Keystone Kops

I was describing the latest Charger game to my sister, who had not watched it, and she thought I was making things up. Maybe I had watched a high school game somewhere and was attributing it to the Chargers. No, I was not. One play in particular floored her.

Philip Rivers threw a screen pass to Jacob Hester, who did not catch it. The ball is laying on the ground and players of both teams are standing around wondering why the whistle had not blown. One of the Patriots suddenly realized that the referee may have seen what no one else had noticed, namely that it was a lateral rather than a forward pass, so he fell on the ball.

After another moment or so he decided that if no one was going to pile on top of him he might as well get up and run with the ball, which he did. Jacob Hester had a “Where are you going?” reaction and then decided to chase him. It should have been no contest, a fullback chasing a linebacker, but…

One of our offensive lineman finally caught up with him, but apparently they don’t teach tackling skills to offensive linemen. Maybe he should have thought of it as “holding,” they do know how to do that. Finally, after running 63 yards, the guy was tackled at our eight yard line by Philip Rivers. It was a nice tackle, too; quarterbacks know how to do everything.

Well, everything except throw screen passes forward.