For three and a half quarters, Saturday night’s NFC Divisional Playoff Game between the Green Bay Packers and Arizona Cardinals was entirely interesting, but it was hardly transcendent.
For most of the evening in Glendale, Arizona, the fifth-seeded Packers and second-seeded Cardinals played a good, tough game with a number of mistakes but a lot of hard hitting. It was, in short, an unremarkable but representative example of what we expect professional football to be.
Then came the final four minutes of the fourth quarter… and a brief overtime period.
One could try to describe everything that happened in the endgame stages of Packers-Cardinals, but this is one of those times when a writer has to get the heck out of the way and allow the pictures — combined with some basic historical facts — to tell the story.
Down 13-10, the Cardinals — scuffling on offense for much of the night — took the lead on this ridiculous play with 3:44 left:
https://twitter.com/TheCauldron/status/688572273767223296
It was the least eventful play of the final four minutes plus overtime… maybe. 17-13, Arizona.
After the Cardinals stopped Green Bay on downs with 2:38 left and the Packers owning only one timeout, Arizona — already in comfortable field goal range — had three points in the bank. The Cardinals didn’t need those points to win the game; they needed one first down.
Head coach Bruce Arians called for a low-percentage fade pass on second down, as opposed to the simpler flat passes and crossing routes which had been getting yards in the fourth quarter against Green Bay’s increasingly tired defense. The Cardinals took three points for a 20-13 lead, but the Packers got the ball close to the two-minute warning, instead of with 1:15 or so left.
Then things simply spiraled out of control.
This was not called pass interference on Arizona:
https://twitter.com/TheCauldron/status/688577482191060993
THIS is what happened on the VERY NEXT PLAY, a fourth-and-20 situation near the Packers’ own goal line:
Wow pic.twitter.com/OQDijYaVuX
— Michael Shamburger (@mshamburger1) January 17, 2016
Aaron Rodgers threw to the same receiver in the same spot of the field. Jeff Janis, who torched Arizona defensive back Justin Bethel all night long, hauled in the 60-yard pass he wasn’t able to catch on the previous play because of the uncalled penalty.
Yes, it was a #BALLDONTLIE moment in light of the penalty, but Green Bay still suffered because the live-ball catch forced a lot of time to expire. Had the pass interference penalty been called (note to the NFL: make DPI/OPI calls reviewable in the final five minutes of the fourth quarter — that should be a no-brainer after this game), Green Bay would have saved nearly half a minute.
The Packers had time for just one last play from the Arizona 41. They had already beaten the Detroit Lions on a Hail Mary earlier in the season:
Look at Richard Rodgers standing all by himself at the goal line while the Lions are all pretty deep in the end zone pic.twitter.com/6ooCaKySFm
— Adam Hoge (@AdamHoge) December 4, 2015
Surely Green Bay wasn’t going to strike again, right?
Well, ummm, about that…
https://twitter.com/TheCauldron/status/688578382020268034
Unlike the Green Bay-Detroit Hail Mary, no Green Bay receiver was playing center field to occupy an Arizona defensive back or safety. This was an easy play for Arizona’s Patrick Peterson to make. He just had to step and leap forward and knock the ball down. No receiver was unguarded here — that was the Lions’ mistake. With Arizona, it was a little bit different.
Peterson’s feet remained glued to the ground, perhaps paralyzed by the moment. Janis took a great leap forward (greater than anything China did under Chairman Mao), and Peterson allowed Janis to occupy what should have been his own airspace.
Touchdown. Hail Packer. The longer extra point was not missed by Mason Crosby. Improbably, we headed to overtime after a string of nutty sequences, the next one more ridiculous than the previous one.
Then, the NFL’s overtime rules reared their ugly head again.
This was the playoff game, in January 2010, which caused the NFL to finally make playoff overtimes a situation in which a first-drive field goal did not end the contest:
Just weeks before the New Orleans Saints won their first NFC title against the Minnesota Vikings on a first-drive field goal in overtime — after winning the coin toss which carries more weight than any other coin toss held anywhere else in the world — the Arizona Cardinals defeated the Green Bay Packers in overtime in a playoff game.
Remember this?
Say, speaking of Packer losses in the playoffs in overtime, what about this game? Anyone remember it?
That was a first-drive game-ending score, as was Tim Tebow’s first-play walkoff touchdown for the Denver Broncos in 2012 against the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Since the NFL adopted its modified overtime playoff rules in 2011, four overtime games had occurred. Pittsburgh-Denver 2012 and Green Bay-Seattle 2015 were decided on first drives. Two — Giants 20, 49ers 17, in January of 2012, and Ravens 38, Broncos 35 (2OT), in January of 2013 — was decided after the first drive.
Would Green Bay win the coin toss this time, unlike its journey to Seattle a year ago? No.
Would Green Bay keep its NFC West opponent out of the end zone on its first drive this time, at least giving Aaron Rodgers and Jeff Janis one shot with the rock?
Nope.
The Packers forgot about Larry Fitzgerald, which kinda matters in overtime of a playoff game:
This is the play before The Play after The Other Play:
Larry Fitzgerald starts OT with a 75-yard catch #BeRedSeeRed https://t.co/PQIxOy1FMX
— NFL (@NFL) January 17, 2016
Moments later, the Cardinals punched the ball into the end zone on a well-executed shovel pass to Fitzgerald. It was over. We’re all still wondering how any of it happened.
In roughly five minutes of scoreboard-clock time — 3:44 of the fourth quarter until the Cardinals’ quick overtime winner — a decent but hardly special playoff game turned into an asylum of unhinged absurdity. Some of the incredible events inside University of Phoenix Stadium were jawdropping feats of athleticism, but even those genuinely spectacular displays were accompanied by astonishing lapses in one form or another.
Through it all, the NFL’s deficient rules and policies — still not in step with notions of fairness and equal opportunity — cast a pall over the proceedings. Green Bay lost on a first-drive overtime touchdown in the playoffs for the second straight season. Aaron Rodgers hasn’t touched the ball in two straight overtime playoff games for only one reason: His team lost a freakin’ coin toss twice.
Arizona was outplayed for large stretches of this game, and Carson Palmer’s first-and-10 interception in the Green Bay red zone early in the fourth quarter was straight from his dark Cincinnati past. Yet, Palmer gained a second chance in this game. He made the most of it, and now he owns his first playoff win. The Cardinals will play their first NFC Championship Game since they made Super Bowl XLIII in January of 2009.
Is there a grand, overarching lesson to take away from Cardinals 26, Packers 20? Not really.
One could write a whole essay on any of the final several plays of this game. They all deserve stand-alone treatment. If anything, this game simply shows us that the NFL’s capacity for supreme theater — enabled by the dumb stuff as well as the amazing stuff — owns a unique hold on the American sporting imagination. It might not always (or even usually) exist for the best of reasons, but Saturday night’s game reminds us why the NFL is so hard to look away from, warts and all.
