The Super Bowl. Fourth quarter. Nine minutes and change left. Taking over possession down by … eight.
Maybe not the situation you dream of as a kid—I think most kids fantasize about throwing the winning score, not needing two plays to tie it—but it’s the situation Jalen Hurts found himself in last February against the Chiefs.
And, of course, it’s the situation I’d been waiting four seasons to see.
“I work for those opportunities,” Hurts told me this offseason, after he’d had some time to reflect on the game. “ work for those opportunities, so in those moments we can get things done.”
Hurts had marched the Eagles 63 yards down the field in seven plays, most of them in one big chunk. And when DeVonta Smith drifted out of bounds at the 2-yard line after catching a ball that traveled nearly 50 yards in the air, it seemed too perfect. The same quarterback who had set a single-season record for rushing touchdowns (in the regular season and playoffs combined), whose team had perfected the art of the QB sneak with a new wrinkle so devastatingly effective people were calling for it to be legislated out of the game, needed to punch it in twice for the first octopus in Super Bowl history.
Hurts and I finally have something in common: It was the moment my career had built toward, too. Sort of.
Welcome to the fourth annual Octopus of the Year Awards. Or, as I describe it each summer: The MMQB’s most self-indulgent awards gala.
