Process, results, consequences
Sam Darnold led the Seahawks to the Super Bowl. Is there are case that the Vikings had the right 'process?'
By Matthew Coller
Process over results.
Over the last 10 years, there is no more tired, frustrating phrase that front offices and coaches around sports have adopted.
Originally the jingle was supposed to refer to the idea that if you make right decisions over and over again, you will ultimately end up on the right side of the ledger. It wasn’t supposed to become a shield to justify anything that goes wrong.
As former Viking Sam Darnold prepares to face the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl following his brilliant NFC Championship game performance against the Los Angeles Rams, there is a debate over whether the Vikings are being evaluated unfairly on the results of letting him walk last offseason rather than on their process of turning things over to JJ McCarthy last offseason.
Is it possible to separate the two? Can we look back at what the Vikings were thinking at the time and truly decide whether their decision made sense? Can we say that the dice just didn’t roll their number? Or can we see flaws in their decision making that led to Darnold’s success and their failure in 2025?
We have to begin that conversation in Week 18 of 2024.
When Darnold struggled mightily against the Lions with the No. 1 seed on the line and then was demolished by the Los Angeles Rams, it appeared to solidify that the Vikings would be moving on from Darnold.
No one will admit to making the decision based on two games but you have to ask: What if he had played well? Would he have been in Minnesota in 2025? It’s hard to answer any other way than yes.
And there’s a problem with that: If we look at the playoff histories of QBs not named Patrick Mahomes or Tom Brady, it’s littered with fellas who “can’t win the big one” and then eventually won the big one.
Last year’s Super Bowl champion Jalen Hurts produced a 60.0 QB rating in a 31-15 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in his first career playoff start.
In 2021, Matthew Stafford won the Super Bowl on a brilliant clutch final drive. If you judged Mr. Stafford on his first three postseason games in which he went 0-3 with two terrible blowout losses and then a brutal L where his club blew a 20-7 lead because he couldn’t put one more score on the board.
“Well, it was the team around him!” Isn’t it always?
How about noted playoff loser Joe Flacco, who won the 2012 Super Bowl despite opening his postseason career with three games in which he totaled 44% completion percentage, 50.8 QB rating and ended in the AFC Championship (you shoulda seen those Ravens defenses) with a 13-for-30, three-interception, 30-13 loss to Pittsburgh. Flacco was terrible again in the playoffs the following season, losing 20-3 to Indy on a two-interception showing.
Surely Eli Manning was clutch from the time he came out of the womb, right? Nah. His first playoff game was a 23-0 loss in which he threw three picks.
This doesn’t even get into all the forgotten terrible playoff performances by Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Patrick Mahomes, Joe Montana, etc. throughout history.
Surprise, surprise, there are usually circumstances and matchups involved in all playoff meltdowns or successes. The Seahawks got to play at home with two weeks rest and then beat the tar out of the injured 49ers. The 2024 Vikings were forced to play a wildly physical game in Week 18 and then travel on the road to Glendale to play against the fully-rested Rams. Both teams won 14 regular season games. The NFL isn’t fair, it turns out.
The idea that the Vikings couldn’t have won with Darnold is probably the saddest coping logic you’ll see in pro sports in the year 2026.
While it might make you feel better to say that the Seahawks are better operated and coached, if we look at all parts not involved with the QB of both squads, that doesn’t hold up very well.
The Seahawks defense ranked No. 1 in the NFL in Expected Points Added. The Vikings were 5th. In the final weeks of the season, Brian Flores’ unit ate alive Jayden Daniels, Dak Prescott and Jared Goff. That’s the NFC Champ game QB from 2024, the No. 2 offense in the NFL in yardage and the No. 5 offense in scoring. There’s no chance they couldn’t have kept a Darnold-led team in the mix in the playoffs? Really?
On offense, Justin Jefferson and Jordan Addison’s 2024 seasons align with Jaxon Smith-Njigba. The Seattle offensive line has improved over the year but PFF ranked them 20th in pass blocking and and 15th in run blocking during the regular season. The 2025 Vikings were 14th and 13th, respectively, because they played excellent when anywhere close to full health.
You could argue that the Vikings roster was closer to Seattle’s because of the money spent on the 53 that Darnold would have eaten up but there were other, more affordable, players who produced similar results to some of the Vikings big-ticket items.
That doesn’t mean that the Vikings were every bit the squad Seattle is. The Seahawks’ two running backs are more gifted than Minnesota’s current backfield and their play caller commits to the run more than Kevin O’Connell, which helped Darnold in play-action etc. Though it’s hard to say that KOC can’t get the most out of Darnold since he was the original “got the most out of Darnold” guy.
Even then, in terms of EPA per run, the Vikings finished 14th and the Seahawks 21st, per TruMedia.
And, even if we can all admit the Seahawks are a better team overall than the Darnold 2025 Vikings would have been, even an average performance by the QB position would have at least put the Vikings in the dance.
By Pro-Football Reference’s EPA, the Vikings’ passing game was worth -40.3 points, which is 28th. The Houston Texans and Denver Broncos had legitimate chances with the 11th and 12th ranked EPAs of +83.1 and +85.4.
If you’re wondering, the 2024 Vikings were 6th at +136.9.
Now let’s get back to process over results.
The question isn’t whether Sam Darnold could have given the 2025 Vikings a serious chance. Obviously, he could have. But could the Vikings have seen these results coming with him playing at this level and McCarthy struggling as much as he did?
There’s a case for and against “process vs. results” here.
The case that their process was sound has a few gaping holes in it. First, we can argue pretty easily that Darnold would have been retained as QB1 if he had played well in Week 18 and in the Wild Card game, even if they had lost on a last-second field goal or whatever.
We’ve already established that basing a QB’s future projection on two big games is flawed.
Second is the caliber of play that Darnold provided. He wasn’t just good. He was spectacular. I’ve used the factoid before about the fact that all of the QBs who won 12+ games, threw for 4,300 yards and threw 35 TDs all turned out be awesome long-term quarterbacks. Feel free to look it up. The worst QBs you’ll find with that criteria is Dak Prescott or Carson Palmer.
You might argue that Kirk Cousins came close to that type of season a few times and you’d be right. There’s a few layers to pick apart. While not as gifted as Darnold, Cousins probably was good enough to get the Vikings deep into the playoffs. When they had a top-five defense, he made the Divisional Round and beat Drew Brees. But after 2019, they flailed around as a team around him trying to recreate 2017 and didn’t have the resources or draft success to have a complete team around him. Even during his 13-win season, the defense was awful.
If you lopped off some of the expensive free agent players to find room for Darnold’s franchise tag, it’s hard to argue the Vikings would have been massively worse in 2025 since they won 14 in 2024 and didn’t exactly get full bang-for-buck on signings.
Another way to look at it would be: If you gave peak Kirk Cousins the 2024 and 2025 rosters, are the Vikings legit contenders? Probably. They could just never match up the timeline with his peak and expense.
The most dubious part of the process wasn’t even the questioning of Darnold though. It was the anointing of McCarthy.
Kwesi Adofo-Mensah said that move had to be made with “incomplete information” but that doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Here’s a list of the first-round quarterbacks who threw less than 800 college passes since 2010:
Anthony Richardson, Trey Lance, Justin Fields, Mac Jones, Tua Tagovailoa, Kyler Murray, Dwayne Haskins, Josh Allen, Mitch Trubisky, Carson Wentz, Ryan Tannehill, Brandon Weeden, Cam Newton.
If you go one more year, you get Mark Sanchez.
It took Tagovailoa several years to find success. It took Tannehill going to another team to make it. There are two No. 1 overall draft picks who became good and the all-time outlier Allen (who also needed two years to become a proficient passer).
Everybody’s different but it’s hard to say that the idea McCarthy would be able to adapt quickly when none of the aforementioned QBs except for (oddly enough) Mac Jones made the postseason in their first seasons.
The limited information that the Vikings leaned on was: 1) 2024 camp performance while taking second-team reps 2) one preseason game vs. second teamers 3) how he carried himself behind the scenes in 2024.
Considering a quarterback like Jordan Love, who had three years of practicing and developing behind the scenes, still took about half of his first season as a starter to acclimate would suggest pretty strongly that watching virtual reality film of Sam Darnold calling the plays and having mock gameplan meetings might not actually prepare someone to face Micah Parsons feels like a fair second guess of the process.
Not to mention that McCarthy’s recovery kept him from throwing at all and he lost somewhere in the range of 40 pounds (per Kevin Seifert and anyone who saw him on TV), so he had to relearn all of the throwing techniques that he made excellent progress on during 2024 camp.
The idea was that they could surround McCarthy with so much talent that he could only need to make a handful of exceptional throws/scrambles per game to make it work and everything else would be in place for him. The problem with that line of thinking is that players get hurt (and suspended). He didn’t have Justin Jefferson during training camp. He didn’t have Christian Darrisaw or Jordan Addison to open the season.
Ryan Kelly and Aaron Jones got banged up too. So did Andrew Van Ginkel, Harrison Smith and Blake Cashman on the defensive side.
Veteran quarterbacks deal with next-man-up all the time. Darnold worked his way through Darrisaw’s absence down the stretch in 2024. But a player who was essentially a rookie? That’s a tough ask.
Then McCarthy got hurt and had his development reset again. And then he struggled to get in a rhythm as a passer when he was called upon to bring them back in games and the whole thing went sideways until the end of the year when he showed signs of progress. It seems the Vikings may have left “total chaos” out of the process.
The other issue with the Vikings’ line of thinking (I promise I’ll get to the part that defends them shortly) is that they could have straddled the fence for a year. If Darnold “turned into a pumpkin,” then they could have turned the ball over to McCarthy in the same vein as Atlanta did with Kirk Cousins and Michael Penix.
If Darnold took them to the playoffs again and made a deep run, they could have signed him to an extension and traded McCarthy. Even if it was just an OK season with another first-round out, they could have used 2025 to evaluate where McCarthy was physically and mentally and decide whether it was time to pull the Smith-to-Mahomes lever or not.
There’s something else that has to be mentioned here. In their process, the Vikings didn’t just underrate how much the golden arm of Darnold was responsible for their offensive success in 2024, they underappreciated what was in Sam Darnold’s heart. They undervalued his mental toughness, his leadership, his ability to put all the bull— criticisms about “seeing ghosts” aside. The fact that he fought like crazy and went through absolute hell to find the other side. That stuff matters, man.
Now, where they can stand on their “process” is that McCarthy was always their bigger picture plan as a franchise.
The Vikings didn’t decide on a whim that McCarthy was a better option than Darnold, rather the concept of turning to the former Michigan quarterback was born when Adofo-Mensah and O’Connell were hired. There is a clear history of teams taking advantage of the rookie quarterback contract advantage, including the Super Bowl representative 2025 New England Patriots, 2023 San Francisco 49ers and 2022 Philadelphia Eagles most recently. This Vikings regime was aiming to spend top dollar in free agency to stack up the squad to the point where the quarterback’s performance would be elevated.
Denver’s Bo Nix, for example, was only the 17th highest graded quarterback this year by PFF and his team made the AFC Championship game.
After losing to the New York Giants in the 2022 playoffs with an expensive quarterback and a flawed roster and then getting their tails handed to them by the Los Angeles Rams behind Darnold and a roster that was short on interior O-line play, interior D-line play and running game, they sought to spend, spend, spend on all of those areas and then hope to get QB play in the ballpark of Nix from McCarthy.
Before McCarthy, every quarterback who threw a football near Justin Jefferson had an MVP-level quarterback rating. Jordan Addison’s numbers weren’t far behind. TJ Hockenson was a Pro Bowler. Jalen Nailor was improving. Jordan Mason gave them an identity on the ground.
They did not expect McCarthy to play like Darnold right away. They expected their roster to play like the Eagles/49ers/Patriots/Broncos etc. around McCarthy and create an environment where he could do enough to win games and learn on the fly. If he could get through the rocky start for a young QB, he could reach a plateau and then profit.
They hadn’t just started spending with Jonathan Allen, Javon Hargrave, Will Fries and extensions for Byron Murphy Jr. and Aaron Jones. The spree actually began the year before when the Vikings extended Justin Jefferson and Christian Darrisaw and signed Andrew Van Ginkel, Jonathan Greenard and Blake Cashman to significant deals that started out as inexpensive on the salary cap in 2024 but took a major jump in 2025 when they expected to have the rookie QB contract. Had they been planning on a $41 million cap hit at the QB position, those important players would have been tougher to sign in 2024.
There was also plenty of reason to think that O’Connell could elevate a quarterback considering Kirk Cousins won 13 games in KOC’s first year and then was playing excellent football by mid-2023 and then Nick Mullens and Josh Dobbs kept them competitive throughout the rest of that year. When Darnold arrived, he had a 21-35 record with a career 78.3 QB rating. He left with a 14-3 record and 102.5 rating. Why wouldn’t the Vikings think KOC could recreate that?
And everyone who supported the move from Darnold to McCarthy at the time made the assumption that KOC and Adofo-Mensah and the rest of the coaching staff knew better than anyone on the outside. They saw his 2024 camp and development and injury and recovery up close, not us. If we make the assumption that he checked off every single box — which KOC, KAM and Mark Wilf insisted that he did — then they would have believed that he could take the leap as many Year 2 quarterbacks have despite not getting any reps and having thrown so few passes in college.
Saying that now feels like a huge reach but you could see how they could convince themselves of it back then.
The Vikings — in terms of pure process — also believed fully that Daniel Jones was going to stay after he’d signed midway through 2024 to work behind the scenes with the staff. They hadn’t expected him to choose Indy, where he knew he could beat out Anthony Richardson for the job. So they thought they had a failsafe. Instead, they failed to find a backup QB who could be the next Sam Darnold if McCarthy wasn’t ready. That put everything on McCarthy, ride or die.
To summarize: The Vikings built the whole plane out of the idea that they could win around the rookie contract like other clubs from 2024 have and they figured they could coach up McCarthy the way they did with Darnold and the rock-solid squad would do the rest and that he’d be ready because of what he showed in 2024. And they thought if he wasn’t ready, Jones would be there to step in.
That brings us to the results.
The thing about process vs. results is the results are all that matter.
A few years ago, former NBA head coach Stan Van Gundy was on the Zach Lowe podcast talking about a play that he called in a playoff series at the end of a game. Ultimately, a player got an open look and missed the shot. Lowe told Van Gundy that he had called a good play and the guy just missed. Van Gundy shot back with: “No, I didn’t call a good play because we lost.”
You can debate all day long whether we could have seen it coming that Sam Darnold would make the Super Bowl with a team of similar strength and that McCarthy would put up numbers that rank in the bottom 10 in the NFL among starting quarterbacks but debates over first-guessing or second-guessing or hindsight or whatever you want to call it don’t get rings. Super Bowls do. The results are that Sam Darnold is playing for a trophy that has alluded the Vikings for its entire existence in a game that they’ve missed out on since the 1970s and their entire franchise will be watching from home as it happens.
There is no “We Had The Right Process” banner that will be hung in US Bank Stadium when they play Week 1 in 2026.
In a league that just fired Sean McDermott after losing in the Divisional Round, John Harbaugh for a last-second missed field goal, Raheem Morris despite a strong end to his season and the Broncos and Chargers both axed their offensive coordinators, there isn’t a ton of patience for coulda, shoulda, woulda.
The reason the Wilfs moved on from Mike Zimmer was partly because his culture had become toxic but it was also because they were stuck in neutral.
After the Super Bowl, how they arrived at one of the biggest gaffes in franchise history doesn’t matter anymore.
It happened and they are somehow still here to fix it.
The biggest irony for the KOC-KAM regime might be that the franchise overreacted to Sam Darnold’s disaster in the 2024 playoffs but isn’t overreacting to his success by firing everyone. They should all be thanking their lucky stars every night as they watch film of potential quarterbacks who can battle in training camp with McCarthy.
We know this about the Vikings: Things change fast. Last year’s genius can be next year’s foolish. Last year’s disaster can be next year’s success story. You can go from devastated by losing Cousins to an Achilles injury to holding Sam Darnold up on your shoulders. You can go from crying tears of sadness for Teddy Bridgewater to crying tears of happiness for Case Keenum in an eyeblink.
The Vikings still have a very good roster. They still have the best receiver in the game. They still have Brian Flores orchestrating their defense. They still have the best kicker alive. They still have US Bank Stadium and a Vikings fan base that will never stop showing up.
So fix it. Because it won’t be the process of this offseason that gets judged, it will be the results. I promise you that.
I can’t believe the same people who argued against Kirk Cousins as the answer are now saying we should have kept Sam because he could have been peak Kirk Cousins.
I also feel like we all collectively agreed that if you can’t find an elite QB, you don’t pay them and you try to get a rookie QB. A very good or kinda great QB just hamstrings the organization unless they’re cheap.
Given that frame of mind, it is very easy to see why the Vikings did what they did. The only part of the process I question is how they evaluated McCarthy vs Nix in the draft, and then McCarthy’s readiness to take over this season.
If they knew he wasn’t ready, they should have beaten Indy’s offer for Jones. If they didn’t know he wasn’t ready - yikes.
I'm already so burnt out on the Darnold and the failed plan discussion. I really wanted them to keep Darnold, more than any fan I've seen, but I also understand how it made perfect sense not to. He didn't want to stay long term and tagging him was also kind of treading water. I honestly don't care that it didn't work this season, but I also don't view NFL football through the myopic view of the long suffering Vikings fan. When I think of the current staff, who are overall excellent by comparison to much if the league, I see them as victims of their own success and expectations. Besides the usual setbacks and attrition of an NFL season, they've been able to coast on overall good baseline of football for several seasons. Offensively they have never had to contend with such poor performance outside of expectation. This year has been a great learning experience for everyone involved, players and coaches alike. Many words have been wasted on the current regime's end, but to me this is where it begins. Now that real, sustained adversity has hit, this is where we actually find out who they are.