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The Seattle Seahawks struck gold with the Sam Darnold signing ahead of the 2025 season. While they were heavily criticized after offloading Geno Smith and bringing in Darnold, the former No. 3 overall pick rewarded the Seahawks with a Super Bowl run that will be remembered forever.
Now, the honeymoon phase is over and Darnold is back to work for the 2026 season. He signed a three-year deal with the Seahawks in free agency in 2025, which will make him eligible for another contract extension during the 2027 offseason.
That’s a ways away, but the Seahawks will naturally be planning for what that deal might look like. As for Darnold, he should have a close eye on Baker Mayfield’s contract talks this summer, according to NFL insider Albert Breer.
“I think it’ll be instructive to watch Baker Mayfield’s negotiation in Tampa, because the trajectories of the former Panthers teammates and 2018 draft classmates have been eerily similar—traded from their original teams to Carolina, stabilize as a backup with California NFC West teams for a bit, then go to start on one-year deals, before turning those deals into mid-market contracts with the opportunity to become a franchise’s long-term answer,” Breer wrote.
Mayfield is heading into the final year of a three-year, $100 million deal with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. That is a nearly identical deal to the one that Darnold is playing on in Seattle, and the 2018 classmates have been linked throughout their careers.
Mayfield hasn’t had the same success, at least on a team level, in Tampa Bay that Darnold has had in Seattle, but he has still proven to be a quarterback that you can win with. Whether the Buccaneers will be willing to pay top-of-the-market money for that or not remains to be seen.
Darnold still has something to prove this season after Klint Kubiak departed to be the head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. While his 2025 season was spectacular, Seattle will want to see similar production again in 2026 before giving him a big contract. If he can repeat that this fall, he will get a big bag of cash next summer.
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