The Minnesota Vikings will not franchise tag Sam Darnold, allowing them to trade him to a quarterback-needy organization. While the Vikings may extend Darnold and keep him at a reduced rate, they will likely part ways with him and usher in the J.J. McCarthy era this year.
That could be tough for fans to accept after Darnold’s 2024 season. The seventh-year quarterback had a career year with the Vikings. He completed 66% of his passes for 4,319 yards and 35 touchdowns on the way to a 14-3 record. However, his final two games were underwhelming at best. Still, not receiving any compensation for his departure could sting, especially considering the Vikings will likely only have four picks in this year’s draft.
But if Darnold does leave in free agency, are the Vikings really getting nothing in return?
Tangibly, no. Darnold’s new deal could earn the Vikings a compensatory pick in 2026, possibly as high as in the third round.
Minnesota could use the money saved by not extending Darnold to fill gaps across the roster. They need to bolster the interior offensive and defensive lines, and Josh Metellus is the only regular contributor in the secondary under contract for 2025. It may not register as a trade in the transaction log, but they could use the cap space to add several players instead of only Darnold.
If Darnold signs elsewhere, it would further solidify Kevin O’Connell and the team’s reputation as a quarterback factory. That could attract future free-agent quarterbacks and bright, young offensive minds eager to join an organization that can develop and elevate their own quarterbacks. They can also address and fix veteran quarterbacks’ issues before arriving in Minnesota, providing them opportunities for a fresh start elsewhere.
They’ve already done it with Kirk Cousins. Regarded as a player who put up good stats but couldn’t produce in crunch time, Cousins entered the 2022 season as a .500 quarterback. In O’Connell’s first season, Cousins set an NFL record with 11 wins in one-possession games on the way to a 13-4 finish. That included the biggest comeback in NFL history, with the Vikings coming back from down 33 points to defeat the Indianapolis Colts and clinch the NFC North. Cousins threw for a then career-high 460 yards and four touchdowns in the win.
Cousins was on his way to helping the Vikings get back into the NFC playoff race when he tore his Achilles in October 2023. One week later, the Vikings inserted Josh Dobbs into the lineup days after being acquired via trade. Still, he engineered a bizarre comeback win against the Atlanta Falcons while O’Connell talked him through the play calls in his headset. O’Connell explained every detail, from who was running what route to the progressions, as Dobbs walked to the line of scrimmage.
Dobbs Mania lasted a few weeks before O’Connell couldn’t squeeze more magic out of him. Still, the Vikings stayed in the NFC playoff race longer than they should have. After the season, Dobbs left for the San Francisco 49ers, Kirk Cousins signed a four-year, $180 million deal with the Falcons.
The Vikings replaced Cousins and Dobbs with Darnold, who had spent the 2023 season in San Francisco, hoping that a season with offensive genius Kyle Shanahan could help turn his career around.
San Francisco gave him limited playing time, and he started only one game. Still, Darnold showed enough promise that Minnesota felt it could help him build on that season. Shanahan’s coaching helped reassure the Vikings that what they saw on tape also transcended to the quarterback room.
One year later, the O’Connell and the Vikings are now sitting in the position the 49ers occupied in 2024. Do teams around the league believe Darnold can replicate his 2024 season and turn them into a winner? Maybe not. But do they believe Darnold can be a Geno Smith or Baker Mayfield-tier starter? Probably.
With a season of film showing he isn’t the same quarterback that flamed out with the New York Jets and Carolina Panthers, Darnold now has a chance to receive his first major payday in the league. He only made $10 million in 2024, but he now has an opportunity to sign a multi-year deal that could be up to $40 million per year.
Seeing what happened with Darnold could push Daniel Jones, another first-round quarterback who didn’t live up to expectations, to re-sign with the Vikings. Moving on from Darnold would usher in the McCarthy Era, but Jones could stay in Minnesota and bridge McCarthy while improving under O’Connell. It’d be much like what Darnold did in 2023 with the 49ers, learning from a respected coaching staff and setting himself up to prove he is closer to the quarterback teams believed he could be when the Giants took him sixth overall in 2019.
With McCarthy still rehabbing his knee, it may not be hard to envision Jones taking many first-team reps during the offseason. If teams believe Jones has improved, he could be in demand next offseason. A Darnold-like performance could set Jones up to eye a second chance as a franchise quarterback in two years.
Like any well-known, high-level operation that would attract former top prospects around the league. Not only would it be a destination for quarterbacks who feel they’ve never fully realized their potential. It would be a destination for young offensive minds who want to be part of the process and learn from O’Connell.
Assistant quarterbacks coach Grant Udinski, 29, spent the past three years in Minnesota, working his way up the coaching ladder. The Vikings could only do so much to hide one of their young top minds, though. After Darnold’s Pro Bowl season, five teams interviewed Udinski for their vacant offensive coordinator position. He took the Jacksonville Jaguars’ job on Feb. 5, showing O’Connell and the Vikings can accelerate a young offensive coach’s climb up the NFL ladder.
There’s a scene in The Wolf Of Wall Street where Jordan Belfort, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, does an interview with Forbes. The interview doesn’t portray him positively, but the publicity it gave him made his firm, Stratton-Oakmont, a place where college students dreaming of being Wall Street big shots wanted to go. Lines of young adults were in his office daily, begging Belfort to look at their resumés and give them a job at his firm.
The Vikings can have a similar effect on young coaches and quarterbacks. Prospects may bypass jobs that pay more at other organizations to be taught by one of the league’s best. That can help lead to larger paydays in the future for quarterbacks who go through Minnesota’s system after working under O’Connell.
Young coaches looking to make a name for themselves will gravitate to Minnesota. Being an assistant quarterbacks coach may not be enough to garner offensive coordinator attention in an organization like the Jets. But if you’re the assistant quarterbacks coach for a first-time Pro Bowler, teams will dig deeper to see if they can find the next hot prospect.
It hurts to lose Udinski. It also will probably hurt to lose Darnold after seeing what he did in 2024. But if O’Connell and the rest of the coaching staff believe in what they are doing, they know they don’t need one particular quarterback to make their offense perform at a high level.
Everyone wants to find the next blue-chip company in the investing world. But not everyone has the foresight for that. All the numbers and projections in the world only mean so much if you don’t know what to do with them. That’s why Warren Buffet, one of the world’s most famous investors, says the most important investment a person can make is in themselves.
“The best investment by far is anything that develops yourself,” Buffet says, “and it’s not taxed at all.”
That can apply to Minnesota’s quarterback machine. Getting a third-round pick for Darnold would be helpful in 2025. But if they can continue to maximize the potential of every quarterback that comes through their system, that will pay more dividends than any Day 2 or 3 draft pick ever could.