POLL: Do You Trust Sam?

[SeahawkSteve80]

incorrect, almost laughably so. Try again.

He leads the league in turnovers with 30 since last season.

What else ya got?

 

[keasley45]

My worry is he has some mental blocks in the big games you just can’t teach out of him. For whatever reason.

It's not just big games, it's pivotal moments when a calm head is required to make a good decision, his brain checks out and does the WTF dance. He (figuritively) walks himself into bad decisions.

Not one of the passes he tossed for INTs needed to be thrown when they were. He just chose to throw them. The first on, he had room to the left to roll out. The second one he had a clean pocket and could have thrown to someone other than the triple covered guy. The third one he stood flat footed in the pocket like a statue and rather than scramble got blasted throwing again to a (first read) wr that was obviously covered. 4th one - he could have just taken the sack or scrambled for a short gain. Why throw?

That's why 'coaching' him out of this is tricky. These plays weren't tough situations to diagnose. His brain just shut down. There were outs for him to avoid what he did and he chose the dead end.

Mental blocks is right. That's psychiatric help, not coaching.

No sacks. 3 hits in 44 passes. Most teams would pay a starters salary to have that stat line for their QB every game.

 

[keasley45]

He leads the league in turnovers with 30 since last season.

What else ya got?

Dave Krieg had 18 fumbles in one season and 24 INTs in another and he is still a Hawks legend. Maybe Sam can get there too.

 

[FreedomHawk]

Do I trust Sam? Yes, but I think coaching needs to govern his expectations and maybe tweak the play-calling for games like this. Stafford adjusted his expectations, as he did not have a great game by his standards.

Big picture this loss could be a net win. (Sam, KK, MM all learned a lot) Like i posted pregame, a split would be fine with me because if we meet Rams in playoffs it's tough to beat the same team 3 times in one season. It does make the home matchup a must, however.

A couple points to consider:

1. Down 14-3 in 1st qtr, did Sam (and coaches) play with a sense of (too much) urgency? Maybe Sam played a bit too much hero ball? After that 14 pt. 1st qtr., anybody on the planet think the Rams would end up scoring only 21?

2. Matthew Stafford dint have a great game either. But 17 years experience did teach him to protect the ball in games like this. Pretty sure he does not want to play the Seattle Seahawks again. 12's gonna get a rematch, baby!

3. How much did MM, KK, Sam learn in the final minute of the game with clock management, which was horrific. A couple more plays before the kick coulda made it more makeable.

Question: Does KK just roll with the play-calling unsupervised? Or does MM direct in real time what direction to take?

 

[Streamhawk]

My worry is he has some mental blocks in the big games you just can’t teach out of him. For whatever reason.

I still think Kubiak did him no favors yesterday; where was the play action? No quickouts or dump offs? Also, I noticed he did have a huge win his freshman year bowl game while at USC over Penn State. What about the "big" games over GB last year? He also smoked Macdonald's legit defense here in late December on SNF.

 

[keasley45]

I'm not as worried as many others. Last year he finished with a couple of bad games and one of them was entirely the offensive line being absolutely terrible and I think every guy in the league struggles. The other game was more on him just playing well. Yesterday he was bad too. I don't fault others for being worried but I think its a small sample size and he will be fine. He's going to play much better in a rematch.

Except the sample size is now going on 2 seasons and he is at 30 turnovers and counting. Even if you want to blame the Vikes O line last year it's hard to argue because he had 16 Turnovers over the entire season last year. He is at 14 this year with a massively improved line in front of him and he has 7 games left to toss more to the opposing teams.

And IF the concern is our o line somehow failing him (and they didn't) the chances of them getting better over the rest of the year losing starters the way they are are slim.

 

[keasley45]

Do I trust Sam? Yes, but I think coaching needs to govern his expectations and maybe tweak the play-calling for games like this. Stafford adjusted his expectations, as he did not have a great game by his standards.

Big picture this loss could be a net win. (Sam, KK, MM all learned a lot) Like i posted pregame, a split would be fine with me because if we meet Rams in playoffs it's tough to beat the same team 3 times in one season. It does make the home matchup a must, however.

A couple points to consider:

1. Down 14-3 in 1st qtr, did Sam (and coaches) play with a sense of (too much) urgency? Maybe Sam played a bit too much hero ball? After that 14 pt. 1st qtr., anybody on the planet think the Rams would end up scoring only 21?

2. Matthew Stafford dint have a great game either. But 17 years experience did teach him to protect the ball in games like this. Pretty sure he does not want to play the Seattle Seahawks again. 12's gonna get a rematch, baby!

3. How much did MM, KK, Sam learn in the final minute of the game with clock management, which was horrific. A couple more plays before the kick coulda made it more makeable.

Question: Does KK just roll with the play-calling unsupervised? Or does MM direct in real time what direction to take?

I don't think we can fault the play calling when we bested the Rams on 3rd down, protecting the QB, passing yards, rushing yards and TOP by a wide margin.

The plan was solid . The plays where we killed ourselves with INTs should not have happened. It's not like Bosa's strip sack in week 1. That was forgivable. He didn't need to do what he did on any of those throws. At an absolute minimum, if we don't turn the ball over on those 4 drives, the bash down of the Rams D that took us 4 qtrs to do happens much sooner, the Rams offense doesn't have an opportunity to score and we win this going away.

Sure, everyone can improve, but I didn't see any catastrophic failure in play design or situational play calling to say it can be fixed enough to somehow mitigate problems like this in the future... Unless we are talking about pivoting squarely into a ball control, limit the QBs role, type of offense.

 

[Cyrus12]

Im 50/50...when signed i thought he wouldn't be as near as good as he has been and then this game he showed old Darnold. Still lots of football left with another big game vs the Rams. He flops in that one and I think the writing is on the wall. Lets face it though, beside yesterday hes been good and better than what we have had for years. As a fan I hope he can forget about yesterday and prove the doubters including me wrong.

 

[DericLee]

I think it's great this happened now.

Last year he really never got a chance to bounce back, the season was over man.

This time he can go right back to the drawing board while it's all still fresh.

My mantra is that it's important to lose a few games along the way, otherwise the chance you overlook a flaw increases exponentially.

I remember people freaking out in 2013 when we lost to the Cards at the end of the year, it was our first home loss in two seasons, our Legion of Boom got beat for the go ahead TD, and Russ threw a pick on the attempted comeback drive.

We good man, and this is probably the best outcome for our Superb Owl chances(which I didn't even think was remotely possible at the beginning of the season).

 

[cymatica]

3 games is not a trend. Its three focking games FFS. They are big games because they are against the best. You don't win them all and at best win half of them. he HAS to clean up the turnovers, he knows that. let it play out.

It's not that he didn't win, it's that he looked like Jets Darnold in those games with horrible decision making.

I've been Darnolds biggest fan since he joined Seattle but after yesterday it is definitely a trend unless proves it wrong next big game

 

[Sperrydogg]

So far, it's hard to argue the narrative. He certainly didn't help his cause yesterday.

I am going to stomach watching the game in its entirety today. I am curious what my impression will be.

I've seen the (low)lights of his picks. Some were, "Okay, shit happens" and some were "WTF?"

The jump pick….

 

[Sperrydogg]

I think it's great this happened now.

Last year he really never got a chance to bounce back, the season was over man.

This time he can go right back to the drawing board while it's all still fresh.

My mantra is that it's important to lose a few games along the way, otherwise the chance you overlook a flaw increases exponentially.

I remember people freaking out in 2013 when we lost to the Cards at the end of the year, it was our first home loss in two seasons, our Legion of Boom got beat for the go ahead TD, and Russ threw a pick on the attempted comeback drive.

We good man, and this is probably the best outcome for our Superb Owl chances(which I didn't even think was remotely possible at the beginning of the season).

I agree 100% I’m glad it happened now for the same reasons and he’s is what th a perfect staff to gameplan how to grow from this game

 

[Chapow]

Darnold is now tied with Tua for most turnovers in the NFL this season. Kinda hard to trust a guy that turns the ball over more than anyone else in the entire league.

We used to beat up our last QB for red zone picks, but you know what's worse than red zone picks? Throwing picks deep in your own territory and giving your opponents a very short field. 2 of the Rams 3 TD drives yesterday were shorter than 30 yards. Both of those very short TD drives only happened because of Darnold throwing picks deep in our own territory.

That said, I do agree that Darnold has played very well for the most part this season, but he has got to find a way to reel in the turnovers. It's a huge problem at this point, and it has been getting increasingly worse over the past several games, even before yesterday.

 

[Chapow]

https://www.fieldgulls.com/seattle-...wks-lead-nfl-turnovers-statistics-sam-darnold

"The Seahawks were clean against the Jacksonville Jaguars the week after the Bucs loss but have proceeded to cough it up 12 times in four games, including 10 charged to Darnold. It may not seem true, but Darnold only has one fewer turnover through 10 games as Geno Smith had all of last season. I suppose it’s more visually jarring when it’s interceptions and not lost fumbles, of which Geno had none last year and put all of his turnovers into interceptions. Geno’s turnovers were contextually damaging given how many were in high-leverage situations and often in the red zone, but is it that much better if your quarterback is committing several turnovers deep in his own territory like Darnold?

Dating back to the Cardinals game, the Seahawks defense has allowed six touchdowns. Four of them are off of Darnold giveaways, however lucky or reckless they may have been. Those TD drives have traveled 3, 19, 3, and 25 yards. Go back to the Texans game and six of the last 10 Seahawks touchdowns allowed are directly off of Darnold giveaways, and every drive started no worse than midfield."

 

[NoGain]

It's a real psychological conundrum. On the one hand, you want him to think about not turning the ball over, doing what it takes to not do so, but on the other hand, you don't want him to tighten up to the point where he's not doing the damage he's been doing with JSN, Horton, and others. He has been big-play-Sam for much of the year.

As keasely mentioned, he never got sacked and hardly hit yesterday. And our offensive schemes were quite productive when you look at the offensive stat lines, especially in comparison to the Rams. Maybe it's as simple as convincing him not to try to do too much, not feel as if he always has to try to make something happen when it's evident it's not there.

I watched some of the Eagles/Lions game on SNF. Darnold wasn't nearly under the pressure Goff was last night. And that could well be a team we face in the playoffs.

 

[pmedic920]

This is predictably the national narrative today for obvious reasons. Sam crumbles in big time games. Agree?

Didn’t until yesterday.

Now I want him to prove it.

Still waiting to see some X&O film breakdown.

I’m hoping that there were legitimate reasons and it’s not ALL on him.

I didn’t vote because I’m not convinced it’s a Black and White issue

 

[Maelstrom787]

I trust Sam to execute a ball-control, rush heavy offense.

I trust Sam not to be a locker room problem and get buy-in from his soldiers.

I trust Sam to feed our stud in JSN.

I trust Sam in regular games with regular stakes.

But...

I mean, it's been a trend his entire career. He just... he falls apart. He panics in big moments, he short circuits, and he makes unthinkable errors. He looks like an entirely different player when the stakes get high.

He's a prototypical stud in the mold of Carson Palmer otherwise. Great arm, can put the ball on the money when rolling out either direction, and a perfect quarterback build.

I just can't trust him to win for us in big matchups. I can't trust him to put the team on his back and take over when they need it. Hell... I can't even really trust him to just refrain from actively giving the big games away.

I don't want it to be like this. He is a franchise quarterback otherwise. He really is.

He's got the damn yips, and its a shame. Its all mental.

 

[toffee]

No worries guys, Darnold will be back to himself in the coming weeks, we are still on track for 14-3 or at least 13-4.

 

[oldhawkfan]

Heres the thing. How many "big games" has he actually been a part of? Did he play in any with the Jets? The Panthers? As a backup in SF? It essentially boils down to last year and this year. Maybe its just another part of his growth as a QB. Everyone seems to bring up the Vikings one playoff game last year, which also happens to be the only playoff game hes ever played in so far. In that playoff game last year the Vikings oline was a mess and did him no favors.

He has basically played in 28 games between last year and this year where he was actually on a team with a chance. Every single QB who has ever played the game has experienced a crap outing. So far this year his successes far out weigh his failures. If he continues to throw multiple INTs in games from here on out then I will say yes to moving on from him. I know that wasn't one of the options in this poll but thats essentially what Seahawks fans are saying about yesterdays performance. It has brought into question his viability for the future. We went from hes a potential MVP candidate up until about 1:00 yesterday afternoon to do we need a new QB by 4:30 yesterday.

 

[GemCity]

I’m a bit shocked we’re debating what ‘big’ games are.

Take the Packers example…GB was 1-5 in their division last year.

Does anyone think the Rams game wasn’t a ‘big’ game?

Never mind…don’t answer that.

Yesterday’s KC vs Denver was a ‘big’ game.

There’s statistical implications at certain points during the season.

Homerism isn’t a bad thing. I applaud those who think along those lines. I tried. I’m way too ‘glass is half empty’ to get on that blind allegiance train.

I am optimistic that MM can get Sam straightened out. Like Mal alluded to, I don’t expect Sam to take over in ‘big’ games and simply will the Hawks to win after win. A Mahomes…Josh Allen…Burrow or Jackson..me3 back in the day type performance in tight games.

But, I’d expect better than absolute shit in taking care of the ball. Especially in ‘big’ games.