Sam Darnold was viewed as a complete bust by age 25.

In the spring of 2023, nobody wanted to bring Darnold in to be their starting quarterback so he took a backup gig with the San Francisco 49ers.

Darnold, the third overall pick of the 2018 NFL Draft, spent the campaign backing up Brock Purdy, the final pick of the 2022 draft.

That’s not how the career of a high draft pick is supposed to go.

Darnold, who once famously said he was “seeing ghosts” turning a horrific nationally televised performance, was becoming invisible.

But come Sunday, Darnold will be more visible than ever when he leads the Seattle Seahawks into Super Bowl LX against the New England Patriots at Santa Clara, Calif.

He’s just 60 football minutes away – or more if the game goes into overtime – of perhaps being known forever as a Super Bowl-winning quarterback. He could even be named the game’s MVP.

At least Darnold is back on the track after badly derailing his career.

Darnold was supposed to be the savior of the Jets but he completed just 59.8% of his passes through three rocky seasons. He passed for 45 touchdowns against 39 interceptions.

He was traded to the Carolina Panthers following the 2020 campaign and he continued to struggle and had 16 touchdowns and 16 interceptions over two lackluster seasons.

Then it was off to the 49ers and it looked like journeyman duty for the long haul.

But after getting a chance to be an observer and soaking it the atmosphere, Darnold was ready for another chance. He had worked hard on his mental game – something he admitted to struggling with – and was refreshed when he joined the Minnesota Vikings.

He enjoyed a big 2024 season with Minnesota – setting career highs of 4,319 passing yards and 35 touchdowns – and led the Vikings to a 14-3 record.

The Vikings badly erred by not re-signing Darnold and he landed a three-year, $100.5 million free-agent contract with the Seahawks

He came through with a second straight stellar season with 4,048 yards and 25 touchdowns while leading Seattle to a 14-3 regular-season record and two playoff victories.

“Sam’s just been so resilient,” Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald said. “… He’s so steadfast in his approach, he’s confident in who he is. He understands how much his team believes in him and has his back.”

Now 28, Darnold is the more experienced quarterback in this game as Patriots star Drake Maye is in his second NFL season.

Darnold has been a cool customer the past two seasons but everyone will be paying attention to see if he can deliver in his biggest moment.

What’s become clear is that Darnold has simplified his approach and that has led to less miscues and fewer times beating himself up.

“As a young player, early on in my career, I was really hard on myself,” Darnold said. “After a bad rep or a bad practice, I would let it affect my attitude a little bit. Just being able to have a great attitude all the time, ‘All right, that happens, it’s football, we’re not always going to be perfect.’”

Both teams have strong defenses so the quarterback who makes the biggest mistake could cost his team the game on Sunday.

Maye, 23, completed a league-best 72% of his passes and was intercepted just eight times while being a close runner-up for MVP honors behind Matthew Stafford of the Los Angeles Rams.

Darnold completed 67.7% of his throws and was picked off 14 times. And he never saw ghosts like he did in the humbling four-interception, 33-0 loss to the Patriots in 2019.

“I almost forgot about it, so thanks,” Darnold said when reminded by a reporter this week.

Darnold can erase nearly all his bad memories just by winning on Sunday.

The need to fill the two weeks between the NFL’s conference championship games and Super Bowl wears out previously fascinating tidbits like this year’s about the Seattle Seahawks’ Sam Darnold: Did you know he’s the first Southern California quarterback to start in the premier pro game?

So maybe the surface-level intrigue of this factoid on its own has been run into the ground. However, the context of what Darnold’s Super Bowl LX appearance — both within the historic framework of USC football and the quarterback’s own career trajectory — makes this one of the better postseason stories in recent memory.

Next September marks the 10-year anniversary of Darnold bursting into the national spotlight. On a Friday night in Salt Lake City, Darnold went 18-of-26 for 253 yards and rushed for 41 yards with a touchdown in his first start at USC.

The Trojans lost to a Top 25-ranked Utah team, 31-27, falling to 1-3 on the season. But Darnold’s presence provided a spark that was immediately evident, and which ignited a nine-game winning streak to close USC’s 2016 campaign.

Covering the Trojans that season made for a wild ride. The first month felt headed for depths not experienced reached in Los Angeles since the Paul Hackett era, only for Darnold to lead USC to heights not achieved since Pete Carroll’s tenure with a Rose Bowl Game win.

USC’s achievements in the Darnold days included more milestones last reached during the dynastic run of the 2000s, with the 2017 Trojans winning the Pac-12 Conference champion. Both the 2016 season’s Rose Bowl victory and 2017 campaign’s league championship are also the last for a program nearly 20 years from its golden age.

Despite this, it can often feel as if Darnold’s time quarterbacking the Trojans goes underappreciated. It could be the lack of a national championship, which former USC great and then-university athletic director Lynn Swann declared was the program’s standard, even as the confetti still fell on the 2017 Rose Bowl.

The 21st century of USC football also bookended Darnold’s two outstanding seasons with Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks in Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart, and a third with Caleb Williams.

And then there’s Darnold’s NFL career up to the last two seasons. College stardom hardly forecasts pro success, and USC quarterbacks of the last 20 years may exemplify that more than any other program’s.

Palmer enjoyed a long and at times excellent NFL career, and Williams is proving to be the real deal for Chicago — so much so, the 2022 Heisman winner very nearly led the Bears to face Darnold’s Seahawks in the NFC Championship Game.

But in the 21 years between Palmer’s debut with Cincinnati and Williams’ in Chicago, USC also produced some of the most notable quarterback busts and flameouts of modern drafts. Leinart technically represented the Trojans in the Super Bowl, but as the back-up to Kurt Warner for the 2008 Arizona Cardinals.

Mark Sanchez showed promise for the New York Jets, but one of the most unforgiving black holes of professional sports eventually swallowed hope of his career being remembered for much more than one of the more unfortunate fumbles in NFL history.

Matt Barkley was the last in a line of USC quarterbacks over a decade from 2003 through 2013 that had pro scouts and evaluators salivating while in college, at least until a blind-side sack from UCLA’s Anthony Barr.

How much the shoulder injury sustained on one of the most famous plays in the crosstown rivalry’s 96 years altered Barkley’s pro prospects, we’ll never know. Barkley was reliable enough to have a place in the league for more than a decade, but never as the star he had been at USC.

Darnold appeared headed for the same fate. Landing with the Jets has repeatedly proven to be a dead-end for quarterbacks, and his tenure there was no exception. A move to Carolina was no better, and failing to beat out a then-relative unknown in Brock Purdy for the starting job in San Francisco may have been a career-ender for others.

Emerging from down on the depth chart has proven to be a strength of Darnold’s, however.

He didn’t make his first start at USC until the Trojans’ fourth game in 2016, having been beat out in preseason camp by Max Browne. While depicting Darnold as an under-the-radar recruiting gem would be disingenuous — he was a high-4-star prospect at San Clemente High School fielding interest from Oregon and Tennessee — Browne more closely resembled the USC pedigree as a 5-star recruit.

Browne and Darnold were similar in that they were two of the more genuine, thoughtful players one could hope to encounter covering college football. It was no surprise, then, reading Browne’s memories of a decade ago as detailed to The Athletic last week.

It’s a must-read article that shines some light into why Darnold reaching this unprecedented point for USC is so special. Even for anyone with no connection to the Trojans, Darnold is an easy guy to root for – and he’s been that from the first start.