Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

NFL

Giving thanks for the historic Jets blooper that keeps on giving

Al Michaels: You’ve got a busted play here …
Cris Collinsworth: (laughing) … Oh, no …
Michaels: … and Sanchez gets hit … the ball is loose and it’s alive …
Collinsworth: I have never seen this before in my life, watch this … Vince Wilfork is gonna throw Brandon Moore back into his quarterback, he’s gonna fumble the football …
Of course this had to be on NBC.

Of course it was national television. Of course it was Thanksgiving Night. Of course it was the Patriots on the other side of the line of scrimmage, and Bill Belichick patrolling that other sideline, and all the ghosts and ghouls and goblins and demons that go along with any Jets-Pats game.
Of course it was Mark Sanchez with the ball in his hands: Sanchez, the one-time GQ coverboy, the one time No. 6 pick in the draft, the one-time Sanchize, the latest heir to Namath, the kid who had been behind center when the Jets twice made it to the AFC Championship game, but ultimately a Warehouse of What-if.
And of course it wasn’t just a fumble.
It wasn’t just a fumble returned for a touchdown.
It wasn’t just a fumble returned for a touchdown, one of three touchdowns the Patriots scored in 52 seconds (including another fumble returned for a TD on the ensuing kickoff! (You forgot about that, didn’t you?) It was one of seven touchdowns the Patriots ran up on the Jets in an epic 49-19 beatdown.
No. Of course not.
It had to be a Buttfumble.
“BUTT UGLY!” screamed the back page of The Post.
“WHAT THE #@#$$$###$#$#!!!!!!” screamed every Jets fan, ever, who sat in front of the television that night (or, more unfortunately, at MetLife Stadium that night) and watched and shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders and fumed and flailed and cursed and cried and shouted, again, top of the lungs: “WHAT THE #@#$$$###$#$#!!!!!!”
Yep. You have to hand it to the Jets. There was no way this was ever going to happen in Week 17 of a lost season, in a 1 o’clock game in front of friends and family and a smattering of diehards, against Jacksonville or Houston or Indianapolis.
Nope. It happened Thanksgiving Night.
Five Thanksgivings ago.
Time sure flies when the universe is making fun of you.

***
Bob Wischusen: First-and-10 New York at their own 31-yard-line … broken play! Mark Sanchez scrambles up the middle and LOST THE FOOTBALL! It’s picked up and run into the end zone for Steve Gregory! He ran right into the back of Brandon Moore and fumbled the ball! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Marty Lyons: Unbelievable, Bob, you got a broken play and then you run into the backside of your right guard …
Jim Marshall never knew how lucky he was. On Oct. 25, 1964, Marshall, the future Hall of Fame defensive end for the Vikings, scooped up a fumble from the ground at San Francisco’s Kezar Stadium and dashed 66 yards toward the end zone — the wrong end zone.

Garo Yepremian never knew how lucky he was. On Jan. 14, 1973, Yepremian — the placekicker for the Dolphins — was about to put a poetic touch on one of the great seasons in NFL history, lining up for a 42-yard field goal that would have made the score of Super Bowl XII 17-0 with just over two minutes to play, matching what soon would be the Dolphins’ record, too. But his kick was blocked, Yepremian retrieved the ball, inexplicably tried to throw it, and Washington’s Mike Bass intercepted and returned it for a 49-yard TD.
For damn near half a century, these were easily the two most popular follies NFL Films would show, in one form or another, year after year after year after year. Both plays were hysterical in their own right, and both were punctuated with extra hilarity. In Marshall’s case, there was the moment he heaved the ball in satisfaction after crossing the goal line, thinking he had earned a six-point touchdown for the Vikings rather than handing a two-point safety to the 49ers.
In Yepremian’s, there is the immediate camera pan of the Dolphins’ sideline, where Don Shula looks fully prepared to shank him with the extra-wide, extra-sharp collar he was wearing on his golf shirt that day, where one of his teammates, half perplexed and half livid, shouts, “DAMN, MAN!!!!”

Of course, no matter how often those faux pas were replayed, both Marshall and Yepremian were helped by a couple of things:
1. Both Marshall’s Vikings and Yepremian’s Dolphins wound up winning the games in question, so their follies were in truth mere footnotes.
2. Twitter wasn’t invented yet.
As we have mentioned, the Jets not only lost the Buttfumble Game, they were smeared by 30 points. Sanchez ran the wrong play, wound up with a face full of Moore for his trouble, and that was just one of the bad things that happened to the Jets that day. Nine seconds after Steve Gregory ran in the fumble from 32 yards away, Julian Edelman ran one of his own in, from 22 yards away, after the late Joe McKnight fumbled the kickoff.

Sanchez watches as the Patriots sealed the victory on that infamous 2012 day.Paul J. Bereswill

But McKnight might as well have lost the ball in Boise for all anyone remembers, or even noticed at the time.
By then, Twitter was already aflame, already in overdrive. After an hour, there were 22,000 mentions of the play, and there had already been a hashtag invented — hello, #ButtFumble. And that was that. The world has never seen #WrongWayMarshall or #OhNoGary. But you’d better believe they’ve seen #ButtFumble. Probably 22 million times in the past five years.
“If it was anybody else he would go crazy, but fortunately I’m a happy-go-lucky guy,” Yepremian said a few years before his death in 2015.
He also wasn’t the #ButtFumble Guy. That had to help his mood.

***
Collinsworth: This is what Reggie White used to do to people, forklift them, just lift ’em off the ground … Mark Sanchez not expecting it and it was the back side of Brandon Moore that knocked the ball out …
For 40 straight weeks, the Buttfumble was ESPN’s Play of the Week. Sanchez’s career was trending downward anyway, but that seemed to expedite it. Rex Ryan’s days were suddenly numbered, too. The Jets finished 6-10 that year. They have only had one winning record since. They are 4-6 on Thanksgiving Day 2017 — the same record they took into Thanksgiving Day 2012.
It’s probably for the best they don’t play Thursday.

The Patriots, of course, have won two Super Bowls since, and seem primed to make a run at another. A few weeks ago, they beat the Jets at the Meadowlands thanks in large part to an odd referee’s call on review that turned an Austin Seferian-Jenkins touchdown into a fumble. Jets fans howled.
The Post’s Jets beat writer, Brian Costello, wrote: “Move over ‘Buttfumble,’ here comes the ‘Whatfumble.’”
Somewhere, Mark Sanchez probably wishes it was that simple.
Five years later, the Buttfumble is still lodged in lore and in memory. And isn’t going anywhere any time soon.