Laura Rutledge and Sam Darnold Credit: ESPN
By Sam Neumann on

Laura Rutledge had to clear things up almost immediately after her postgame interview with Sam Darnold aired Saturday night.

After Seattle’s 13-3 win over San Francisco on Saturday night, cameras showed what looked like Darnold walking past Rutledge on the field without stopping for a postgame interview. People immediately assumed he was blowing her off, especially given what happened with Justin Herbert back in November when the Chargers quarterback told Rutledge he was trying to celebrate with his team instead of doing the interview. But that’s not what happened with Darnold.

“Nope,” she wrote on social media. “Actually we had a lot of time till we had to go off air so I told Darnold he had plenty of time to talk to whoever he wanted to see. Thanks!”

She also retweeted someone who explained that ESPN was interviewing Kenneth Walker III at the same time, so Rutledge told Darnold he could go find other people first if he wanted.

That’s precisely what he did.

Darnold was looking for Brock Purdy, his former teammate from the 2023 season, when Darnold backed up Purdy in San Francisco. The two found each other on the field and shared an embrace before Darnold came back for the interview.

When another X user — who has over 60,000 followers — ignored what actually happened and continued to act in bad faith, Laura Rutledge followed up with more detail.

“Hey! You may have missed where I explained that I told Darnold to take his time talking to whoever he wanted to see because we had time before we were going off air,” she wrote. “He was looking for Brock Purdy and was able to find him and then graciously did the interview.”

The reason people jumped to the wrong conclusion had everything to do with Herbert. After the Chargers beat the Eagles in overtime on Monday Night Football in November, Herbert kept walking when Rutledge approached him for a postgame interview.

“Yeah, I’m trying to celebrate with my team,” Herbert told her as he tried to wave her off.

Rutledge persisted, asking if they could talk really fast, and Herbert eventually stopped and did the interview. That became a whole thing, with plenty of people criticizing Herbert’s handling of the situation and questioning whether he was being disrespectful to Rutledge.

Rutledge later explained on the Athlon Sports podcast that she had waited over 90 seconds after the game ended before approaching Herbert, deliberately stalling the broadcast to give him time to celebrate with his teammates. The broadcast window doesn’t wait forever, and she eventually had to get the interview that the Chargers had agreed to provide.

So when cameras caught what looked like Darnold doing something similar to Herbert, social media immediately turned it into another example of a quarterback disrespecting Rutledge on national television. The difference is that Darnold wasn’t trying to avoid the interview.

The fact that she had to respond immediately shows how quickly a false narrative can take off based on a few seconds of video without context.

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann