He’s only three games into his latest NFL stop, but Sam Darnold is already responding brilliantly to changes the Seattle Seahawks are making to his game. So much so, the Pro Bowl quarterback is delivering “career-high” results in multiple key areas.
The scheme called by offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak is allowing Darnold to post a “new career-high dropback success rate,” according to The Ringer’s Austin Gayle. He detailed how Darnold “delivered the most efficient game of his career in Seattle’s blowout win against New Orleans. He posted a 72.2 percent dropback success rate and 0.90 EPA per dropback—the highest marks for any quarterback with 15-plus dropbacks in a game this season.”
This level of efficiency helped a Darnold-led offense account for 37 of the 44 points the Seahawks dropped on the Saints in Week 3. Although Seattle’s QB1 was still left regretting missed opportunities.
Darnold’s superior dropback numbers aren’t happening by accident. They owe a lot to a clever adjustment made by Kubiak and his staff when the Saints visited Lumen Field.
Key Change Helping Sam Darnold Dominate
The change in question involves how “Darnold, unsurprisingly, has thrived with play-action,” per Gayle: “After calling just two such plays in Week 1, Seattle has used it 17 times across the past two games. Darnold now ranks third in success rate on play-action dropbacks.”
It’s somewhat surprising Kubiak didn’t lean into the play-action pass against the San Francisco 49ers in the opening game. The concept is, after all, a staple of the Kubiak playbook, dating back to Gary Kubiak, Klint’s father, who adopted it as a member of the Shanahan coaching tree.
A Kubiak and Shanahan offense is one based on moving pockets to attack coverage vertically against defenses gassed by chasing heavy doses of zone-stretch runs. Darnold is taking care of his end of the bargain by turning the play-action game into big plays through the air.
This showed up against the Saints, with Darnold “completing 6 of 8 passes traveling over 10 air yards for 146 yards and a touchdown. Darnold’s average completion traveled 10.3 yards in the air,” per Next Gen Stats.
Those numbers justify the talent around Darnold, particularly among his receiver corps. It’s where Jaxon Smith-Njigba has been prolific, to the tune of 22 catches for 323 yards and a touchdown. Meanwhile, rookie Tory Horton, who also snagged a TD against the Saints, is already an impact player.
Darnold’s also getting help from a running game becoming more Kubiak-esque each week.
Seahawks Running Game Creating Sam Darnold’s Efficiency
The familiar outside-zone concepts Kubiak loves are being brought to life by gifted Seahawks running back Kenneth Walker III. Although he’s produced mixed results, the mercurial Walker has adapted to the one-cut-and-go demands of the system brilliantly.
A great example was this cutback gain at the expense of “overflowing LBs and lack of gap discipline” against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Week 2, highlighted by Nate Tice of Yahoo! Sports.
Walker gashed the Steelers for 105 yards on the road, and while he couldn’t get on track the same way last week, the 24-year-old still rushed for two touchdowns on home soil. Even though Walker did break off the big runs he managed in Pittsburgh, the threat of the run still made Darnold and the offense tick.
That threat was the platform for the play-action game, according to Michael-Shawn Dugar of The Athletic. He believes the Seahawks are “still probably gonna see Sam Darnold have play-action success. As long as safeties & LBs are worried about the threat of it, the explosives on the fakes will hit.”