The Legend of Jesse Smoke (33 page)

Shaking her head in disgust, Jesse kicked a 17-yard field goal.

We stopped Dallas on the next series, but we still couldn’t get anything going on our next possession. We punted, and stopped Dallas, got the ball back. Same thing. Three and out. We kept getting stopped with dropped passes, or receivers falling down, or Jesse throwing it just a few inches beyond the fingers of a wide receiver. On one play she launched a perfect spiral toward Gayle Glenn Louis but it hit a referee in the back of the head and bounced to the ground. (So did the referee.) That stopped another drive, and Jesse kicked a second field goal, but then Dallas drove it down and scored again before the end of the half and we trailed 21 to 6.

The crowd was really into it then.

I should say something about Coach Engram’s ability to make adjustments at halftime. You can’t change very much about a game plan once you’re in a game, but you can do various subtle things to take advantage of what you see during the action of the first half. Of course if you’re getting your ass handed to you, the changes you make have to make a difference, and the tendency is to try to make drastic changes. Engram never did that. He always said that panic was
not the way to respond to adversity. He’d stick with what we planned and practiced, but he’d change the look of it a little bit, or move players into different positions to see what impact that might have. In the Dallas game he noticed that their defense was almost always playing in a two-deep zone, with the safeties paying special attention to Anders and Louis. So he decided to go with a three-wide-receiver formation in the second half and put Jeremy Frank in the slot. Since Jeremy returned punts for us and was fast and very shifty, Engram reasoned that one of the safeties would have to look toward him on pass plays to that side.

“We’ll run him across the front and on deep outs behind Anders,” Engram said. Then he looked at Jeremy. “You got to sell it,” he said. “Make them believe.”

“That will tie up the safety eventually,” I said. “But at first they’ll try to cover it with a linebacker and maybe a nickelback.”

“That’s what I’m counting on,” Engram said.

Jesse nodded. She knew exactly what he was trying to set up. “Run Sean from the slot, too,” she said. “No linebacker out there can cover him.”

We talked it over and went into some of the other variations from the three-wide set. We were going to use Gayle Glenn Louis there too. In the first game against Dallas, we killed them with passes to the backs and quick fades up the sidelines. Now we were going to get into the same formations, but we were looking at the middle of the field. We’d split the safeties eventually and if it worked, we’d have something open deep on one side or the other.

Coach Engram worked the last few minutes of halftime with the defense and Coach Bayne. Dallas had been running on us, reading the tackle stunts we ran on running plays, catching both defensive ends by running inside their outside pass rushes. Bayne decided to keep the tackles in their lanes and stop running the stunts. What we gave up in the pass rush would be offset by shutting down the running game. Orlando Brown and Elbert James would take up
some of the slack in the rush and we’d give them a little help with Talon Jones and one of the corners. Our defense was good enough that if we could get some points on the board early in the second half, we’d make a game of it.

I was worried about Jesse’s confidence. She hung her head a bit when we were heading through the tunnel on the way back out to the field.

“You okay?” I said.

She looked at me. Her eyes were as bright as ever. “I hate this place,” she said, and trotted out onto the field, the offense following behind her.

We kicked off in the second half, and Dallas got a good return out to their 36-yard line. But on the two running plays they tried, they gained nothing. On third down, they tried a deep pass down the middle that fell incomplete. Jeremy Frank called a fair catch on a relatively short punt at our 33-yard line. I’d gone over the first few plays we’d run with Jesse before she took the field. We started again in the three-wide set, and Jesse handed off to Mickens who ran behind Dave Busch for 4 yards. On the next play, Anders and Rice went deep, Gayle Glenn Louis ran a quick slant to the right side of the field, and Jeremy Frank cut to the outside and caught a 14-yard pass for first down. The play looked like this:

From the Dallas 49, Jesse flipped a quick pass to Mickens in the flat and he gained about 3. On the next play, we were in a three-wide set again and this time Rice was in the slot. Jesse dropped back, faked it to Frank on the left, then hit Rice crossing in front about 5 yards downfield, and he cut to the center of the field and gained 16 more yards. Now we had a first and ten on the Dallas 23. The crowd was still into it, but they’d quieted some because of how quickly we’d marched down the field.

On the next play I called Mickens off tackle. He cut to the outside and gained seven yards, but we got called for a false start. Now it was on the 28, first and 15.

Jesse shook her head and leaned down in the huddle. I called a slot right, corner fade to Anders. Wilber told me later that Jesse said, “I’m not kicking a field goal down here.”

I could just hear her saying something like that. Her voice, when she was in the heat of competition was so inspiring I’d almost burst out laughing.

This time Anders was in the slot. Not many teams can run more than one or two players from that position. It’s like having four men on a baseball team who can play shortstop. But every one of our guys has to learn how to run patterns out of the slot and every one of them can do it. (That’s another quality of Jonathon Engram’s coaching.) Anyway, Anders lined up in the slot, and the corner assigned to him man-to-man didn’t go to the slot with him—he stayed on the outside. Dallas looked confused on defense. They had shifted to the nickel (which means they had added a fifth defensive back) and played a three-deep zone. Jesse noticed it. She sent Anders in motion to the left, just to confirm it. When nobody in the Dallas defense followed Anders she knew he would be getting a lot of attention on his side of the field from a safety and at least one cornerback. As she called signals, she stood up and looked back at Mickens. Then she leaned over center again and changed the play. Or, I should say, she called a variation on the play I’d called. Anders would still do what he was
supposed to do—cut to his right, toward the middle of the field, then run for the corner looking over his left shoulder. The two wide receivers would run long, shallow posts up the seam, and Mickens—who was supposed to block on the play I called—would circle out of the backfield and run to the middle of the field. It looked like this:

It was wide open. Jesse stepped back, looked downfield, then fired it to Mickens—hit #29 between the 2 and the 9—and he turned around and ran straight for the goal line. He hit the safety in the chest and carried him into the end zone. Jesse kicked the extra point and with 11 minutes left in the third quarter we trailed 21 to 13.

The defense was so fired up by now we stopped Dallas on three plays and got the ball back. This time we couldn’t get a first down on a third and 1. Mickens got stuffed by the Dallas right tackle and middle linebacker on the sweep. We punted from our 42 and then, by god, Dallas got moving again. They started on their own 26 and took a lot of time, completed a few short passes, made just enough yards on a few runs up the middle and off tackle, and now with 6 minutes left in the third quarter, they were on our 33 and looking ready to take it away from us.

On third and two, though, Orlando Brown swept into the backfield and tackled their fullback for a 4-yard loss. They had to punt.

They tried for the coffin corner—that is, they tried to put the ball out-of-bounds inside our 5-yard-line—but the ball went into the end zone and we took over on our 20. Things sort of settled after that into a kind of back and forth rut. We drove the ball to midfield and then stalled. (Jesse got sacked, pulled down by a blitzing safety on a third down play.) We punted, Dallas went three and out, punted back. On a sweep to the right side, Mickens fumbled. Dallas drove to our sixteen yard-line and then their quarterback got hit by Orlando Brown and fumbled. From then on Jesse took charge of the game.

It didn’t look like that was going to happen at first. I called a play that allowed for a deep pass if it was open. Jesse dropped back, moved her arm up and down the way she does, and then she got hit hard from behind by a Dallas linebacker. She held on to the ball, but she really went down hard. The crowd cheered in an odd way when that happened. Normally when their defense gets a sack, an NFL crowd makes a lot of noise, but this time there were as many groans as there were cheers.

And then Jesse didn’t get up, not right away. The crowd got quiet. Compared with the earlier noise, they were suddenly absolutely silent. Dan Wilber leaned over Jesse and after a moment, she turned over on her back, reached for his hand. He helped her to her feet. She shook her head and walked back to the huddle and the crowd cheered. The
Dallas
crowd was actually cheering her.

On the next play, she dropped back again and this time she fired a quick strike to Rice 15 yards downfield on a hook pattern. He turned, caught the ball in his gut, then got creamed by the safety. He, too, got up fairly slowly.

We had the ball at our own 35, first and 10, when the quarter ended.

When Jesse came to the sideline during the commercial time-out between quarters, she had blood running down her cheek. She didn’t take her helmet off.

“You all right?” I said.

“Just got the wind knocked out,” she said.

“I want the doc to look at you.”

“I’m okay,” she said. “I want to run that play again.”

“Which one?”

“The one I got hit on. Call it again. Anders was open.”

Sure enough, on the first play of the fourth quarter, Jesse dropped back, found Anders up the sideline, and hit him in stride. It was a beautiful ball, a perfect bullet of a spiral that arched slightly over his shoulder and fell into his waiting hands. He took it all the way, and now we were just trailing 21 to 19.

Coach Engram decided to go for two points.

Dave Busch came to the sideline with Jesse and Dan Wilber and Gayle Glenn Louis. “Give it to Mickens behind me,” said Busch, so fired up his eyes almost clicked when he blinked.

Part of what made Coach Engram a great coach was he knew when to listen to his players. Jesse looked into his eyes and said, “Do it.” He smiled and called a simple off-tackle run behind Dave Busch and James Cook. The fullback would punch in between those two, leading the play, and Mickens would run behind him, looking for daylight. It worked perfectly. Nobody got a hand on him.

With 14 minutes left in the fourth quarter we were now tied at 21.

Our defense was still just as fired up as Dave Busch was, but Dallas took the ball and went on a time consuming drive all the way to our five yard-line. With only four minutes to go in the game, they tried a pass to the corner of the end zone, but Talon Jones of all people jumped in front of the receiver and intercepted the ball. He ran out of the end zone all the way to our 42.

Then Jesse trotted back onto the field and I could see I need never have worried about her confidence. There was blood all over the front of her white jersey now, blending right in with the burgundy numbers on her chest, but it didn’t seem to bother her. If anything it only served to fire up the men blocking for her. She ran the plays we called, and with Mickens running well on sweeps and off tackle, she
threw just three passes on the next drive. One of them was a 20-yard strike to Sean Rice on an out pattern. He moved so convincingly toward the center of the field that the corner, who had covered him so well earlier in the game, nearly fell down for the sudden change in direction. When Rice turned, the ball was right there and he snatched it out of the air just before falling out-of-bounds.

After that, Jesse went on a streak. She looked so good and the line was protecting her so well, we started calling more passing plays from the three-wide set. She completed eleven passes in a row at one point. Sean Rice played like an All-Pro before it was all over. They were double-teaming him, in fact. He caught 8 balls for 154 yards and 2 touchdowns.