Really, you could pick out any of Justin Jefferson’s 10 catches from Sunday. There was the 46-yarder on the Vikings’ third snap, followed by a 22-yard touchdown three plays after that on which he bodied up Bills corner Dane Jackson and boxed him out for the score. There was, of course, the impossible fourth-and-18 grab in the fourth quarter, a one-handed catch for the ages, pulled in despite a safety putting two hands on the ball. Then, you have the third-and-10 catch in overtime that put Minnesota on the goal line.
But there was only one play Jefferson made at Highmark Stadium over those three hours that his coach, Kevin O’Connell, would raise repeatedly to me, as he stood in the biting, 25-degree air on the tarmac at the Buffalo airport, waiting to board the flight back to Minneapolis. And chances are, if you had 10 guesses, you probably wouldn’t guess where this one came from—with the Vikings down by 17 and less than 17 minutes left in regulation.
“We just kept looking at it like, if we can just start chipping away …” O’Connell says. “Then, we get that 81-yard touchdown run. On a day when we felt like we would have to run the football, we didn’t get off to a great start running it. We wanted to come back to the run and kind of try to sustain some drives that way. So for Dalvin [Cook], to make that run at that moment?
