🔥 HOT NEWS: Mike Macdonald dismantles the biggest myth surrounding Sam Darnold, exposing why the offseason criticism never made sense ⚡. DH

Macdonald doesn’t see Darnold’s two bad games to end last season as any sort of reason to pass over him as a franchise quarterback.

This weekend Sam Darnold will be under the spotlight more than usual. The Minnesota Vikings are coming to town to face the Seattle Seahawks, which will put their decision to move on from Darnold last offseason front and center.

So far it’s not working out well for them. JJ McCarthy has had a rough first season as a starter for the Vikings, who have lost five of their last six games coming into this week. McCarthy ranks 36th in passing yards, 34th in touchdowns and 33rd in QBR.

Meanwhile, Darnold has continued the exceptional work he showed last season for Minnesota and is performing at a top-10 level – ranking eighth in yardage, sixth in touchdowns and sixth in QBR.

Even though Darnold led them to 14 wins last season, it seems the Vikings’ brass were hung up on his two poor starts to end the year rather than the spectacular work he did the rest of the season. Here’s what Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald has to say about that recency bias, per Mike Dugar at The Athletic.

“It’s a little narrow-minded… You’re just going to go off a two-game sample? When we were looking into possibly trying to get Sam, to a person, the type of player and teammate he was on a daily basis was really cool. Then you watch the totality of the tape — there’s a lot of great things going on in the red zone, on third down, two-minute, on the move; we know he’s a great thrower on the move. All those things shined through.”

The Vikings had the inside track to re-sign Darnold after his big breakout season, but reportedly they never even made an offer. That left only one other competitor for the Seahawks to outbid: the Pittsburgh Steelers.

It didn’t take long for Darnold to make his decision, ending with a three-year, $100.5 million contract with Seattle that was at first dinged as an overpay but now looks like one of the most team-friendly deals for any starter in the league.

As far as we’re concerned Darnold has already disproven the idea that he can’t win big games, but those two bad starts seem to be lingering for a lot of analysts, who can’t get his first few years with the Jets out of their heads.

Either way, every quarterback has a bad game from time to time – especially when they’re facing a defense that’s ranked No. 1 in the league – which the Rams currently are.

Despite the warts, Darnold has proven he’s more than good enough to be the Seahawks’ franchise quarterback for the foreseeable future. There’s a good chance the Vikings’ decision to let him walk will go down as one of the worst in recent NFL history.