![]() Because just as Tua revealed himself as a college football legend in that national championship game, coming from nowhere to seize glory, I knew that a day would come when Tua would do that again. I have remained on Tua Island, through thick and through thin. Not when he was battling Ryan Fitzpatrick for playing time. Not when he had a potentially career-altering hip injury. I called him the greatest college quarterback of all time. And then they did bench Jalen for Tua, and it won them the national championship. I began worshiping at the altar of Tagovailoa when he was a backup quarterback at Alabama, and my podcast cohost, Ben Glicksman, spent half of every episode yelling about how the Tide needed to bench Jalen Hurts for the five-star freshman from Hawaii, even though they were winning pretty much every game. You implored the Dolphins to move on, for the sake of their hyper-talented wide receiver room. You roasted viral highlight videos of him lobbing training camp lollipops to a visibly bored Tyreek Hill. But Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa threw four fourth-quarter touchdown passes to flip the game, including a gutsy tight-window game-winner with 15 seconds remaining: Baltimore led 35-14 at the end of the third quarter. On Lamar Jackson’s 79-yard touchdown run, it looked like he had a turbo button and Miami’s defenders didn’t. The Ravens seemed to be running away with Sunday’s matchup against Miami-literally, they had three touchdowns of 75 yards or more. In the span of a few hours, there were two such comebacks-infinity percent more than all of last season-and those two miracles may have only been the second- and third-best comebacks of the day. Last NFL season, there were 61 games in which a team won by 20 or more points-and a grand total of zero games in which a team came back from a 20-point deficit to win. But comebacks? Those require midgame miscalculation. Upsets happen in sports, because maybe we miscalculated the strength of the teams before the game, or the favorite simply has a very bad day. Teams that are getting their asses kicked generally don’t flip the switch-not only are they likely slower and weaker and worse than the team that has built a big lead, they’re probably demoralized from the whole “ass-kicking” thing. ![]() Teams that are kicking ass do not simply stop kicking ass, unless they are in movies. Every week of the 2022 NFL season, we will celebrate the electric plays, investigate the colossal blunders, and explain the inexplicable moments of the most recent slate. ![]()
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