About a decade ago, the last time the Seahawks and Patriots played in the Super Bowl, Michael Gervais stood on the Seattle sideline as the final moments played out: the Seahawks marching downfield, Malcolm Butler’s shocking interception, Seattle left slack-jawed as New England celebrated.
Gervais isn’t a player or a coach. He’s a performance psychologist. After that game, he played an important role: helping the Seahawks process the gut-wrenching loss. Gervais had been hired a few years prior by Pete Carroll, then the Seahawks’ head coach, who believed in developing players mentally, not just physically, at a time when sports psychology wasn’t as mainstream.
“He made it part of the water we were drinking,” Gervais told NBC News. “It was part of the air we were breathing. It was embedded through the culture.”
This season, the Seahawks’ culture had a new project: the redemption of quarterback Sam Darnold.
Once labeled a draft bust, Darnold had been cast aside by a number of teams. During those years, he had gone looking for better coaching, had rebuilt his confidence and finally landed with the Seahawks, a team that happened to prioritize the mental part of the game.
Darnold has played so well this year that he’s led Seattle all the way to the Super Bowl, where the Seahawks will play — guess who — the New England Patriots on Sunday. On the biggest stage imaginable, Darnold will have a chance to exorcise Seattle’s demons and complete his own arc from castoff to champion.
“He understands how much his team believes in him and has his back,” Seattle coach Mike Macdonald, Carroll’s successor, said at a news conference this week. “So just keep firing away, man, keep being you.”
Darnold always had the pedigree of a Super Bowl quarterback. Growing up in San Clemente, California, he was graded as a top high school recruit and started at USC for two years, becoming a hero after he mounted a comeback win over Penn State in the 2017 Rose Bowl. He had a big arm and flashed athleticism. Pundits applauded when the Jets took him No. 3 in the 2018 draft.
But for his first five seasons, Darnold found himself stuck on dysfunctional teams — first the New York Jets and later the Carolina Panthers. In that time, the Jets and Panthers cycled through four head coaches and five offensive coordinators, including interim coaches replacing those fired midseason. On those teams, Darnold threw almost as many interceptions as touchdowns.
He had two low points in 2019, his second year in the league.
That September, the Jets were playing the Cleveland Browns on “Monday Night Football.” Darnold had just been diagnosed with mononucleosis, the ailment sometimes described as “kissing disease,” and was home recovering.
During the broadcast, ESPN displayed a graphic showing Darnold looking serious and pointing out toward the viewer in the type of pose seen on old Uncle Sam posters. Next to him were the words: “OUT INDEFINITELY MONONUCLEOSIS.” Immediately, it went viral on social media.
“He was getting made fun of pretty good on the internet for a couple weeks,” Jordan Palmer, Darnold’s longtime personal quarterback coach, told NBC News. “He just had to sit at his house. Things weren’t going well. Now everyone gets to make fun of you.”
Later that season, the Jets were playing on “Monday Night Football” again, this time against the Patriots — and Darnold had one of the worst games of his life. He turned over the ball five times and the Jets lost 33-0. He was also wearing a microphone for the TV broadcast. At one point, ESPN caught him talking on the bench during a vulnerable moment.
“Seeing ghosts,” he said.
That went viral, too. People made more jokes. Here was evidence the Patriots had rattled Darnold to the point he didn’t seem to know what he was doing. “Seeing ghosts,” Palmer explained, is actually a common phrase among coaches.
“Just eyes all over the place,” Palmer said. “Feels like there’s more than 11 [defenders] out there. Sometimes that’s because the quarterback has no idea what he’s doing, and sometimes that’s because the quarterback could’ve been better prepared for that situation. And I’m not weighing in on which one it was.”
In 2023, Darnold became a free agent for the first time. He turned down “much better opportunities,” Palmer said, to sign with the San Francisco 49ers, to spend a season backing up Brock Purdy and being coached by Kyle Shanahan, a leading NFL offensive mind.
Palmer compared it to a businessperson returning to school for an executive training program. “They go back there to get a different perspective, maybe a different way of thinking about the same problem they always see,” he said. “It was a year of just resetting. Go to practice where you’re not preparing for the game, you’re just getting better yourself.”
That season, the 49ers averaged about 29 points per game, the third most in the NFL. They rode that offense to the Super Bowl, where Purdy squared off with Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs. San Francisco ended up losing, 25-22. But shortly after, Darnold and Palmer met to debrief. Darnold had watched Purdy closely, how he’d approached the playoffs and his preparation.
“Nothing changing about his routine,” Palmer said of Purdy. “Nothing changing about his process. Big things happening in the world? He had no idea about it. Wasn’t paying attention. … Just keeping it consistent all the way through the Super Bowl.”
After that gap year, Darnold decided to sign with the Minnesota Vikings, a team coached by Kevin O’Connell, who’d played quarterback himself in the NFL. O’Connell designs plays with pre-snap shifts and motions that are supposed to help the quarterback figure out what the defense is doing and give the quarterback “answers,” as Palmer put it.
“What did he help him with?” Palmer said. “The answer’s kind of, like, everything.”
Plus, the quarterback coach in Minnesota was Josh McCown, Darnold’s former Jets teammate, with whom he had a good relationship. McCown helped Darnold “between the ears,” Palmer said. “Managing the game, managing your emotions.”
Darnold broke through that season — in his seventh year in the league. He threw for more than 4,000 yards, 35 touchdowns and just 12 interceptions — and led Minnesota to 14 wins. Until that point, he had recorded only 21 career wins. The Cinderella comeback was almost complete, but Darnold imploded in his playoff debut. He took nine sacks, had two turnovers and lost 27-9 to the Los Angeles Rams. One could have wondered if he was “seeing ghosts” again.
In March 2025, the Vikings let Darnold walk and he signed with Seattle.
That same offseason, John Schneider, the Seattle general manager, made another big decision. He asked Gervais, the performance psychologist, to come back. Gervais had worked for Seattle for about a decade during the Carroll era and left during the pandemic. (He’d also worked for a number of other professional teams and athletes.) Now, Schneider wanted Gervais to help Macdonald, Seattle’s new coach, build his own culture.
That culture can be defined by two words: “chasing edges,” Gervais said, “which means running to the edge of your capabilities every day to extend what you’re capable of doing.”
In an interview with NBC News, Gervais spoke carefully. He described himself as an “organizational resource” and said he couldn’t get into details to avoid giving away “competitive secrets.” He said he taught Seattle’s coaches some techniques to pass on to the players — breathing, meditation and visualization exercises, and something he called “self-talk training.”
“Self-talk is the origin of creating confidence,” Gervais explained. “It’s also how we let go of mistakes. It’s what we say to ourselves that materially impacts our performance state. The organization has invested in being great and disciplined with self-talk.”
Gervais wouldn’t say which players use which exercises. But he said Darnold “designs his life to explore what he is capable of doing. That’s how you create mental toughness — is by day in and day out going right to your edge. In the messy edge is where you learn how to speak to yourself, how to back yourself, how to let go of mistakes, how to stay psychologically agile toward the shared mission.”
Given all these tools, Darnold completed 67.7% of his passes this season, a career high, and threw for another 4,000 yards. He also led the Seahawks to 14 wins and the No. 1 seed in the NFC playoffs. (Without him, the Vikings turned to a young quarterback, J.J. McCarthy, and their season unraveled in short order.)
This week while preparing for the Super Bowl, Darnold reflected on his journey. He said he had learned how to forgive himself for a bad pass, a bad game, to move on and not to be so hard on himself.
“You’re never going to have a perfect day out there,” Darnold said, “and once you understand that, truly understand that, then you can go out there and just play free. That really unlocked something for me mentally, and it allowed me to play good football and be OK with things that happen out there.”
In the NFC championship game, Darnold had a personal rematch with the Rams, who’d bounced him from the playoffs the year prior. He was facing quarterback Matthew Stafford, who on Thursday won the league MVP award — and Darnold outplayed him. He threw for 346 yards and three touchdowns with no turnovers as the Seahawks won 31-27.
All Darnold needed, after all those years in NFL purgatory, was a team with a healthy culture. That team is now reaping the rewards of all the lessons he learned along the way.
“Sam is a leader, a custodian and a massive contributor to the success of [our] culture,” Gervais said.
