After all, Chase Young didn’t catch Tom Brady. But, he achieved something that almost it resulted in an even better result: an unexpected performance by a teammate named Taylor Heinicke, who started the year employed by a football league that no longer exists.
Saturday night’s wild card game between the Bucs and Washington was Brady’s playoff debut by a team other than the Patriots. Who would have guessed that the star of the show would be Heinicke, who played fewer NFL games (eight) than the number of misspellings of his surname recorded on Twitter during the game? Heinicke entered his unlikely playoff start with 77 NFL pass attempts on his behalf. Brady, for comparison, has almost as many playoff pass touchdowns (75).
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The Bucs advanced to the divisional round with a 31–23 win against Washington. Young, the presumed defensive rookie of the year, failed to overthrow Brady, who was fired three times in front of Washington, but had a clean pocket for most of the night. However, despite the fact that the 7–9 football team was the mandatory playoff representative of the humble NFC East, and veteran Alex Smith being excluded with a calf injury, this dispute came to Washington’s final tenure. The reason was Taylor Heinicke.
In the first part, Heinicke kept things interesting. After the Bucs jumped to a 9-0 lead, he responded by leading a 75-yard TD. He hit a 24-yard pass, then an 18-yard pass, then converted a third to eight under pressure from Ndamukong Suh. Putting aside Tony Dungy’s enthusiasm at the NBC booth, it seemed inevitable that his initial spark would disappear, as it often does with young QB substitutes in the line-up.
Not so! It was in his 13-yard run in a second and 11 in the third quarter when the delighted crowd suddenly realized, “Heinicke is fast!” (This is 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 to five on the Tampa Bay eight-yard line, which started with Heinicke falling, then retreating further back, to the 20-yard line. It certainly wouldn’t end well. But Heinicke … just kept moving. He stepped out of the group of players, ran to the left and fired towards the first down marker. On the four-yard 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 grass, extending the football to knock the post over. Its eight-yard touchdown run covered about three times as much ground.
Young had run off the bench to watch the goal line play closely and that was when he descended on his QB, fervently pointing the name on the back of his shirt to the TV cameras. Know his name, he was saying … and maybe even spell it right next time.
Washington lost the subsequent two-point conversion, but it didn’t matter: the score was 18-16. During the NBC broadcast, reporter Kathryn Tappen shared an anecdote about how, during Heinicke’s 16-day spell on the New England training team in 2017, he entered the QB meeting room in [insert impressive-sounding early-morning hour here] and discovered Brady, who had no idea who the young QB was. Now, improbably, Heinicke’s team was behind Tom Brady by just two points. Everything was possible!
The fun looked like it could end when, at the beginning of the fourth period, Heinicke retreated to the locker room, shivering in pain, while an even greener Washington QB – newcomer Steven Montez – started to warm up. Heinicke separated his left shoulder on that touchdown dive, but he still got his Lamar Jackson moment. He returned to the field with a bandaged shoulder and a 12 point handicap to close. Minutes later, Heinicke found Steven Sims on a corner route, placing the ball where his receiver could hold it in front of the defender and with two feet inside. Did a QB that signed with the team on December 8 actually do that? A verklempt Brady, who shouted “incomplete!” from the Bucs sideline, I certainly hoped not. But the piece survived a review and the touchdown was maintained.
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The fact that this game came down to Heinicke’s final possession – after a Bucs field goal, Washington recovered the ball in three minutes, losing by eight points – will certainly be a matter of study for the Bucs, whose aspirations in the season would require three more wins, against clubs much more proven than the Football Team. But for us, the viewers, that was a pleasure. 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 came up, raising the bar for reserve QB, let alone fourth-graders.
There is probably a lesson to be understood here about the flaws in how the NFL evaluates and develops young QBs, that someone capable of a wonderful performance like this started the year as a backup at XFL’s St. Louis BattleHawks. Certainly, there is a teaching point that will be used by coaches for many years to make the most of your opportunity when it comes up. There is also great potential for Mathematics that studied partial differential equations be next Ryan Fitzpatrick went to Harvard.
A failure on Wednesday to 21, with two minutes to play, ended Heinicke’s night and Washington’s season, but that performance ensured his NFL opportunity continued. And millions of viewers now can’t wait for the next time we see Heinicke’s game, a feeling that, like so many things in our world, would have made absolutely no sense a year ago.