanwori empowered to operate as a linebacker when needed, the safeties took deep shots away. Along those lines, here’s a mind-blowing fact: Through three quarters, New England had just one pass play of at least 10 yards: a 21-yarder to Kayshon Boutte on the first play of the Patriots’ second possession.
That Boutte play, by the way, was followed by three consecutive tackles for losses and a punt.
From that point until the fourth quarter, New England had just two first downs, one of which came on a penalty away from the play.
Seahawks’ schemes
Two of the game’s most critical plays were new from the Seahawks’ coaching staff, and specifically planned for the Patriots for Super Bowl LX.
The first was Witherspoon’s first-quarter sack, which was born of Seattle’s desire to test the middle of the New England line with speed. Witherspoon had actually blitzed earlier, pressuring Maye off the edge on a drive-ending third-and-9 on New England’s first possession. On the sack, the coaches had Witherspoon loop inside, between Williams and Lawrence, which got the corner in space on Morgan Moses (with attention drawn to the defensive linemen). Witherspoon navigated right past Moses for the big play.
Its impact? The Patriots had just one first down that wasn’t generated by a flag from that point through the start of the fourth quarter.
The second play was AJ Barner’s touchdown. The Seahawks’ coaches noticed the Patriots matched routes out of their Cover 3. So they figured they might be able to exploit that by running a corner out of his deep third. On the play, they had Cooper Kupp split right and, sure enough, Christian Gonzalez followed him on an over route to the middle of the field. Barner then ran a corner route into the vacated area.
The key there? The run action—it was play-action off an outside-zone run that the Seahawks had run a bunch already, and it sucked linebacker Jack Gibbens up. By the time Gibbens saw what was happening, Barner was by him. It was too late.
The concept was one Kubiak ran in practice during the week, and one that got Macdonald’s attention right away. “I remember it working in practice and saying [to Kubiak], ‘That’s pretty sweet. Run that in the game.’” And, just like the Witherspoon concept, it looked even sweeter on game day.
Klint Kubiak’s replacement
Now the Seahawks move forward with some staff questions, and the big one will be finding a way to replace Kubiak.
Andrew Janocko, who has been Kubiak’s quarterbacks coach in all three of his stops as an offensive coordinator (Vikings, Saints, Seahawks), is the widely presumed leader to be Kubiak’s OC in Las Vegas. The only thing I see stopping that from happening would be if the Seahawks move to promote him to offensive coordinator, which would give Janocko the chance to call plays.
If Janocko were named OC in Seattle, I’d guess that Seattle offensive line coach John Benton will go to Vegas with Kubiak and become the Raiders’ OC. Either way, I’d view Janocko, Benton and pass-game coordinator Jake Peetz as the top internal candidates to be Macdonald’s coordinator, with Lions run-game coordinator Hank Fraley looming as one outside name to watch.
Patriots’ defensive coordinator
Similarly, the Patriots have a coordinator decision to make. Inside linebackers coach Zak Kuhr, whose history with Vrabel dates back to their time as staffmates under Urban Meyer at Ohio State, did a fantastic job filling in as play-caller when defensive coordinator Terrell Williams underwent treatment for cancer. So the question now is whether Kuhr becomes coordinator, with Williams perhaps becoming assistant head coach, or if they go back to the way things were initially set up.
Mike Vrabel on player competition
Vrabel had an interesting comment in his wrap-up press conference about trying to find the “better, younger, cheaper player.” It’s something he and I talked about last week when discussing how brutally honest he is with guys, because he remembers being on the business end of those discussions as a player.
“We all understand what the business side of it is,” he told me. “And I’ve always said that the only business side of this is that, in theory, the team is looking for younger, better, cheaper players. And everybody’s job is not to let that happen. And then that’s the counterbalance. That’s why I watched every draft after the one that I was in, because I wanted to see who they were drafting to take my place. But it’s a great dynamic when you could at least appreciate it and understand it.”
It’s worth considering Vrabel’s comments ahead of New England’s offseason, as the Patriots go into it with a full complement of draft picks.
Kenneth Walker III’s future
Finally, Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker III is a free agent. The franchise tag number should land around $14 million for the position, which is reasonable, and right around what Colts RB Jonathan Taylor earns. Is he worth paying at that rate on a deal for, say, $42 million over three years? I’d say he is, and Zach Charbonnet’s injury status would give Walker some leverage in the negotiation. We’ll see if he gets tagged or extended, or if he’s allowed to test a market that also features Jets star Breece Hall.
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