BAD BEATS: NFL WEEK 17

BY ADAM GREENE

You always risk taking a loss when wagering on anything, but a Bad Beat is something special. So many times, when an “L” is heading your way it’s clear it’s coming from the start. The moments when it swoops in during the final seconds of a game, when defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory, that the Bad Beat was born.

The results are the same. The payoff you were looking for isn’t coming. But the emotional toll is very different. When a game is going sideways early, you’re prepared for the final result. But when it’s looking good the whole way, only to have the rug pulled from under your feet in the final minutes, it can frankly hurt your feelings.

Sunday, there was no classic Bad Beat, no last second larceny brought on by sheer luck, freakish athleticism or coaching stupidity. But that doesn’t mean we escaped unharmed. We just had to wait the entire night to take the shot in the teeth as the Washington Football Team held on for a 20-14 victory over the Philadelphia Eagles.

And if you took the Eagles at +3, you had a tough time getting to sleep Sunday night.

Entering the fourth quarter, WFT was up 17-14 and you weren’t ecstatic about it, but you were at least looking at a push. You were going to get your money back and be able to fight again. There were NFL playoff games on the horizon for the very next weekend and, at least on the AFC side, maybe the best slate in more than a decade. Every team playing in that bracket would be 11-5 or better. There are multiple rivalry match ups, revenge games and subplots dating back to the early 1990s as Frank Reich, Buffalo Bills hero, has the chance to ruin that team’s best season in over 20 years as head coach of the Indianapolis Colts.

But there was still a chance you could pull this off, win a nice little chunk of change to take into that dream weekend and maybe turn it into that post-COVID vaccine search for the Loch Ness Monster you always dreamed of since Leonard Nimoy first told you about it on a rerun of In Search Of… when you were a kid.

Sure, there have been numerous scientific expeditions that have proven, beyond the shadow of any scientific doubt, that Nessie could not exist, but that’s just because you personally have never clapped your eyeballs onto the murky depths of the ancient lake first formed when the icebergs receded from the Pleistocene Epoch and, obviously, trapped a small population of living plesiosaurs in the process.

All you needed was the game to continue playing out as it had and your search for Nessie was on at best, or slightly delayed at worst. Then Philadelphia Eagles head coach Doug Pederson did something that defied belief, even for you, a person convinced that a dinosaur not only survived the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction Event, but has lived for millennia in the Highlands of Scotland without ever once being stuffed into a sheep’s stomach and served as a haggis.

Pederson benched the quarterback he started, the guy he’d already benched another guy to get onto the field, and replaced him with a guy you had no idea was even still on the team. Yes, with the chance at victory in his grasp, Pederson decided the No. 6 overall pick in April’s NFL Draft looked pretty good and told Jalen Hurts to grab his Microsoft Surface tablet because it was Nate Sudfeld time!

Two plays later, Sudfeld sent a pass right into the loving arms of Washington Football Team safety Jeremy Reaves and your hopes of sharing a human hand to plesiosaur flipper high five with a Scottish cryptid disappeared, much like a lake monster plunging to the depths away from the prying eyes and thousands of cell phone cameras that surround the loch daily.

On his next drive, Sudfeld fumbled two plays in. He’d run a total of five plays and turned the ball over twice. There were two more Sudfeld possessions, but one ended with a punt and the other with the final seconds of the game ticking away as a disgusted Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth realized they braved the elements and a global pandemic for 15 game minutes of Sudfeld, whose name sounds like an ingredient to crystal meth.

You money was gone, but more importantly, so was Nessie. Yes, the ever-elusive freshwater beast has escaped you once again

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