Holy Moly!

The Green Bay Packers are trailing the Lions 23 – 21 and have the ball on their own 21 yard line with 6 seconds left. They’ve got zero chances in hell of winning. That is, unless they pull off one of those weird Cal – Stanford multi-lateral, band on the field types of plays. Okay, they’ve got ONE chance in hell. IF they can get the ball to their own 40 yard line or do, they’d have that ghost of a chance of a miracle Hail Mary pass (remembering that a quarterback can usually only throw the ball about 65 to 70 yards in the air max) connecting.

They try their multi-lateral thing, and, as time has run out, and from about their own 40 yard line, tight end Richard Rodgers hurls the ball backwards to quarterback Aaron Rodgers (who started the play with a short pass over the middle to set up the laterals) who gets tackled on about his own 25 yard line to end the game. However, as they say on some of those infomercials, “But wait, there’s more,” and Aaron Rodgers’ face mask gets tugged by a Lion slightly, but noticeably enough to draw a 15 yard grabbing the face mask penalty. That put Green Bay fifteen yards closer to the end zone.

When the last second of a game has ticked off and a penalty has been called on the defense, the officials give the ball to the offense for one last untimed play to make sure that the penalized team hasn’t gained anything by committing that last second penalty. Green Bay would have that one last play and they would have that ball on their own 39 or so. They WOULD have that one, ghost of a chance opportunity, because they WERE within striking distance of a miracle Hail Mary.

They also had that type of enterprising quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, who could MAYBE pull something like that one of a kind play off. They also were playing the Lions, one of the FEW teams to have never played in a Super Bowl, and a team that was just dangerous enough to MAYBE allow something catastrophic to happen.

(Note, they also had one other possibility, with that being Rodgers throwing a pass to somewhere around the opponent’s 35 yard line AND getting the defense to commit a defensive pass interference foul, and allow for a last second field goal, but that was something that a referee would be unlikely to call – a play where it seemed like THEIR call was the difference in the game)

Green Bay was JUST close enough to have a chance. Rodgers dropped back to pass. Detroit decided to only rush three men, which was a gamble. They would have more men back near the goal line to defense the long pass, but they would also not have as much of a pass rush as they would with four (and some teams even blitz and rush five to give a QB ZERO time to rear back and throw a bomb like Rodgers would need to throw, an aggressive strategy that almost always works, by the way).

With the light pass rush and five men blocking three, Rodgers had the time, and seemingly scrambled around an extra second or two to buy a little extra time for his receiving corps to race down to the end zone. As he was scrambling around, one player was seen NOT racing down the field for Green Bay. That was tight end Richard Rodgers. He seemed to be jogging down field while the other wide receivers were sprinting to get near the end zone.

Rodgers escaped from any pass rushing danger (he handled the play as if he never felt there was a chance of anybody from Detroit getting to him), and rolled to his right. His scramble led him to a running start to get as much momentum as he could to allow him to get his maximum distance on his throw. He in fact gave that one EXTRA oomph to his throw, aiming it a bit higher than normal to get extra trajectory and to make that one, final effort to do his part and GET the ball far enough to reach the end zone.

The ball sailed HIGH in the air towards the Detroit end zone. It became pretty evident that the extra oomph Rodgers gave allowed the throw to get enough distance on it to reach the end zone. Rodgers had done his part. He had reached the end zone with his last second throw.

Now it was up to his receivers to catch the ball with most of the Detroit defense back there to defend against this last second pass and seal the win for their side. The fact that a defensive back can jostle for position and get to a ball and bat it down while the offensive player HAS to catch it makes the Hail Mary pass a play that seldom, if ever, succeeds.

As the ball flew through the air and the Green Bay receivers and Detroit defensive backs jostled for position and tried to get to the exact spot where they thought the ball was going to come down, a funny thing (okay, it was the type of “funny” things that only happen in miracles) happened.

Richard Rodgers, that same guy that was trotting down the field so nonchalantly as the play was developing, started entering the area near the end zone, where the approximately ten or so players from both teams were all battling to either catch or knock down this last second, game determining pass play. Everyone on Detroit was so concerned with the four Packer wide receivers near that spot about five yards deep in the end zone, they did not realize that this latecomer to the party, Rodgers was NOT being accounted for.

As the ball came closer to coming down in the end zone, all of the Packer receivers noticed that Rodgers had suddenly gotten into position to maybe be able to catch the pass. The jostling they had been doing with the Lions for one of THEM to catch the ball suddenly turned into a different tactic. They noticed that the Lions were out of position a bit and far enough behind them that it became the smart play to wall off the Lions, kind of like basketball players trying to box out and screen for a rebound.

The Packers boxed out the Lions as Richard Rodgers, seeing the ball now, backed up to a point about three or four yards deep in the end zone. He jumped up to catch the ball at a spot that only he could get to first (as the Lions were behind the play by a yard or two due to the boxing out). As the Lions struggled to burst through the wall of Packers, Rodgers got to the ball first and snatched it out of the air and clutched it tightly, as the now desperate Lions collapsed on top of him. Not even the crew of NFL referees, who never seem to agree anything is a catch anymore, could deny what had just happened.

Touchdown, Packers.

It will go down in the record books as a 61 yard touchdown pass from Aaron Rodgers to Richard Rodgers. The degree of difficulty of Green Bay going from likely loser of a game and desperate team attempting to pull off a Cal – Stanford type of desperation lateral-filled play to a team that pulled out a stunning, miraculous victory was about as severe as anything that has been seen since the Immaculate Reception.

It was a play for the ages. It was living proof that as long as there is the slimmest sliver of a chance that a miracle can be pulled out, a team HAS to try for the near-impossible attempt at it, because that is the only way that a miracle can be pulled off. And the two people who understood that fact the most were Aaron Rodgers and Richard Rodgers, two football players who went to Cal, the same school that pulled off the miracle lateral play of 1982.

Holy Moly!