Chase Young didn’t get hold of Tom Brady after all. But he did get something like that almost resulted in an even better result: an unexpected performance by a teammate named Taylor Heinicke, who started the year in the service of a football league that no longer exists.
Saturday night’s wildcard game between the Bucs and Washington was Brady’s playoff debut for a different team than the Patriots. Who would have thought that Heinicke would instead be the star of the show, having played in fewer NFL games (eight) than the number of misspellings of his last name logged on Twitter during the game? Heinicke came in his unlikely playoff start with 77 NFL pass attempts to his name. Brady has nearly as many touchdowns in the playoffs by comparison (75).
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The Bucs advanced to the division round with a 31-23 win against Washington. Young, the presumed defensive rookie of the year, did not bring down Brady, who was fired three times by the Washington front but enjoyed a clean sack most of the night. Despite the fact that the 7–9 soccer team was the required playoff representative of the humble NFC East and veteran Alex Smith was ruled out from a calf injury, this game amounted to Washington’s ultimate possession. The reason was Taylor Heinicke.
In the first half Heinicke kept it interesting. After the Bucs jumped to a 9-0 lead, he responded by leading a 75-yard TD drive. He hit a 24-meter stride, then an 18-year-old, then made a third-and-eight under pressure from Ndamukong Suh. Aside from Tony Dungy’s enthusiasm at the NBC booth, it seemed inevitable that his early spark would fade, as so often happens with young replacement QBs in the lineup.
Not so! It was on his 13-yard scrambling on a second and 11th in the third quarter when the delighted audience suddenly realized, “Heinicke is fast!” (That’s literally what I wrote in my notes; you can see why I get paid to write about sports.) But the best was yet to come. Washington had a third and five on the eight-meter line from Tampa Bay, which started with dropping Heinicke and then retreated even further, up to the twenty-meter line. This would certainly not end well. But Heinicke … just kept moving. He slipped out of the group of players, ran to the left, and sprinted to the first down marker. At the four meter long line, he planted with his left foot and launched himself into the air. The 6 ‘1 “QB covered the remaining 12 feet suspended above the turf and extended the football to topple the pylon. His eight-foot touchdown run covered about three times the ground.
Young had run off the bench to watch the goal line play up close and this was when he descended on his QB, fervently pointing the name on the back of his jersey to the TV cameras. Know his name, he said… and maybe even spell it right next time.
Washington missed the subsequent two-point conversion, but it didn’t matter: the score was 18–16. During the NBC broadcast, side reporter Kathryn Tappen shared an anecdote of how Heinicke’s sixteen-day stint on the New England practice squad entered the QB conference room in 2017 at [insert impressive-sounding early-morning hour here] and discovered Brady, who had no idea who the young QB was. It is unlikely that Heinicke’s team was just two points behind Tom Brady. Everything was possible!
The fun seemed to be over when Heinicke retired to the locker room at the beginning of the fourth quarter, shivering in pain, as an even greener Washington QB – rookie Steven Montez – began to warm up. Heinicke parted his left shoulder on that touchdown dive, but he still managed his Lamar Jackson-esque moment. He returned to the field with the shoulder tied and trailing 12 points to close. Minutes later, Heinicke found Steven Sims on a corner route, placing the ball where his receiver could secure it in front of the defender and still with two feet within the bounds. Did a QB who signed with the team on December 8 really just do that? A warning Brady shouting “incomplete!” on the part of the Bucs, certainly hoped not. But the piece survived a review and the touchdown held.
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The fact that this game came down to Heinicke’s last possession – after a field goal from Bucs, Washington got the ball back in three minutes, trailing eight points – will certainly be a matter of study for the Bucs, whose season aspirations have three more wins against clubs that are all far more proven than the football team. But for us the viewers, this was a treat. This game looked like it was going to be a snoozer. Young and the Washington front against Brady seemed to be the only potential intrigue. But then Heinicke emerged, raising the standards for backup QB play, let alone fourth-stringers.
There’s probably a takeaway here about the flaws in the way the NFL evaluates and develops young QBs, that someone capable of a delightful feat like this started the year as a backup to the St. Louis BattleHawks. XFL. There is certainly a learning point that will be used by coaches over the next few years to make the most of your opportunities when they arise. There is also great potential for the mathematics that has studied partial differential equations to be next Ryan Fitzpatrick went to Harvard.
Completing on fourth and 21 with two minutes to play ended Heinicke’s night and Washington’s season, but this feat kept his NFL shot going. And millions of viewers now can’t wait for the next time we’ll see Heinicke play, a feeling that, like so many things in our world, makes absolutely no sense a year ago.