I can’t stop watching it.
Playing in the background on some distant open tab on my laptop forever will be the ending of Sunday’s Patriots-Raiders game, in which a Bill Belichick–coached team lost on the most confounding piece of situational football we have seen in modern NFL history. It is a play so wonderful and unusual to the human eye that we will study it like a potential raw video of the Loch Ness Monster. It will take us years to fully understand it. Centuries. It will take a Rosetta Stone from a different planet with translations for words we do not yet know. It will take the collective breadth of knowledge from neuroscientists, philosophers, various holy men and other mystical beings who can understand human consciousness in a way the lay football fan cannot.
First, the facts: There were two seconds remaining in a 24–24 game between Belichick and his longtime assistant, Josh McDaniels, now coaching the Raiders, in Las Vegas. The Patriots had the ball on their own 40-yard line and handed it to Rhamondre Stevenson. As he broke a tackle toward midfield, the clock ran out, meaning the game would soon head to overtime. Stevenson shifted to his right toward the sideline and had blockers. He got to the 35-yard line, and on our TV screens we saw the emergence of Jakobi Meyers, the Patriots’ wide receiver and a former high school quarterback. For some reason, Stevenson pitched the ball to Meyers like a point guard dumping a pass in the lane to a nearby power forward.
