When this anomaly of a game was finally over, the crowd had filed out of Lumen Field. Sam Darnold was about to do the same—and after offering the platitudes on this particular win counting only if his Seahawks keep going—I wanted to give the quarterback his shot to exult over the classic everyone had just witnessed.
For a million reasons, I intimated to him, Seattle’s 39–38 overtime win had to feel really good, both for the team and for the guy that the team gambled on in March.
“No, absolutely,” Darnold told me, with a laugh. “It’s fun, man. And I’ve been in this league long enough to enjoy wins. You know, it’s hard to win in this league, and you have to enjoy it. You have to celebrate every single win that you have, because if you don’t, then there’s just no point in playing the game that I’ve played ever since I was five years old.
“I always have that joy with me, even though it might not seem like it.”
Darnold and his Seahawks earned this one, a game that played out like an actual heavyweight fight with the highest of regular-season stakes. The three and a half hours it encompassed first illustrated the Rams’ might, and then, sure enough, their NFC West rivals’ fight.
And for the home team, that helped illustrate what was so satisfying about it.
Seahawks kept ‘Chasing Edges’
This wasn’t a perfect evening for Seattle. Nor was it an off-night for the Rams. Indeed, the Seahawks yielded 581 yards to Matthew Stafford and a Davante Adams-less offense. They turned the ball over three times—with the Rams registering a pick and recovering a fumble on their own 1, and running another pick to the Seahawks’ 1-yard line. Stafford finished with 457 yards and three touchdown passes, two to Puka Nacua, who had 12 receptions for 225 yards and two touchdowns. Kyren Williams and Blake Corum combined for 118 yards on the ground.
But where the powerhouse Rams seemed to win on all of the big, obvious things, Mike Macdonald’s team kept, as their training camp t-shirts read, “Chasing Edges” to consistently find a way to win on the margins, with sound situational play in all three phases of the game.
Those margins were seized on defense, where, after allowing 409 yards through the game’s first 47 minutes, the Seahawks forced three consecutive fourth-quarter three-and-outs. The first of those came after Darnold’s second interception, minimizing the damage of the mistake and forcing the Rams to punt off their own goal line. That’s when the special teams seized an edge, with Rashid Shaheed running the punt back 58 yards to paydirt.
Then, there were the throws that Darnold made, even after those early mistakes might’ve conjured the ghosts of Rams games past—namely the nine sacks he took in last year’s wild-card playoffs as a Viking, and the four picks he threw earlier this season in Inglewood, Calif. Like the defense, Darnold compartmentalized all of it, and made five massive throws.
• The first came with 6:30 left, with Darnold rolling left on a bootleg off play-action, then throwing back across the field to AJ Barner, who’d leak out to the backside of the play to take advantage of the Rams’ overpursuit.
“We just saw the way they were playing some of our keepers and some of our run-game stuff,” Darnold said. “And we felt like they were overflowing. So when that happens, we have that play that we can get to. And we got to it.”
• The second came on the Seahawks’ second snap of overtime, when Darnold came off a play fake and had Rams DT Kobie Turner, a menace all night, right in his face. Darnold got around him, ran to his right, and found Jaxon Smith-Njigba, who broke off his route and followed his scrambling quarterback for 17 yards along the sideline.
“That’s a play that we practice a lot—we’ve been practicing it since OTAs,” he said. “And then, obviously, when a play breaks down, you’ve got to make something happen. I’d trust Jax with my life, to be honest. And it doesn’t just have to be Jax in that situation—whenever we have anyone in that situation, I’m going to trust that they’re going to go make that play.”
• The third was three plays later, with Darnold threading the needle with an opposite-hash throw on a deep, out-breaking route to Cooper Kupp. As he released, Rams star Jared Verse, coming on a twist around Turner, pile-drove him into the turf. Kupp stabbed his left foot, dragged his right foot, and picked up 21 yards to put the Seahawks at the Rams’ 16.
“It was going to be a tough throw. And then obviously I got hit, which I wasn’t expecting,” Darnold said. “And so that added another element to it. I didn’t think … it was definitely a throw I could make. But when I got hit, I was looking at the big screen while I was on the ground, hoping it was complete. And then Klint [Kubiak] started yelling in my headset to try to beat the challenge, that they’re going to try to challenge it. But Coop made an unbelievable catch.”
• The fourth was the score to cut the Rams’ OT lead, a 41-yard strike from Stafford to Nacua, to make it 37–36. And another example of Darnold’s chemistry with Smith-Njigba.
“It’s just a play we’ve been practicing for a long time, an in-breaker there,” he said. “And obviously he did a really good job—he had outside leverage, and he just did a really good job understanding his leverage and beating his guy, which he’s been doing a really good job of that all year.”
• Then, there was the two-pointer to Eric Saubert to win the game.
“That was a play that we honestly hadn’t practiced—we practiced it throughout the week, but that was a new play our coaches came up with,” Darnold said. “Obviously, they do a really good job of coming up with plays throughout the week. They crush it. They stay up way too late and spend so much time going over certain plays and coverages. And so that was a play that I felt really, really good about.”
Darnold explained that the play was a two-man pattern with Smith-Njigba and Kupp to his right. But the Rams had three guys covering two to that side, and he could feel, as such, the void in the middle of the field. Saubert got to that void. The rest is history.
But the other thing that’s interesting about it? It was the one play Darnold described to me that didn’t go back to the spring or summer for him and his teammates.
Mike Macdonald’s T-shirt slogan
So, to go back to Macdonald’s T-shirt slogan. On the one hand, within his Seattle program, the chance the players have to chase those edges is built through the plays and schemes drilled over not days, weeks or months. There’s also an element, as putting in that new concept for the Rams specifically showed, of being ready for whatever might come up on a night like Thursday.
Which is a big part of why the Seahawks were never rattled, no matter how bleak it looked.
“We practice two-minute and end-of-game, nail-biter situations more than any team I’ve ever been on,” Darnold said. “And that’s a huge credit to our staff, Coach Mike, for putting us in a ton of situations throughout the week. And we actually like to do this thing where, a game like tonight, like if a crazy situation happens, or like last week, if we need to go, say, 30 yards in 20 seconds, that’s a situation that we practiced throughout the week.
“We just try to pick random situations that’ll come up throughout the season. And we practice them. Yeah, it’s obviously time well spent when we do that.”
And that, by the way, is every day.
It starts in the team meeting each morning—with the offense, defense and special teams in there—as Macdonald and his staff present a situation that Seattle may have faced in its previous game, or one that popped up elsewhere in the league that week, or even a hypothetical where there was an alternate turn of events to something the players saw.
Then during a practice period, the coaches will put the ball down and have the players practice it live.
It, of course, prepares the players for those situations. It also has a psychological impact, allowing players to handle fire-drill situations without panic.
When I raised the mistakes on Thursday night, to ask about the team’s resilience, Darnold joked, “Yeah, thanks, Albert—thanks for bringing that up.” He could poke fun at it at that point, of course, because of how the aftermath of the missteps played out. But he also quickly acknowledged that the Seahawks never wavered primarily because they knew, no matter the situation, they’d have answers.
“I mean, it’s who we are. We’re a relentless group that’s never going to give up.” Darnold
“I mean, it’s who we are,” Darnold said. “We’re a relentless group that’s never going to give up. And there have been games where that’s happened. We’ve gotten down in games, and we’ve had to come back from behind, and it’s not always going to be pretty, but we get the job done at the end. Again, we have to keep our heads down and go to work, and not be satisfied with tonight’s results, because we know, as you pointed out, we have a lot of work to do.
“There are some things we have to continue to work on, as a team—not just as an offense, but as a team. We’re going to figure those things out.”
But for at least a little while, Darnold, again, allowed that he’d let this one wash over him and his teammates a little bit, with the NFC West title and home-field advantage in their sights.
They, of course, earned it. And have been earning it, quietly, for some time.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Sam Darnold Reveals to Albert Breer How the Seahawks Pulled Off Their Epic Win.
