The Commanders Pulled Off The Perfect Hail Mary

A good Hail Mary looks like chaos, and isn't. It's not just a matter of having every receiver sprint to the end zone, chucking the ball up, and hoping for the best. A good Hail Mary is a designed play. Everyone has their spot to be in, their role to play. If it still requires a mini-miracle to complete, well, a good Hail Mary is about shaving off the odds by controlling what you can control. And Washington's 52-yard touchdown to beat Chicago 18-15 at the buzzer on Sunday was not merely a good Hail Mary; it was flawless. This [football man voice] is how you draw it up.

When Plato was formulating his theory of ideal forms, this was the tip drill he had in mind. This was the Hail Mary formation that the Commanders said they'd practiced a dozen times in training camp, executed perfectly. “If you look it up on film, we were pretty much all in our spots,” WR Terry McLaurin said.

But before the play could even develop to that point, the Commanders had to win the first battle: giving receivers enough time to get downfield. "I don’t know how long the play was, but it took a long-ass time," Commanders head coach Dan Quinn said. Jayden Daniels handled it with his legs, scrambling for a total of 12.79 seconds and 40.7 yards before releasing the ball, the highest and third-highest totals in those categories on a touchdown pass since the league started tracking them in 2016.

Even before Daniels let it fly, the Bears' prevent left a lot to be desired. They rushed three plus a spy on Daniels, at a time when the conventional wisdom is gradually shifting toward bringing more pass rushers in favor of fewer defenders, since there's usually already an extraneous body or two in coverage. Just last week, the Lions blitzed to break up the Vikings' Hail Mary attempt. In a copycat league, I suspect this will be the norm before long.

And then there's Tyrique Stevenson. Oh buddy.

The Bears corner was too busy taunting Washington fans to notice the play had started, even as visiting Chicago fans desperately motioned for him to turn around. Stevenson has already apologized on Twitter, but I suspect he's gonna have a real bad time in the film session today.

Stevenson did in fact get to the scrum in time to affect the play, though not, from his point of view, for the better. The four Commanders receivers were in a classic "diamond" formation, with Zach Ertz and Luke McCaffrey as the wings, McLaurin a couple yards in front of them, and Noah Brown a few yards behind. This is how it appears in playbooks at every level, and has for decades. The idea is that defenders are likely to swarm the center of the diamond, making it tough to do anything more than get a hand on it. That's the second battle: defenders are taught to knock the ball down, receivers to tip it up, either forward or backward. That's where McLaurin and Brown—the "jumpers"—come in.

As the ball descended, the Bears defenders, including safety Kevin Byard in the rear, instinctually converged on it. Brown did not, leaving him all alone in the back. “That happened to be my assignment," he said. Usually it's not so painless. Defenses knows what the diamond is trying to achieve, so they're supposed to leave at least one man with each other jumpers to try to thwart it. The Bears, who biffed just about every aspect of this Hail Mary, did have someone meant to stay in the back. He just ... didn't. "They're going to have a guy that's supposed to jump up and catch the ball," Byard said. "We're supposed to have a jumper, which I was. ... Obviously they executed better than we did." In fact, it was Stevenson, fresh off taunting the locals, who got his hand on the ball initially, but he couldn't do anything more than bat it accidentally but directly to a wide-open Brown. Third battle won handily; game over.

It was Daniels's first successful Hail Mary throw since high school, he said, and the rookie who looks like a star-in-the-making now has a signature moment. In perhaps the wildest stat to come from Sunday, this was the first time since at least the NFL-AFL merger that Washington has won a game on a touchdown at the end of regulation. Hail indeed.