SAN DIEGO — This is the beauty of the game when you think of it, no? Fifty-nine minutes of blood and sweat, strains and sprains, bruises and blotches . . . and it boils down to one play, to one call, to one decision. Fourth-and-1. Sixty-nine seconds left. Jets ball at the Chargers’ 29.
What do you do? Well, hell, you know what you do. You go for it. Fans always go for it. Coaches? Coaches can be more conservative. There was the option to kick a field goal, lengthen 17-14 to 20-14; miss, though, and you shorten the field. You can pooch, but if you hit it too long you only gain nine yards of field position.
Or you go for it.
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Rex Ryan called a timeout. He gathered Mark Sanchez and Brian Schottenheimer on the sidelines, and told his quarterback and his coordinator, “Hey, let’s be true to ourselves. They know what we’re going to run, but let’s put [Thomas Jones] back there and do our thing that we’ve done all year and run that power.”
The Jets? They loved it. They were fired up. Especially the guys up front, Damien Woody and Brandon Moore and Alan Faneca. Especially Tony Richardson, who would lead Jones into the hole.
“We do that about as well as any team in the league, picking up short yardage either at the goal line or anywhere else,” Moore said. “We knew they knew what was coming.”
“You’re damn right they knew,” Faneca laughed.
It was simple, really; Moore and Woody on the right side would try to shove the pile forward a yard. Faneca, coming from the left, would pull. Richardson would lower his head like an anvil. And Jones needed to pick up one yard.
And picked up two.
“One play for the championship,” Moore said.
“One play, we get that yard and we’re going to keep our season going,” Jones said. “It’s the only thing you can ask for in that situation, and when you succeed it feels better than anything you can imagine. All that hard work, all that practice, all that repetition. You live for a moment like that. And then you get it.”
They got it. One play.
“Our guys believe in that philosophy,” Ryan said, “and there was no way we weren’t going to run our bread and butter there.”