Browns Learn Prayers Sometimes Answered

The Hail Mary pass is the most dramatic play in football.

It fails most of the time but when it works, as it did Sunday when Tim Couch completed a 50-yard touchdown pass to Quincy Morgan with no time remaining in the Cleveland Browns’ 21-20 victory over the Jacksonville Jaguars, you can count on extreme reactions from both teams.

Jacksonville Coach Tom Coughlin: “The despair and the gloom that set in when you have something in your hand and it’s taken away from you and you lose it, that’s hard.... Never in my wildest dreams did I expect that was ever going to happen. I thought we were in total control of the game. There was no logical explanation for it. My emotions ran the gamut from total despair to total frustration.”

Cleveland Coach Butch Davis: “Yeah, another day at the office. I don’t really know what to tell you, other than when you’ve coached 30 years, you think you’ve seen everything. Obviously, you haven’t.”

Jacksonville cornerback Fernando Bryant: “The call came in and it came down to me making the play or not making the play, and I didn’t make it.”

Couch: “I was just giving everyone a ‘jet’ call. Everybody goes deep and you see what happens. It just worked out for us. It’s unbelievable when you think about how something like this can basically determine how your season will turn out.”

The “Hail Mary pass” became part of football’s lexicon in 1975 when, after completing a desperation last-second touchdown pass to Drew Pearson to give Dallas a 17-14 playoff victory over favored Minnesota, Cowboy quarterback Roger Staubach, applying a Catholic touch, described his throw that way, instead of saying, “I threw a prayer.”

It has been part of football ever since. From Doug Flutie’s dramatic touchdown pass to Gerard Phelan in Boston College’s victory over Miami in 1984 to Marcus Randall’s last-second 75-yard touchdown pass to Devery Henderson in Louisiana State’s wild win over Kentucky this season, the Hail Mary pass has been responsible for scores of victories over the years.

When a Hail Mary pass works: It’s usually because someone on defense makes a mental mistake. That’s what happened to the Jaguars last week.

With the ball at midfield and Cleveland down to its last play, Jacksonville knew Couch had to throw into the end zone. Still, the Jaguars did not go into a complete Hail Mary prevent defense. Instead, Jacksonville used regular two-deep prevent coverage.

The differences between the coverages vary from team to team but the basics are the same. In a Hail Mary prevent, at least three defenders are lined up across the field near the end zone. In a regular prevent coverage, the defensive backs are staggered, with two or three defenders playing zone at least 25 yards off the ball.

Against the Browns, Jacksonville free safety Marlon McCree was responsible deep for the left side of the field and Bryant was assigned to cover Morgan underneath. Bryant allowed Morgan to get behind him running down the right sideline because he thought McCree would be there to help.

But McCree wasn’t there because, looking at Couch, he’d been faked into the middle of the field. By the time he recovered, it was too late. That left Bryant to contest Morgan for a jump ball, and the result was a touchdown for the Browns.

Getting a one-on-one matchup on a Hail Mary pass is a dream opportunity for an offense. Any quarterback with a decent throwing arm and a receiver with a sense of timing can almost always make the play work with only one defender to worry about.

When a Hail Mary play fails: It’s because a defense doesn’t panic and is in the right coverage.

The Browns used a “bunch” formation, common on Hail Mary passes. It features a group of receivers on one side of the ball, a lone receiver on the other side. This formation confused the Jacksonville secondary, which ended up with too many defenders concentrating on the Browns’ bunch receivers on one side of the field.

The Jaguars would have done better to string their defenders in the end zone, in position to knock the ball down. Too often, defensive backs try to intercept Hail Mary passes when an incompletion is all that’s necessary.

“The ball is always kept in front of you and you knock the ball down,” Coughlin said. “That’s what you do. That wasn’t the case here. Fernando actually had four or five yards on [Morgan] and as the ball was thrown and they both began to look up for it, they got entangled a little bit. That’s where I think Marlon could have been over the top and could have been involved in knocking the ball down. It didn’t happen.”