At USC, Sam Darnold was a star. When he joined the NFL, a lot was expected of him. But his professional career hasn’t quite lived up to the grandeur of his Trojan days.
The expectation for Darnold and the Minnesota Vikings, his new team, is that he can recapture some of the magic he possessed as the Trojans’ signal caller.
After graduating as a four-star recruit from Southern California’s San Clemente High School, Darnold enjoyed a stellar two-year career with the USC Trojans. Darnold was selected to the Freshman All-American Team in 2016 and won the Pac-12 Offensive Freshman of the Year award. In 2017, he led the Trojans to the Pac-12 Conference Championship and won the MVP award in the conference final.
In one of the most iconic Rose Bowls ever, Darnold and the Trojans faced battle against Penn State’s Nittany Lions and Saquon Barkley on January 2, 2017. In front of roughly 96,000 spectators, fifth-ranked Penn State was upset 52–49 by ninth-ranked USC. SBNation summed up the incredible match and Darnold’s outstanding performance as follows:
The 2017 Rose Bowl was one of the greatest games of the year, if not the greatest, for reasons that numbers cannot fully convey. There were several poignant turns, Saquon Barkley jokes, and Sam Darnold bullet passes in it.
However, the offense-heavy game meant that the figures would undoubtedly be impressive, and they were, including the following:]
A total of 473 yards of offense were amassed by USC’s redshirt freshman quarterback Darnold, surpassing Vince Young’s 467 yards in 2006 as the highest ever by a single player in a Rose Bowl. [And at that time, Young wasn’t a freshman]
453 yards of passing for Darnold. That falls just short of Oregon’s Danny O’Neill’s all-time Rose Bowl record of 456 against Penn.
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