If you’re a Jets fan, of course it’s Sam Darnold in Super Bowl 60 and of course it’s the Patriots who will be on the other side of the ball from him in Santa Clara. Maybe there could be more of a worst-fears-realized scenario for the Jets than this one, but it’s hard to come up with one offhand. Jets fans can only be looking at the big game this way:
Them vs. Him.
Call it the Ghost Bowl. Darnold once famously said he was seeing ghosts when he went up against the Patriots. Only now he’s the ghost for Jets fans.
The Jets aren’t the only team that gave up on Darnold. The Vikings did the same thing even after Darnold had them at 14-2 a little over a year ago. But the Jets are the team that drafted Darnold with the third overall pick and then gave up on him a few years later because they had a general manager who convinced the owner that Zach Wilson was going to be a better quarterback than Sam Darnold. So they took Wilson – wait for it – with the second pick of the 2021 draft.
And then, three years after the Jets did that, just because these are the Jets and Jets things just keep happening to them, the Patriots took Drake Maye with the third pick of the 2024 draft. And how did the Patriots end up with the third pick of the draft? Because in Week 18 two years ago, the Jets beat Bill Belichick’s Patriots in the last game Belichick would ever coach in Foxborough. So the Patriots’ record fell to 4-13, and they fell into the place in the draft where Maye was waiting for them after the Bears had taken Caleb Williams and the Commanders had taken Jayden Daniels. So even when the Jets got a win against Belichick – after having lost to him 15 straight times in the regular season – they really ended up losing. The Patriots finally had a quarterback to replace Tom Brady. The Jets still don’t have a quarterback.
Listen, plenty of pro football teams have made mistakes with quarterbacks who ended up playing in championship games for somebody else. The Steelers cut Johnny Unitas before he ended up with the Colts. The Patriots gave up on Jim Plunkett, who ended up winning two Super Bowls with the Raiders. Nobody saw greatness in Kurt Warner before he got with the Rams. The list is longer than that. Now the Jets are on it, because of Sam Darnold, who doesn’t turn 29 until next June.
The Panthers gave up on him, too. So did the 49ers. The Vikings gave up on Darnold because they liked J.J. McCarthy better. But it is the Jets who gave up on him for Wilson, after never giving Darnold the chance to show what he could do if they put enough good players around him; who never really forgave him for saying “I’m seeing ghosts” to his then-coach Adam Gase during a Patriots came, a mic’d exchange that later resulted in rules changes about procedures for in-game audio from players. It didn’t help Darnold at the time. The damage had been done. The Patriots had done it to him the way they’d been doing it to him from the time he’d gotten here from USC. The score that night was 33-0. The combined score of his three losses to the Patriots while he was a Jet was 99-17 (he missed three others because of mononucleosis and injuries). Six of his 39 career interceptions as a Jet came against New England. The last game he ever played for the Jets was a 28-14 loss in Foxborough.
Then Woody Johnson came back to the Jets after his wildly forgettable performance as Ambassador to the Court of St. James – when you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way – and he wanted a clean slate and his GM Joe Douglas (who didn’t draft Darnold because Mike Maccagnan did) developed a quarterback-crush on Wilson. Darnold didn’t finally turn into the quarterback the Jets hoped they were getting until he got to Minnesota, where Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell – who’s supposed to know better – had developed a ridiculous quarterback crush of his own on McCarthy.
Now the dominoes that began to fall once Darnold had escaped from New York have produced this Ghost Bowl for Jets fans. The Patriots are about to play in their 10th Super Bowl since Belichick quit the Jets to take the Patriots job over two decades ago. The Patriots are doing what they’re doing after two straight 4-13 seasons, a period during which even the Jets won four more games than they did. But Patriots got Maye. Jets got Post Achilles Rodgers, and then Justin Fields. And so it goes.
The Seahawks are Darnold’s fourth team since the Jets. The Jets? They’ve had two coaches since Adam Gase, two general managers since Maccagnan. They are no better than an expansion franchise. The player they thought could be a franchise quarterback – before they found another one they liked better –just played the game of his life in the NFC championship game against the Rams. At the start of that game, you wondered if Darnold could be better than Matthew Stafford with the money on the table. It turned out he sure was.
“I’m happy for Sam Darnold,” the Seahawks star receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba (10 catches) said when it was over.
How could you not be happy for Sam Darnold? For sure, the Patriots team he will be facing in Santa Clara isn’t the one that made him see ghosts. Belichick is gone. Brady was in the broadcast booth on Sunday night watching Darnold put it on the Rams. But the Patriots are back in the big game. Sam Darnold has finally made it there himself. Jets fans will watch it all, knowing their team sadly remains the same. Super Bowl 60: Them vs. Him.
