USC’s Sam Darnold won’t bust in the NFL

Let’s not kid ourselves here, guys. Barring injury, there’s no chance former USC Trojans quarterback Sam Darnold will bust in the NFL.

2018 looks to be the Year of the Quarterback in the NFL Draft, with as many as five signal callers in contention to get selected in the first round. All five have serious upside and could be stars if the right organization picks them. However, there’s only one quarterback who has no potential to bust: Sam Darnold of the USC Trojans.

Darnold is coming off the board at No. 1 or No. 2. He’ll play his professional ball for either the Cleveland Browns, the New York Giants or one of a few teams who have the ammunition to move up to No. 2 in a trade with New York.

The most likely candidates to move up are the Buffalo Bills and the Arizona Cardinals, in that order. This is all assuming the Giants won’t draft him at No. 2, which they almost certainly will if the Browns take Wyoming Cowboys quarterback Josh Allen first overall.

So what’s so great about this California kid? Along with John Elway, Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck, Darnold is one of the most highly-touted quarterback prospects to come out of college in the last 35 years.

Darnold leaves USC after his redshirt sophomore year with the program. In 27 career games with the Trojans, Darnold completed 64.9 percent of his passes for 7,229 yards, 57 touchdowns and 22 interceptions. He averaged 8.5 yards per attempt at USC, boasting a career quarterback rating of 153.7.

USC won the Rose Bowl in his redshirt freshman season in 2016 over the Big Ten Champion Penn State Nittany Lions. Many thought that Penn State team deserved a College Football Playoff spot over the division rival Ohio State Buckeyes. As a redshirt sophomore in 2017, Darnold led the Trojans to a Pac-12 Championship over the rival Stanford Cardinal. However, the Trojans fell to Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl Classic, 24-7.

Darnold is 6-foot-3, 220 pounds with 9 3/8-inch hands. He has the size to be a franchise quarterback. If need be, he could start day one, but he’d be well advised to spend his rookie year backing up a veteran starter. He’s dynamic, albeit a tad raw. Then again, wouldn’t all quarterbacks in this draft class fit that classification?

If everything goes right for Darnold, his NFL prototypes are Green Bay Packers legend Brett Favre and Pittsburgh Steelers future Pro Football Hall of Famer Ben Roethlisberger. Darnold has a powerful right arm, is mobile enough and thrives when improvising in and around the pocket.

Favre was as tough as they come, setting an NFL record for most consecutive starts while with Green Bay. He was a bit of a gunslinger, but that was part of his charm. Favre might have only won one Super Bowl with the Packers, but he did bring home three NFL MVPs to the Cheesehead Faithful.

Roethlisberger is bigger and a tad more mobile than Darnold. However, both have demonstrated a certain knack for making something out of nothing when the original play goes off script. It is important to win from the pocket, but Darnold’s composure in chaos is next level. This should serve him in his professional career, as it did in the Pac-12.

The less optimistic comparisons would be to Luck of the Indianapolis Colts or Carson Wentz of the Philadelphia Eagles. Like Luck, Darnold has the ability to carry a so-so roster to the NFL playoffs. The Colts weren’t exactly beaming with talent when Luck won 11 games in each of his first three NFL seasons. On the downside, Darnold could have a knack for turning the ball over like Luck. Darnold’s biggest criticism at USC was his proclivity to succumb to the sack fumble.

Wentz was fantastic in his second season in the league. He was the front-runner to be NFL MVP before tearing his ACL in a road game versus the Los Angeles Rams. Darnold isn’t as mobile and doesn’t have as powerful of an arm as Wentz, but may end up being a more accurate passer. Look for Darnold to complete somewhere in the range of 60 to 63 percent of his passes at the NFL level.

Turnovers and the occasional strip-sack fumble are Darnold and Wentz’s two biggest criticisms going forward as franchise quarterbacks. It happened often enough to Darnold in college for it to become a thing that casual draft experts tend to dwell on. If he can do a better job of holding on to the ball in the pros, the guy will be a rock star. Presumably Cleveland would röck önce again. \m/

So what’s the absolute nadir for Darnold as a professional quarterback? Two lower-end NFL signal callers Darnold might be compared to are Blake Bortles of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Jameis Winston of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

But let’s just hold on for a second. Fact: Bortles is not a bust. He’s been the Jaguars’ starting quarterback for the last four years and was a series away from leading Jacksonville to the Super Bowl in 2017. Bortles beat the self-proclaimed second-best team in the AFC in the Steelers twice last year, once to end Pittsburgh’s season at Heinz Field nonetheless. Mechanical issues have hindered Bortles’ accuracy, but he shares a gamer element with Darnold in big spots.

If Bortles is the floor in Darnold’s NFL projection, a bad Browns team would be on board with that. The heir apparent to Bernie Kosar in Northeast Ohio gridiron action remains in flux. Maybe even a Giants organization that has grown tired of seeing lame duck picks off the right hand of Eli Manning fall Sunday after fall Sunday? Why does NBC keep broadcasting this on national television? It’s a script Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth know all too well and so do we.

Overall, Winston’s game seems to be the most comparable to Darnold’s. Though Winston hasn’t led the Buccaneers to the NFC playoffs in his first three seasons, he still has room to grow as a professional.

Darnold may be more mature than Winston, but you could see him trying to force throws into tight windows like Winston does in Dirk Koetter’s Air Coryell in Tampa. Disclaimer: Darnold will throw the occasional “what were you thinking?” pick as an NFL franchise quarterback, though not as often as Winston. That is Winston’s professional calling card, but may not be Darnold’s. Just saying.

Looking forward, why won’t the guy bust? Let’s put it this way: Just look at what he did for the USC program once he took over for an overwhelmed Max Browne in a Week 4 road game versus the Utah Utes in 2016.

USC might have lost that game to a solid Utah team, but the Trojans didn’t lose again the rest of the season. The Trojans rattled off nine wins in a row that fall with Darnold as a starter, finishing 10-3 (7-2) on the year.

Darnold’s hype couldn’t be higher after that stellar Rose Bowl performance over Penn State. He would have been a top-10 pick in the 2017 draft if he was eligible. In that game, he completed 33 of 53 passes for 453 yards, five touchdowns and an interception. That was one of the greatest Rose Bowls ever played, and Darnold was the central figure for the winning team.

USC won its first four games of the 2017 NCAA season before falling on the road against a good Washington State Cougars team in a night game. Nobody outside of the Fighting Mike Leaches would have won that game in Pullman that day. It helped that Washington State had its own NFL quarterback prospect in Luke Falk. The Trojans won the Pac-12 South with a 8-1 conference record, finishing the year at 11-3 on the season after falling to Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl Classic.

So what happened to Browne once he lost the starting job at USC to Darnold? He transferred to the Pittsburgh Panthers and couldn’t lead the team to a bowl game. Apparently filling the shoes of Nathan Peterman isn’t as easy as it looks. Then again, Joshua Dobbs did a fine job of that with the Tennessee Volunteers, Peterman’s first collegiate team.

Let’s not forget that USC got absolutely boat raced by the Alabama Crimson Tide in that 2016 Week 1 neutral site game in Arlington, Texas. Browne was the Trojans starting quarterback over Darnold. Alabama beat the tar out of USC, 52-6 on Labor Day Weekend at AT&T Stadium. That 1-3 start to 2016 had many of the Trojan Faithful questioning why the interim tag was removed on new head coach Clay Helton.

In a blue-blood college football program like USC, it’s usually clear when the right coach is hired. There’s expected to be an uptick in on-field performance in year two. While USC looked to be back to good under Helton, most of that fell on Darnold’s right arm. We just didn’t know it at the time.

One could argue he was carrying a so-so Pac-12 team under the illusion that it had returned to national prominence. The Pac-12 hasn’t produced a national champion in the College Football Playoff era. Some could argue that Darnold was under-coached at USC. They wouldn’t be wrong.

Even though he only appeared in 27 games for the Trojans, Darnold is ready to take his football talents to the professional level. While he hails from Southern California, he has the blue-collar ethos that will play very well in tough cities like Cleveland, New York or even Buffalo.

Darnold loves football and is a no-nonsense on-field leader. He can be an adult right away in football markets that have often needed a babysitter or three in them. Keep in mind he’s a 20-year-old football player and not a miracle worker. These things take time.

Should his new employer trot him out Week 1 to start the 2017 NFL season, look for that awful football team to still go 5-11 or 6-10. Darnold is simply an elevator of the talent around him. USC might be a blue-blood, but we’ve seen more talented teams in Los Angeles than we have in the Helton era of Trojans football. Look for USC to regress back to an eight-win team in 2018 sans Darnold.

Shockingly, no former Trojans quarterback has ever made it to a Super Bowl. Former Heisman Trophy winner Carson Palmer came the closest, but that was at the tail-end of his prime in his best season as a professional in 2015. The Panthers were a buzzsaw for Palmer’s Cardinals in Charlotte that late January evening. All Palmer did was throw picks like they were going out of style. It was bad, real bad.

With his entire NFL career ahead of him, it wouldn’t be shocking for Darnold to buck the trend of former USC quarterbacks not getting to the Super Bowl. Darnold is a mature, cerebral player that thrives in winning time. If he’s not someone’s franchise quarterback for the next decade-plus, that would be a shame.

Next: 2018 NFL mock draft: Browns, Giants and Jets land quarterbacks

Unless his general manager does a horrendous job in constructing an offensive line, Darnold is not going to bust, period. Look for him to carry a once-proud organization out of the abyss and into national relevancy. He did it for two years at USC and he will do it again in the NFL.