Sam Darnold’s Long Road From USC to Super Bowl LX

The need to fill the two weeks between the NFL’s conference championship games and Super Bowl wears out previously fascinating tidbits like this year’s about the Seattle Seahawks’ Sam Darnold: Did you know he’s the first Southern California quarterback to start in the premier pro game?

So maybe the surface-level intrigue of this factoid on its own has been run into the ground. However, the context of what Darnold’s Super Bowl LX appearance — both within the historic framework of USC football and the quarterback’s own career trajectory — makes this one of the better postseason stories in recent memory.

Next September marks the 10-year anniversary of Darnold bursting into the national spotlight. On a Friday night in Salt Lake City, Darnold went 18-of-26 for 253 yards and rushed for 41 yards with a touchdown in his first start at USC.

The Trojans lost to a Top 25-ranked Utah team, 31-27, falling to 1-3 on the season. But Darnold’s presence provided a spark that was immediately evident, and which ignited a nine-game winning streak to close USC’s 2016 campaign.

Covering the Trojans that season made for a wild ride. The first month felt headed for depths not experienced reached in Los Angeles since the Paul Hackett era, only for Darnold to lead USC to heights not achieved since Pete Carroll’s tenure with a Rose Bowl Game win.

USC’s achievements in the Darnold days included more milestones last reached during the dynastic run of the 2000s, with the 2017 Trojans winning the Pac-12 Conference champion. Both the 2016 season’s Rose Bowl victory and 2017 campaign’s league championship are also the last for a program nearly 20 years from its golden age.

Despite this, it can often feel as if Darnold’s time quarterbacking the Trojans goes underappreciated. It could be the lack of a national championship, which former USC great and then-university athletic director Lynn Swann declared was the program’s standard, even as the confetti still fell on the 2017 Rose Bowl.

The 21st century of USC football also bookended Darnold’s two outstanding seasons with Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks in Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart, and a third with Caleb Williams.

And then there’s Darnold’s NFL career up to the last two seasons. College stardom hardly forecasts pro success, and USC quarterbacks of the last 20 years may exemplify that more than any other program’s.

Palmer enjoyed a long and at times excellent NFL career, and Williams is proving to be the real deal for Chicago — so much so, the 2022 Heisman winner very nearly led the Bears to face Darnold’s Seahawks in the NFC Championship Game.

But in the 21 years between Palmer’s debut with Cincinnati and Williams’ in Chicago, USC also produced some of the most notable quarterback busts and flameouts of modern drafts. Leinart technically represented the Trojans in the Super Bowl, but as the back-up to Kurt Warner for the 2008 Arizona Cardinals.

Mark Sanchez showed promise for the New York Jets, but one of the most unforgiving black holes of professional sports eventually swallowed hope of his career being remembered for much more than one of the more unfortunate fumbles in NFL history.

Matt Barkley was the last in a line of USC quarterbacks over a decade from 2003 through 2013 that had pro scouts and evaluators salivating while in college, at least until a blind-side sack from UCLA’s Anthony Barr.

How much the shoulder injury sustained on one of the most famous plays in the crosstown rivalry’s 96 years altered Barkley’s pro prospects, we’ll never know. Barkley was reliable enough to have a place in the league for more than a decade, but never as the star he had been at USC.

Darnold appeared headed for the same fate. Landing with the Jets has repeatedly proven to be a dead-end for quarterbacks, and his tenure there was no exception. A move to Carolina was no better, and failing to beat out a then-relative unknown in Brock Purdy for the starting job in San Francisco may have been a career-ender for others.

Emerging from down on the depth chart has proven to be a strength of Darnold’s, however.

He didn’t make his first start at USC until the Trojans’ fourth game in 2016, having been beat out in preseason camp by Max Browne. While depicting Darnold as an under-the-radar recruiting gem would be disingenuous — he was a high-4-star prospect at San Clemente High School fielding interest from Oregon and Tennessee — Browne more closely resembled the USC pedigree as a 5-star recruit.

Browne and Darnold were similar in that they were two of the more genuine, thoughtful players one could hope to encounter covering college football. It was no surprise, then, reading Browne’s memories of a decade ago as detailed to The Athletic last week.

It’s a must-read article that shines some light into why Darnold reaching this unprecedented point for USC is so special. Even for anyone with no connection to the Trojans, Darnold is an easy guy to root for – and he’s been that from the first start.