The Titans call the play ”Home Run Throwback,“ and, boy, they got that right. It looked like a throwback to college intramurals, or a sandlot play. But when it worked—Lorenzo Neal to Frank Wycheck, Wycheck to Kevin Dyson, Dyson 75 yards down the sideline—it provided perhaps the most electrifying moments in Nashville sports history.
Well, maybe that’s an understatement. This one will stand as one of the most improbable finishes in the entire pantheon of NFL highlights.
When pro football arrived here, its touters proclaimed that Nashville had never seen anything like the NFL game. Saturday’s finale proved the boosters right, at least for one day. Not the Titans, not the Media Geniuses, and certainly not the crowd at Adelphia had witnessed anything like the denouement to Saturday’s wild, wild, wild-card playoff, when the ending was rewritten three times, a miracle sprang forth, and time briefly stood still.
In its aftermath, ”The Play“ is inspiring other names. The ”Music City Miracle.“ ”The Lateral.“ Or my favorite, ”The Immaculate Deception.“
It also has captured the city’s imagination. On Sunday and Monday, countless conversations began the same way: ”Did you see it? Were you there?“
It’s not as if nothing remarkable happened during the game’s first 58 minutes. There was Wycheck’s amazing grab of a pass that bounced off the arm of an unsuspecting Buffalo linebacker. There were the safety, sacks, fumbles, and general havoc induced by Jevon Kearse, who has become as much of a scoring catalyst as anyone on the Titans’ offense. There were the hundred hard-fought yards earned by Eddie George.
In the end, though, all of that paled in comparison to what transpired in the final 16 seconds, when the Titans’ staff searched their bag for one last trick. ”You never think you’ll use it in a game,“ Wycheck said. ”But there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that’s the play we’d call. It worked to perfection.“
Um, kind of. As special teams coach Alan Lowry had drawn up Home Run Throwback, Wycheck would field the short kick, then pass back to Isaac Byrd. ”Catch it, sell [the fake], and throw it,“ Wycheck explained, making it sound so simple.
Once he caught Wycheck’s lateral, Byrd was to follow blockers up the left sideline. If he encountered trouble, he could pitch the ball back to Dyson.
There were a few complicating factors. The team practiced the play only once each week, and never at full speed or against a real defense. For another, the only two Titans who had rehearsed the role of pitchman were unavailable. Derrick Mason left with a concussion; Anthony Dorsett experienced leg cramps.
That left Dyson as the unlikely understudy who had seen the play but never learned the lines. ”The coach just called my name out of the blue,“ he recalled. ”When I ran out, they were still trying to explain it to me.“
As with most sandlot plays, nothing worked quite the way the diagrammers had envisioned. So, as with most sandlot plays, the Titans improvised.
The kick came to Neal, not Wycheck. Byrd never arrived at his designated spot. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that the Bills put all but their last nickel on what Neal and Wycheck were selling.
Suddenly, Dyson had the ball on the sideline with a convoy of blockers and only one defender between him and the goal.
”I was thinking, åIf I can’t outrun the kicker, I don’t need to be here,’ “ Dyson said.
In the addled spirit of the play, coach Jeff Fisher at first thought that Dyson should run out of bounds to leave time on the clock for a field goal try. The crowd, at first, registered surprise; then excitement, as they realized that the Titans would be in field goal range; then pandemonium, as it became apparent that Dyson would score.
For a few giddy moments, the Titans danced, the crowd roared, and the stadium rocked. Then everything stopped.
For two minutes, though it seemed much longer, referee Phil Luckett peered at a screen on the sidelines that only he could see, reviewing Wycheck’s throw from every available angle. In the first rows of the stands above Luckett, fans exhorted him, hollering ”Touchdown! Touchdown!“
Earlier, the zebras had blown at least two calls (one deprived the Bills of a scoring chance; the other, against Kearse, handed Buffalo a TD). The final one, though, they got right.
Watch all the replays, follow the ball from release point to reception, discount the rants of a surprising number of Big City Media Geniuses, and you’ll conclude that Wycheck’s throw traveled laterally, which is why they’re called laterals.
When Luckett announced that the touchdown would stand, the crowd of nearly 67,000, which has quickly gained a reputation as the league’s loudest, reached an even higher decibel level and didn’t stop.
Already, Dyson’s happy return is being shown in the company of Franco Harris’ ”Immaculate Reception,“ Dwight Clark’s ”Catch,“ and the Cal-Stanford Band Soirée. It will be remembered as one of the most exhilarating, least likely football endings ever. Nashvillians will remember where they were that afternoon, just before 3 p.m. Except that, 20 years from now, at least 300,000 will boast that they witnessed the Music City Miracle first-hand. They were there. They saw it all. It was that kind of play.
How It Looks From The La-Z-Boy
Titans 26, Colts 24
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