Panthers castoff Sam Darnold avoids big mistakes, wins Super Bowl over Drake Maye
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- Sam Darnold, once cast off in Carolina, had a turnover-free Super Bowl win with Seattle.
- Drake Maye struggled under pressure for New England and committed three turnovers.
- Seahawks defense dominated game, while Darnold avoided the big mistake in 29-13 win.
Two quarterbacks with deep connections to Charlotte and the Carolinas squared off Sunday in the Super Bowl.
And it was Sam Darnold — the castoff quarterback who spent two completely forgettable seasons in Carolina — who ended up with the Super Bowl ring.
Known for much of his career for making the big mistake, Darnold instead played a steady, unspectacular, turnover-free game, which was more than enough in a 29-13 win in Super Bowl LX, given the havoc that Seattle’s defense was wreaking. That Seahawks D totally flummoxed New England’s QB Drake Maye, the Huntersville, N.C., and University of North Carolina product. Maye was sacked six times and committed three turnovers, including one fourth-quarter interception that turned into a 45-yard defensive touchdown and sealed the game for the Seahawks.
Maye is only 23 years old. He will likely be back to the Super Bowl again, and he’ll play better.
In this one, though, he missed a number of throws when he had time, and he didn’t have time too often. He was overwhelmed, much like Cam Newton was 10 years ago in the same stadium, by the opposing team’s pass rush.
Maye was at Super Bowl 50 and watched that game, wearing Panthers regalia along with his father Mark. It ended in disappointment for the Maye family, and this one did, too.
The Patriots didn’t even score for the first three quarters and were in danger of being the first NFL team to ever get shut out in the Super Bowl. Bad Bunny had been in the end zone by then; New England hadn’t.
Finally, the Patriots scored two touchdowns in the fourth quarter to make the score a little more respectable (that period contained 30 of the game’s 42 points). Maye’s numbers by the end, padded by the fourth-quarter surge, looked fine on the surface: 27-for-43 for 295 yards and two touchdowns. But it was his three turnovers — one lost fumble, two interceptions — that were the bigger story and will be what he most remembers in the offseason.
Darnold, on the other hand, threw for a modest 202 yards, on 19-for-38 passing. But he never made a major error. He threw one touchdown pass, managed the game well and went home a winner.
Both players were No. 3 overall picks in separate NFL drafts, but Maye is still on his first team. Darnold, 28, is already on his fifth. He started with the New York Jets, got traded to Carolina, backed up Brock Purdy in San Francisco, became a star in Minnesota and now has won a Super Bowl in Seattle.
“It’s unbelievable,” Darnold said on the NBC broadcast afterward. And if you think back to when he went 8-9 for the Panthers in two seasons as an on-and-off starter, that’s an accurate statement.
Let’s think back a little to Darnold’s stint here. We saw a little of Darnold the winner here, and it was right at the beginning: Carolina began 3-0 in 2021 in Darnold’s first three games with the Panthers.
But then Christian McCaffrey got hurt and Darnold started making the sort of processing errors you’d expect from an ancient computer system. Carolina went 2-12 over the final 14 games in 2021. Darnold ended up with nine TD passes and 13 interceptions for that 2021 season — still the worst TD/INT ratio of his career. Then-coach Matt Rhule wanted to bring in Baker Mayfield for competition the next year, and he and his coaching staff quickly decided that Mayfield had won the starting job in training camp in 2022.
Mayfield was worse than Darnold, though, ending up 1-5 as a starter and helping to get Rhule fired in midseason 2022 (yes, the offensive scheme and Rhule were obviously part of the problem, since Mayfield has also flourished in Tampa Bay since leaving Charlotte).
Darnold would eventually re-inherit the Carolina job at the end of the season under interim coach Steve Wilks. He played OK in a run-heavy offense, and Carolina won some games, but it wasn’t nearly enough for the Panthers to seriously consider bringing him back. Darnold left for San Francisco and a backup QB job in free agency, and Carolina drafted Bryce Young No. 1 overall in the 2023 draft.
But Darnold has since authored one of the NFL’s best redemption stories in recent years. He had never won more than seven games as a starter in an NFL regular season from 2018-23. The past two years he has won 28 regular-season games. Minnesota miscalculated and let him go after 2024 after a 14-3 regular season but a playoff flop, which meant Seattle scooped him up on a massive contract and Darnold won 14 more times again in 2025 before cruising through the playoffs.
Would it have been a cool story if Maye, the hometown kid who grew up a Panthers fan, had won a Super Bowl at age 23? Of course. But Darnold winning one is cool, too. Yes, Seattle’s defense was the primary reason. But Darnold played well enough. The ghosts he referred to were once while with the Jets were long gone Sunday.
“As long as you believe in yourself, anything’s possible,” he said in the postgame celebration Sunday.
Darnold did, and it was.
This story was originally published February 9, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Panthers castoff Sam Darnold avoids big mistakes, wins Super Bowl over Drake Maye."
