Culture
In Sam Darnold, Seahawks got a younger, cheaper QB. It won’t matter unless they support him
The Seattle Seahawks have their Geno Smith replacement in Sam Darnold. Now they need to get him some help.
Seattle’s agreement with Darnold is a three-year, $100.5 million contract with $55 million guaranteed, according to The Athletic’s Dianna Russini.
On paper, it’s essentially the same deal Baker Mayfield signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers last offseason after a resurgent 2023 season. When accounting for the rise in the salary cap since then, however, Darnold’s deal looks more like an updated version of the three-year, $75 million contract Smith signed in March 2023 after his breakout season in 2022.
By average annual salary, Darnold’s contract is one of the lowest among veteran starting quarterbacks. Justin Fields’ two-year, $40 million contract with the New York Jets — also agreed to on Monday — is currently the lowest. The rankings could change depending on what happens with Aaron Rodgers and Russell Wilson.
But regardless, the Seahawks are acquiring Darnold for a bargain relative to the rest of the veteran quarterback market, and probably for $7 million to $12 million less per year than Smith’s expected extension with the Raiders.
Geno Smith is expected to get a new deal with Las Vegas. He’s been looking to make between $40-$45 million a year.
— Dianna Russini (@DMRussini) March 8, 2025
Seattle is banking on getting the best version of Darnold, who before last season had just one season in which he threw for more than 3,000 yards and completed at least 60 percent of his passes (2019 with the Jets). At his best, Darnold is an athletic, strong-armed quarterback who can make big-time throws. There’s a reason he had the sixth-highest touchdown rate in the league at 6.4 percent, just a few points behind Joe Burrow (6.6) and well above the league average of 4.8 percent (all stats provided by TruMedia) in 2024.
Seattle saw some of Darnold’s best work up close in Minnesota’s Week 16 win at Lumen Field.
The Vikings were able to get that version of Darnold last season by giving him a capable offensive line — albeit one that struggled late in the year — a very good scheme that was heavy on play-action dropbacks, and one of the best wide receiver tandems in the league. But acquiring a younger, cheaper option at quarterback won’t matter if the Seahawks can’t give him that same level of support, starting with the offensive line.
Seattle is expected to sign former Ravens offensive lineman Josh Jones on a one-year deal worth up to $4.75 million, according to a report Monday from Ian Rapoport of NFL Network. Jones has started multiple games at guard and tackle since entering the league as a third-round pick of the Cardinals in 2020. He’s likely to be a do-it-all depth piece on the line and perhaps a replacement for swing tackle George Fant, who was released as a cap-saving measure last week.
Seattle should still actively search for more bodies up front. The first day of free agency wasn’t a busy one for veteran centers, but a couple of the best options came off the board. The Chicago Bears agreed to terms with The Athletic’s top-ranked center, Drew Dalman, on a three-year, $42 million contract that makes him the second-highest-paid center by average annual salary. Chicago entered this offseason with the same interior offensive line needs as Seattle, and the price the team paid to protect quarterback Caleb Williams speaks to how expensive it can be to upgrade the front line.
Chicago traded a 2026 fourth-round pick to Kansas City for All-Pro guard Joe Thuney, who has a 2025 base salary of $15.5 million but is due for a contract extension ahead of his age-33 season. The Bears also traded a 2025 sixth-round pick to the Rams for 28-year-old guard Jonah Jackson, who is due $17.5 million this season.
Seattle general manager John Schneider has expressed apprehension about making those sorts of commitments. He has made exceptions in the past, such as the three-year, $22.5 million deal he signed 30-year-old Gabe Jackson to after trading a fifth-round pick in 2021. The move appeased quarterback Russell Wilson, who publicly complained about his pass protection, but it was a deviation from Schneider’s typical player acquisition strategy. Jackson was useful for only the first year of the deal.
All of this ties into why the Seahawks were mostly dormant on the first day of the negotiating period. Schneider wants to take calculated risks in free agency, but that can be tough to do when Seattle is one of many teams needing interior offensive upgrades.
One of those other needy teams is Minnesota, which agreed to terms with center Ryan Kelly, The Athletic’s third-ranked center, on a two-year, $18 million contract ($9 million guaranteed). This Seahawks free-agency plan listed Kelly as a fallback option in the event the Seahawks couldn’t land Josh Myers, The Athletic’s second-ranked center. At this point in free agency, a Myers signing would be Seattle’s best path to upgrading the center spot, which is critical in Klint Kubiak’s offense.
The beginning of free agency was a good one for guards, and the next few days might produce more of the same. The following deals were agreed to on Monday, according to multiple reports:
- Aaron Banks, Green Bay Packers — four years, $77 million
- Patrick Mekari, Jacksonville Jaguars — three years, $37.5 million
- James Daniels, Miami Dolphins — three years, $24 million
- Ben Bredeson, Tampa Bay Buccaneers — three years, $22 million
- Evan Brown, Arizona Cardinals — two years, $11.5 million
There are still multiple players available from The Athletic’s top 150 rankings, including the top-ranked guard, Will Fries, No. 14 on the list. The others are Mekhi Becton (No. 26), Teven Jenkins (No. 33), Brandon Scherff (No. 51), Kevin Zeitler (No. 58), Will Hernandez (No. 79), Shaq Mason (No. 115) and Dalton Risner (No. 147).
The structure of Darnold’s deal will reveal more about Seattle’s available cap space, but the team hasn’t otherwise made much of a dent with its other signings. Linebacker Ernest Jones IV and defensive tackle Jarran Reed have Year 1 cap hits of $5.2 and $5 million, respectively, according to Over the Cap. Seattle has the cap room to add multiple impact players up front on the second day of free agency.
If Banks’ deal is any indication, Fries is due for a major payday, although the broken leg that ended his 2024 season could limit his market somewhat. Seattle might have to sweeten its proposal with more years, guaranteed money or both to pry him away from another guard-needy team, such as Minnesota. (Update: Fries agreed to a five-year, $88 million deal with Minnesota on Tuesday, a league source told The Athletic’s Dianna Russini.)
Scherff or Zeitler would be nice backup plans who make the Seahawks better, but since they’re 33 and 35, those two former Pro Bowlers would obviously be temporary solutions.
Seattle needs to be active in the wide receiver market, too, but the offensive line should be the priority. Once that is settled, Seattle can pursue receivers such as Demarcus Robinson, Marquez Valdes-Scantling or even Cooper Kupp, who is expected to be released by the Rams (it’s worth noting the Seahawks have former Rams assistant coach Jake Peetz on staff as the passing game coordinator).
An intriguing fullback option has also emerged, as the 49ers are expected to release veteran Kyle Juszczyk, according to The Athletic’s Jeff Howe.
But Day 2 of free agency needs to be about ensuring the Seahawks have a much better run game than they’ve had in recent years, and that Darnold isn’t constantly dodging pass rushers the way he was in the wild-card loss to the Rams. That game looked like many of Seattle’s outings with Smith, who was one of the most pressured quarterbacks in the league last season.
The only way to justify swapping Smith for Darnold in the name of youth and cap savings is to reallocate those funds to the position group most responsible for helping the quarterback be at his best.
(Photo of Sam Darnold, left, and Seahawks outside linebacker Boye Mafe: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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