About a decade ago, the last time the Seahawks and Patriots played in the Super Bowl, Michael Gervais stood on the Seattle sideline as the final moments played out: the Seahawks marching downfield, Malcolm Butler’s shocking interception, Seattle left slack-jawed as New England celebrated.
Gervais isn’t a player or a coach. He’s a performance psychologist. After that game, he played an important role: helping the Seahawks process the gut-wrenching loss. Gervais had been hired a few years prior by Pete Carroll, then the Seahawks’ head coach, who believed in developing players mentally, not just physically, at a time when sports psychology wasn’t as mainstream.
“He made it part of the water we were drinking,” Gervais told NBC News. “It was part of the air we were breathing. It was embedded through the culture.”
This season, the Seahawks’ culture had a new project: the redemption of quarterback Sam Darnold.
Once labeled a draft bust, Darnold had been cast aside by a number of teams. During those years, he had gone looking for better coaching, had rebuilt his confidence and finally landed with the Seahawks, a team that happened to prioritize the mental part of the game.
Darnold has played so well this year that he’s led Seattle all the way to the Super Bowl, where the Seahawks will play — guess who — the New England Patriots on Sunday. On the biggest stage imaginable, Darnold will have a chance to exorcise Seattle’s demons and complete his own arc from castoff to champion.
“He understands how much his team believes in him and has his back,” Seattle coach Mike Macdonald, Carroll’s successor, said at a news conference this week. “So just keep firing away, man, keep being you.”
Darnold always had the pedigree of a Super Bowl quarterback. Growing up in San Clemente, California, he was graded as a top high school recruit and started at USC for two years, becoming a hero after he mounted a comeback win over Penn State in the 2017 Rose Bowl. He had a big arm and flashed athleticism. Pundits applauded when the Jets took him No. 3 in the 2018 draft.
But for his first five seasons, Darnold found himself stuck on dysfunctional teams — first the New York Jets and later the Carolina Panthers. In that time, the Jets and Panthers cycled through four head coaches and five offensive coordinators, including interim coaches replacing those fired midseason. On those teams, Darnold threw almost as many interceptions as touchdowns.
He had two low points in 2019, his second year in the league.
That September, the Jets were playing the Cleveland Browns on “Monday Night Football.” Darnold had just been diagnosed with mononucleosis, the ailment sometimes described as “kissing disease,” and was home recovering.
During the broadcast, ESPN displayed a graphic showing Darnold looking serious and pointing out toward the viewer in the type of pose seen on old Uncle Sam posters. Next to him were the words: “OUT INDEFINITELY MONONUCLEOSIS.” Immediately, it went viral on social media.
“He was getting made fun of pretty good on the internet for a couple weeks,” Jordan Palmer, Darnold’s longtime personal quarterback coach, told NBC News. “He just had to sit at his house. Things weren’t going well. Now everyone gets to make fun of you.”
Later that season, the Jets were playing on “Monday Night Football” again, this time against the Patriots — and Darnold had one of the worst games of his life. He turned over the ball five times and the Jets lost 33-0. He was also wearing a microphone for the TV broadcast. At one point, ESPN caught him talking on the bench during a vulnerable moment.
“Seeing ghosts,” he said.
That went viral, too. People made more jokes. Here was evidence the Patriots had rattled Darnold to the point he didn’t seem to know what he was doing. “Seeing ghosts,” Palmer explained, is actually a common phrase among coaches.
“Just eyes all over the place,” Palmer said. “Feels like there’s more than 11 [defenders] out there. Sometimes that’s because the quarterback has no idea what he’s doing, and sometimes that’s because the quarterback could’ve been better prepared for that situation. And I’m not weighing in on which one it was.”
In 2023, Darnold became a free agent for the first time. He turned down “much better opportunities,” Palmer said, to sign with the San Francisco 49ers, to spend a season backing up Brock Purdy and being coached by Kyle Shanahan, a leading NFL offensive mind.
Palmer compared it to a businessperson returning to school for an executive training program. “They go back there to get a different perspective, maybe a different way of thinking about the same problem they always see,” he said. “It was a year of just resetting. Go to practice where you’re not preparing for the game, you’re just getting better yourself.”