Sam Darnold’s Super Bowl Tax Bill Is A Total Write-Off

If we are to take stories first from Sportico's Michael McCann and Robert Raiola and later Forbes' Nathan Goldman as actual factuals, and all involved have made their reputations on knowing the whatabouts and whereabouts of money, Sam Darnold's greatest moment as a professional athlete gave us one answer to the question, "What price glory?"

The answer here is apparently 70 grand. That may seem a relatively small cost, given the reputational boost Darnold has just received for helping to guide the Seattle Seahawks to Super Bowl victory, especially given the fact that his current contract is worth a little over $100 million. But the point of the Sportico and Forbes stories is that, because of California's particularly strident "jock tax," Darnold will pay that much more in taxes to the state that hosted his greatest moment than he got paid for having played in that game. Frankly, there's a mathematical case to be made that he should have tanked the NFC championship game just to keep the money.

The explanations for how and why this particular bill came due are somewhat byzantine, as all tax laws tend to be, but the nut of it is that California's 13.3 percent jock tax on money earned while in the state, when combined with Darnold's salary means, that he will pay roughly $249,000 for the right to make $178,000 based on the eight work days he spent in California preparing for the Big'Un. I mean, Darnold could sell his Super Bowl ring and come out ahead, we suppose, but then he'd end up looking like a worse version of the chump people imagined him to be as a Jet, Panther, Viking, and 49er. In fact, his year playing for San Francisco must have been a total loss leader based on that logic.