God must be a Floridian.
NFL football newsGod must be a Floridian. That’s as good an explanation as any for what happened Sunday.
Act 1 — Miami crushes New England.
Act 2 — Brian Griese passes for 407 yards as Tampa Bay wins in overtime.
Act 3 — Jacksonville beats Indianapolis.
Act 4 — Palatka is named America’s most cosmopolitan city.
With all due respect to the bass fishing capital of the South, nothing seemed more like an act of God than what happened under the new roof at Lucas Oil Stadium.
OK, Miami beating the Patriots by 25 points should trigger a reverse Spygate investigation. Bill Belichick not only sent the Fish a tape of his pre-game walkthrough, he included a playbook and Gisele Bundchen’s home phone number.
But back on planet Earth, the Jaguars’ win was harder to explain than a Federal Reserve bailout.
They had the game won, then they had it lost, then they won it again by out-Peytonning Peyton Manning.
The final blow was Josh Scobee’s 51-yard field goal with four seconds left. It came after Manning had pulled off a classic desperation drive to give Indy a 21-20 lead.
It was must-see TV and a perfect prelude to Sunday night’s Emmy Awards.
We were ready to bury the Jags and start second-guessing Jack Del Rio for passing up a sure field goal in the first half. And it’s not as if it was a crucial game or anything.
“Every game is a Must Win,” Del Rio said.
Yes, but some are more “Must” than others. The Jaguars were 0-2 and looking nothing like the trendy Super Bowl pick we heard so much about in the offseason.
Last year’s nice playoff run earned Del Rio a contract extension and quarterback David Garrard a new $60 million deal. If only the Jags had acquired a wide receiver who could catch or an offensive lineman who could block, they might not have been staring into the playoff abyss before the season was a month old.
No 0-3 team has made the postseason since the 1998 Bills. But if the Jags couldn’t beat the Colts on Sunday, they might never have.
Manning still wasn’t quite his usual self after missing all of preseason. Defensive demon Bob Sanders was out with an injury Sunday. The offensive line was patched together.
About the only thing the Jags had going for them was they’d never lost a game at Lucas Oil Stadium. It’s a lot like the old RCA Dome in that 65,000 or so Hoosiers show up in blue Manning jerseys and scream like Bobby Knight for three hours.
They were quite pleased in the second quarter when Jacksonville had the ball at the Colts’ 11 and went for it on fourth down. Fred Taylor was stuffed, and the non-field goal would have made the difference.
At least it would have if not for one of the most confounding comebacks in modern NFL history. The Jags were great at one thing Sunday — hogging the ball. One drive took 12:18, which is only slightly less time than it takes for Al Davis to hire and fire a coach.
So after Manning led the Colts 77 yards for the go-ahead score, Jacksonville had 1:06 left and was 80 yards from the end zone. Garrard hadn’t completed a pass longer than 11 yards to his receivers all day.
But that 12-minute offense pulled out some one-minute magic. That gave Scobee a chance to save the season.
“It felt like we won the Super Bowl,” Garrard said.
They are still a long way from that. So are the Bucs. As for the Dolphins, I’m still not quite sure that wasn’t all a hallucination.
Even if it were, Sunday could have been pretty much the end of NFL football in Florida for the rest of the season. Now we can at least keep paying attention for another week or two, by which time the Palatka Symphony should be ready to open its season.
Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 10:00 pm and is filed under NFL football news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
