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But it is a pretty good symbol of how many things have gone right for D.C.’s once-embattled football franchise over the first eight weeks of the 2024 season—mostly because plenty of things had to for that play to work.
In fact, really, the only thing simple about it was the name OC Kliff Kingsbury gave the call.
Or, as one Commanders coach joked via text Sunday night, .
It was, to be clear, Washington’s conventional call for such a play. No real tricks. Just rules on where players were to wind up to make this sort of prayer come true. Everyone involved knew it was a long shot, as rookie phenom Jayden Daniels approached the line of scrimmage with two seconds remaining and his team trailing the Chicago Bears, 15–12.
“You have a jumper in the middle, then three guys looking for the tip—one in the front, two in the back,” says veteran receiver Noah Brown, one of the former Cowboys that Dan Quinn brought with him from Dallas in the offseason. “I happened to be in the back.”
It was from there that Brown made a miracle happen for the coach he followed from the Dallas Cowboys in Washington’s 18–15 win. But before all that, a lot of things had to fall into place, starting with the guy who’d throw the ball to him even being available for the game.
Daniels sustained a rib injury in the Commanders’ Week 7 rout of the Carolina Panthers, and his status for the game against the Bears (and his showdown with the one player taken ahead of him in April’s draft) was up in the air all the way into the hours before kickoff. The quarterback sat out practice Wednesday, then participated in the Thursday walkthrough. On Friday, Daniels felt good enough to go, so Quinn wanted to push him to test his limits with his injured ribs.
“ We really pushed it,” Quinn told me over the phone after the game. “We pushed him to see how he’d respond.”
Daniels told his coaches on Saturday, ahead of the team’s walkthrough, that he felt fine. So he went through that walkthrough—“just easy moving around,” per Quinn—and everyone had their fingers crossed he’d wake up and feel good again Sunday morning. The final test came during normal warmups at the stadium in the afternoon. But that just confirmed, after Friday’s tests that he was still good.
“[Friday] wasn’t a scripted-play day, it was, ” Quinn says. “Those were the things that we looked at. Went through the whole process and told him, . I wanted to make sure he knew that it had to be him. He did a fantastic job.”
Physically, Daniels was there. Performance-wise, though, it wasn’t the same. The Commanders moved the ball but stalled three times in the red zone in the first half. The only points in the second half, prior to the Hail Mary, came on a long field goal after Washington got the ball on a short field.
So the defense needed to come to play to make that last play possible, and it did.
Eventually, the Bears started to move the ball. D’Andre Swift ran for a 56-yard touchdown. And after one long drive was short-circuited by the Bears calling the William “the Refrigerator” Perry goal-line run back from the mid-1980s—the exchange between Caleb Williams and backup center Doug Kramer was fumbled and lost at the 1—Williams drove the Bears for the go-ahead points near the end of the fourth quarter.
After a well-placed kickoff forced a return, the Commanders’ offense trotted out with 19 seconds left, the ball at Washington’s own 24 and hope in short supply.
The initial hope was to get a chunk play, call the team’s last timeout, then run a sideline route to set up a game-tying field goal. But Daniels’s first throw, deep over the middle to Zach Ertz, fell incomplete with 12 seconds left. Which shifted the plan to a simpler one—get the ball into range to throw the Hail Mary. So Daniels threw again to Ertz, this time for 11 yards, then called the timeout. After that, he found Terry McLaurin for 13, and McLaurin quickly got out of bounds at Washington’s 48-yard line with those two seconds to spare.
“That’s the one you need,” Quinn says. “If we don’t get that play to him, then we’re out of gas.”
But they did, and in went the call, .
At the snap, Brown flew down the field and worked, as Daniels bought time, to get behind the defense. His normal landmark—“the top of the letters in the end zone, you get yourself some space, so that if the ball does fall back like that that you’re not out of bounds”—would change a bit, because the throw was short. But as the crowd gathered around Ertz, the jumper on the play, Brown got himself about five yards back and, to his surprise, he was alone.
“I just got into the end zone, tried to box my defender out, keep him behind me,” he says. “He ended up in front of me, but so did Zach.”
Chicago’s Tyrique Stevenson went to bat the ball away. Instead, Ertz batted it back. You know the rest.
“The biggest key, when you go back to watch it, it’s Zach Ertz tipping it,” Quinn says. “And it’s so hard to catch. [Ertz] was the one that went up to knock it up, and then it went behind to Noah. There’s a reason they don’t work very well, and a reason it’s called . The fact that Zach was able to get a hand on it to keep it alive, I thought that was the real key. Jayden did a good job of buying time.
“Some people all-out blitz it. Some people rush three and drop everybody back. The whole key is it’s got to get into the end zone by tip or by the throw. Jayden did a good job of buying time. Nick Allegretti might have strained to make a block at the end to give himself a chance to throw it. It was wild.”
For Quinn, it was historic, too. He mentioned how hard it is to complete a Hail Mary. He knows, because he’s never been on either side of one in a game. Brown told me he hadn’t, either. Kingsbury has—he was the Arizona Cardinals’ coach for the 2020 Hail Murray—but there were plenty more on the Commanders’ sideline like Quinn and Brown.
And for the record, while Jim Nantz and Tony Romo wondered on the broadcast whether Daniels’s rib injury would allow him to make that throw (they suggested that the Commanders could bring in Marcus Mariotta for the heave), Quinn had no doubt. During that Friday workout, he said, “he ripped one 60-something yards.”
So he knew Daniels would get the ball where it needed to go.
Of course, the chances it’d land in a Commanders player’s hands in the end zone was always a long shot. Then again, for even the most ardent believers of Quinn and new GM Adam Peters, so too was the idea Washington would contend in those guys’ first year. Or at least it was to those who weren’t in that building.
“I’m not surprised,” Brown says. “I know what happens when you put in hard work. I know what it looks like. We have all the ingredients to do that here. We have all the guys who come in and work day in and day out. As long as we continue to do that, the success will continue.”
On Sunday, it did in a most unconventional way.
Luck was part of it, of course. It just wasn’t the part of it.
