The Spirit Of St. Darnold

Luke Braun breaks down the refined recklessness of Sam Darnold, a quarterback who can turn the dial to 11 and win your team some games -- if you let him.

Photo courtesy Getty Images

It’s May 20, 1927. A scrawny aviator from Little Falls, Minnesota sits in a rickety 28-foot single-engine airplane. It’s filled with gasoline - almost entirely gasoline. More gasoline than this plane has ever carried. He has a few sandwiches and a wicker chair. Mud from a rainy takeoff still cakes the bottom of his aircraft.

He looks out at the sunset over the coast of Newfoundland. He knows what this landmark means. It’s his last chance to turn back. To land back on Long Island with his life intact. If he presses further forward, he won’t have enough fuel to make it back should anything go wrong. He’ll have no way to go but forward.

Anyone who grew up in Minnesota knows the story of Charles Lindbergh, the first man to successfully fly solo across the Atlantic. It’s a story of near-suicidal insanity. To make this trip work, Lucky Lindy had to custom-build a monoplane with many of the normal safety features stripped away to make room for more fuel.

There were so many decisions Lindbergh made that put his life in jeopardy. The plane’s custom design had no windshield or forward visibility. The sheer weight of 450 gallons of fuel meant there couldn’t be a radio. There would be no lifeline. No protection. Just a monoplane carrying five potential fireballs and barely clearing the trees.

To see, Lindbergh needed a periscope. To navigate, he needed to look out the side of his plane. But because of the big fuel tanks, he couldn’t see out the side easily either. That means that to navigate, had to roll the whole plane to see out the side, see what he needed to see, then use a simple compass to realign his trajectory. He didn’t know how to navigate celestially - rather, he watched how landmarks moved over time, a process called dead reckoning.

He didn’t have any of the experience to be the man to try this. Lindbergh had just 2,000 hours of experience, mostly carrying mail for USPS between Chicago and St. Louis. That’s roughly 300 miles, as compared to the 3,600-mile journey he had planned. He’d never cleared a body of water as big as the Long Island Sound, let alone the entire Atlantic.

There are so many reasons for Charles Lindbergh to see the fiery red hues of a setting sun wash over the rocky Canadian coast, realize that this whole thing is a death trap, and turn around. A mailman from Minnesota doesn’t need to be in this situation.

But Lindbergh didn’t stop. Instead, he lowered his altitude - sometimes within 10 feet of the water. There’s a cushion of air close to the water that would improve his fuel efficiency. Instead of running from the danger, he added to it.

That’s why he made it to the coast of Ireland 33 hours later.

Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images

The Spirit Of St. Louis, both physically and metaphorically, is alive and well in Minnesota. Physically, a replica can be found at Flying Cloud Airport in Eden Prairie. Just east of MSP Airport on 494 in Eagan, the metaphorical spirit exists within a quarterback and a team that embraces enough risk to weed out the faint of heart.

So, Your Team Wants Sam Darnold

If Sam Darnold hits free agency, he’ll be the belle of the ball. He’s cleared every personal best by a mile and has now even tied the Vikings franchise record for passing touchdowns with 35. The A-topic of any national Vikings discussion is whether he’ll hit the market at all.

With J.J. McCarthy waiting in the wings for 2025, the Vikings expected Darnold to play out one season, hit free agency, get his money and move on. McCarthy had season-ending knee surgery, but there’s no reason to see it jeopardizing his 2025 outlook, even with an additional procedure in November.

Healthy youngster or not, Sam Darnold is playing out of his mind. Dianna Russini at the Athletic has reported that the Vikings want Darnold back, and are considering the franchise tag as a band-aid way to do that. They could enter contract negotiations after the season, but as of this writing, they have not done so.

Let’s say he hits the market. Several teams will be on the lookout for their QB of the future. Teams with varying supporting structures and spending power will light up Darnold’s agent’s phone. Let’s say your team signs him (or, if you’re one of the many Vikings fans reading, let’s say he stays here).

What are you buying into?

To understand Darnold’s renaissance, you have to understand his relationship to risk. Like the Spirit of St. Louis, Darnold has employed a relationship to risk that didn’t work for years and years - but one day, it did. Many before Charles Lindbergh died trying the risky journey across the Atlantic. Their problem may have been that they were too safe.