LOS ANGELES – Breaking: Sam Darnold was not successful at everything he did as a child, Yahoo Sports has learned.

Yes, he was a precociously talented baseball player growing up in San Clemente, Calif. He was a taekwondo terror at age 5. He was very good at soccer. He excelled at basketball. And, certainly, the USC quarterback was a brilliant football player.

Oh, and he was a capable student and a nice guy and a loyal friend, too.

But an exhaustive Yahoo investigation has uncovered a smudge on Sam’s gilded lifetime record. For the tawdry details, we turn to Mr. Jeremy Chung.

“He was probably a better athlete than a musician,” said Chung, finding a diplomatic way to say that young Sam Darnold was not the most gifted or diligent viola player in the Shorecliff Middle School orchestra. “He was way more into sports than into music.”

Please take a moment to allow the shock of that revelation to sink in.

Darnold dutifully gave the viola the old middle-school try, after previously playing the violin in elementary school. He even went on an orchestra field trip for a concert in San Diego. He finally left classical music behind in eighth grade.

But consider this: The viola is still stashed in the garage of the Darnold house in Orange County. Maybe, years from now, after winning a national championship and a Heisman Trophy and being the first pick in the NFL draft and enjoying a lucrative pro career, he’ll circle back to conquer the one pursuit that didn’t quite come naturally to the Golden Child.

Maybe, if he ever amends the list of life goals he made in ninth grade, he will add Viola Master to his body of work. Knowing him, he’d eventually play sold-out shows at the Hollywood Bowl.

Sheet music optional, of course. Because improvisation is the Sam Darnold way.

You can title his quarterbacking style “The Unscripted Symphony.” Darnold can execute a called play just fine, but it’s what he does off the cuff and on the run that makes him so entertaining.

“Sometimes I make the easy plays look hard,” Darnold said with a smile.

But more often he makes the hard plays look easy. Darnold may never be as good as John Elway and Brett Favre, but he’s got a similar freelance flair to his game. He credits part of that to his basketball background and the hundreds of spontaneous decisions made with the ball in that sport – and part of it is simply hard to describe.

“There are times on the headset where we’re saying, ‘Where’s he going?’ “ acknowledged USC coach Clay Helton.

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The answer: He’s going somewhere to make a play only he can see developing. (“Elite anticipation,” Helton calls it.) Darnold will find a Trojan somewhere, deliver the football and restore order to a chaos he created.

Then what are the coaches saying on the headset?

“You’re just laughing,” Helton said.

The Trojans laughed their way to nine straight wins to close the 2016 season, capped off by a 52-49 victory over Penn State in an epic Rose Bowl. Darnold threw for more than 3,000 yards and 31 touchdowns during the season, and he produced a few magic-act highlights along the way.

There was the flea-flicker failure against Arizona State on Oct. 1. Darnold handed to running back Ronald Jones, whose pitch back to the quarterback was disrupted by a blitzing Sun Devil. The ball hit the ground, Darnold picked it up and ran for his life to his right. Sprinting sideways, he fired a pass 46 yards in the air to Deontay Burnett.

There was the red-zone fumble-turned-touchdown against Colorado on October 8. Darnold’s handoff fake turned into a loose ball on the turf at the 16-yard line. He picked it up, retreated left, circled back right and finally threw it from the 35 – a strike to tight end and roommate Tyler Petite for a TD.

And there was the throw that made the Rose Bowl victory possible – a combined improv with less than 90 seconds left between Burnett (changing his route on the fly) and Darnold (seeing the adjustment and making a daring throw). Darnold dropped the pass over two well-positioned safeties for the touchdown, and USC won the game later on a walk-off field goal.

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