Vikings QB Sam Darnold brought lessons from San Francisco to Minnesota

Sam Darnold learned to breathe again in San Francisco.

Darnold, who enjoyed a successful debut for the Vikings in last Sunday’s win over the Giants, spent all but one game last season watching a winning operation from the 49ers sideline. He credited San Francisco’s vast playbook and regimented game planning for teaching him a higher level of offense. He tipped a cap to 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy for providing an example of a quiet leader.

Darnold, the former No. 3 overall pick of the New York Jets in the country’s largest media market, said he also learned to drop the weight of the world from his shoulders. The Vikings will need to keep Darnold comfortable during Sunday’s home opener against his former team at U.S. Bank Stadium.

“When you’re at quarterback, I feel like a lot of times you can feel everything collapsing in on you,” Darnold said Wednesday. “Not just in the game, but theoretically as a whole. If things aren’t going your way, you can feel the weight of the world a little bit. At the end of the day, it’s your job to just put the ball in your playmaker’s hands and let them go make a play. It’s as simple as that sometimes. For me, it’s just being able to get the ball out and into their hands and let them go run with it.”

Darnold also learned a thing or two about the 49ers that Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell might want to learn for Sunday. Not that O’Connell, the former Rams coordinator, needs a ton of help game planning against his former NFC West rival. He downplayed the role players have in preparing for their former teams.

“Unless a bunch of them are going to end up being coaches like me,” O’Connell said. “Probably not often. But Sam’s a really bright guy and whatever we can get from him to help us as coaches, I’m going to try to do. But I also want to make sure we’re sensitive to his own process that he’s established.”

Darnold learned a lot in San Francisco, the first NFL team he got to choose during his initial journey into free agency in March 2023. The 49ers signed Darnold three days after starter Brock Purdy underwent surgery to repair the ulnar collateral ligament in his throwing elbow.

Though Purdy recovered fine, Darnold said being a backup on the sideline of a title-worthy team gave him a new perspective about how things are done in the NFL.

“Being able to prepare and be ready like I was the starter, but just sit back and watch everything that was going on in the organization, how things were run there,” Darnold said. “I really did learn a ton from Brock and the way he prepared, his quiet confidence that he had every single day. He’s not the rah-rah guy, not going to lead the team in breakdowns at the end of the year, but he’s just as steady as they come.”

Darnold said Purdy and the 49ers system also helped him understand “the role of a quarterback.”

“Watching Brock dish the ball out to guys, especially first and second down,” Darnold added. “If what we’re hunting up concept wise isn’t there, just to be able to check the ball down and let our guys run with it. Just understanding better the role of a quarterback.”

Vikings general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, whose NFL career began in San Francisco as a quantitative analyst from 2013 to 2019, said Darnold’s time with the 49ers was a pull in signing him.

“You know the type of training they’re going to be getting, what’s emphasized,” Adofo-Mensah said on the Aug. 17 broadcast of the Vikings’ preseason game against the Browns. “Talking about feet and eyes, different things like that, we know that they play a similar way. Frankly, similar offenses are going to shop in the same areas. They have Josh Dobbs, we have Sam Darnold because we definitely respect each other and what we do in the passing game.”

On the 49ers practice fields last year, Darnold first dove into the rigidness of the West Coast offense run by 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan, who leads a similar system to that which O’Connell brought to the Vikings from the Rams. Drop-back steps and eye progression have to be in rhythm, with timely passes hitting windows that often allow receivers to catch and run.

A year of 49ers practices helped set Darnold up for success in Minnesota, said ESPN analyst Dan Orlovsky.

“You have to have the blind muscle memory because that’s the foundation of that offense,” said Orlovsky, who played under Shanahan when he was the Texans coordinator in 2009. “Having that in San Francisco is huge, and just getting the bank of reps. … There’s a lot of the correlation and similar parts that he can bank on.”

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