The Music City Miracle
If you knew an older Bills fan, you likely saw them have a PSTD flashback after “13 seconds”. We all know 13 seconds as it just happened two seasons ago and was maybe one of the greatest playoff finishes of all time, but for the zoomers who might be reading this and have only heard about the lore, it’s happened before. It was arguably even worse then.
The year is 2000, at the end of the 1999 NFL season. It is the wildcard round. The Bills were the 5th seed and had the #1 defense in the league, and were coached by everyone’s current favorite football grandpa Wade Phillips. The Bills had made the playoffs 8 times in the past decade and were still looking for that Super Bowl win. The Titans were Nashville fresh, this being their third year in Nashville and the first under the new name. Despite being a devastating 13-3, the Tits were actually the 4th seed as they had lost the AFC Central to the 14-2 Jaguars. As far as wildcard matchups go, this was pretty good!
It was not the most enjoyable watch if you like offense. The first score of the game was a safety on the Bills. At halftime the Bills were in a 12-0 hole. Things looked bleak. Then things turned around and the Bills scored 13 unanswered points to go ahead. The Titans got the ball with 6 minutes left, managed to squeak into field goal range and score the go-ahead kick with 1:48 to go, setting the stage for what should have been the big heroic 2-minute drill by the Bills. They nailed a 41-yarder to go up 16-15 with 16 seconds left. Setup complete.
What’s 16 seconds? Kickoff would probably take anywhere from 4-10 seconds off the clock and the Bills were going to kick it a bit short to prevent a touchback. If the Titans got lucky on the runback they might have enough time for what, possibly two plays? Chances of victory are so slim in these moments and 99% of the time, you are already drinking the celebratory beer here anticipating the victory.
This happened instead. In a funny twist of fate, the Music City Miracle took 13 seconds. Although it took a while to confirm it as a lateral, which it is. Barely. It might be the slightest lateral in history, and only one camera angle really shows it (2:39 in this video is the angle). The game camera makes it look like a forward pass, but when you Zapruder the shit out of it with the best angle, you see the ball leaves Wycheck’s hands in an extended sidearm flick beyond the line, and Dyson has to lean a ways inward to actually catch the ball, just barely closer to the line then where it left. If Wycheck throws the ball normally instead of using that desperate sidearm flick, this play ends with the Bills winning. It’s so close, but the call was correct. Sorry Bills fans, it’s a lateral.
The legacy of this game is more than just the lunatic ending. This game would curse the Bills and send them into a 17-year playoff drought which finally ended when Andy Dalton beat the Ravens to allow the Bills to back into the playoffs in 2017. It was the longest active playoff drought for the time. If a Bills fan was born the very next day, they would almost have been old enough to vote by the time they experienced a Bills playoff game. They would have been able to drink by the time the Bills would finally win their next playoff game in 2021.
The Titans side of the story is more interesting. This is the Titans team that would eventually reach the Super Bowl and lose in the famous One Yard Short game. The Titans that season were notable for being the Jaguars Achilles heel, due to what some Jags fans believe was a stolen playbook. This has never been confirmed and lives in Jaguars lore as one of the reasons Jacksonville hates Tennessee to this day. It is very plausible the Jaguars are Super Bowl champions if the Music City Miracle never happens as literally no other team beat the Jaguars in the entire year, and they sent Dan Marino into retirement with a vengeance.
Maybe that should be the next subject of a Lateral, actually.
Couple of things
1. Had Ralph Wilson not been a bigot against short people, Buffalo would have never been beaten by the Music City Miracle, because Flutie would have kept Buffalo out of that 0-12 halftime hole.
2. Jacksonville played a baby-shit soft schedule in 99 due to the expansion Browns, Bungles, post-coin flip Steelers, weak-ass NFC West, & injured to shit Jets & Broncos making up 12 of their games (Tennessee & Miami were the only teams with winning records Jacksonville played; only Tennessee & Baltimore were the only team the Jags faced that scored more points than they allowed).
3. Buffalo would have stomped Jacksonville’s offense out in the AFC Championship game (assuming Ralph Wilson doesn’t force Wade to start Robosack), and probably would have beaten the Rams in the Super Bowl as they had a great defense like Tampa Bay but a decent offense unlike Tampa Bay.
Fun fact: Buffalo traded the #9 overall pick in the 1998 draft to Jacksonville for ROB JOHNSON after ONE good performance coming back on a crappy Ravens defense. The player Jacksonville took with that pick: Fred Taylor. How the hell Rob Johnson for Fred Taylor is not considered as one the of the worst trades in NFL history is beyond me.
Also, in off-topic Arena League news, a different team from the same league Antonio Brown’s Albany Empire got kicked out of has folded midseason, bringing that league (the National Arena League) down to 5 teams.
I NEVER understood why the Bills were so hesitant on Flutie. There is NOTHING during his Buffalo years that would lead me to the conclusion that Rob Johnson was going to get it done better. What kind of idiot takes a team that went 10-5 and puts the known-to-be-incompetent backup in for the playoffs? Ralph got what he deserved for that one.
Also, I’m 100% in agreement with you on The Music City Miracle. Even if you told Flutie not to throw the ball, he still could have led them to a win, and would probably have turned the 6 sacks Rob took into hefty gains on the ground. Bonus of being a small guy… hard to tackle.
Buffalo starting Rob Johnson still infuriates me to this very day and I’m not even a Bills fan.
You can also include Tennessee with Jacksonville. Cleveland was a shell of a team, Cincinnati was the worst it has ever been and Pittsburgh was painfully average. Baltimore, Tennessee and Jacksonville had three seasons where they were starting with 4-5 wins with four working bye weeks.
Greatest Show On Turf that year was a team of destiny. Woulda coulda shoulda…..didn’t.
Jags absolutely were robbed of a Super Bowl that season, and if you need any more evidence that we ALL lost what was a truly-blessed season, look no farther than the appropriately-titled Jags hype song from that season, “Uh Oh”.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WYSlGaQsC8I
Was this the last time a team had a song with players performing in it?
Took the stolen playbook thing with a grain of salt until I saw who the Titans’ defensive coordinator was. Gregg Williams? Employing dirty and underhanded tactics to win? Say it ain’t so!
Man if this wasn’t enough to trigger Bills fans, the fact these types of throwback comics are called “laterals” lmao
It was a literal lateral.
Also, that lateral was the first close play that technology was advanced enough to be able to analyze the play up close. While the Immaculate Reception was more popular (and controversial depending on who you are), due to the 1970s, we still don’t have clear shots of who touched the pass first and where the ball was when Franco Harris caught it.
The Music City Miracle was being dissected like the Zapruder Film before Kevin Dyson passed the 20-yard line.
*watches the video submitted as proof it was a lateral*
Are… are we watching the same video? It’s close but that’s a forward pass. It’s always been a forward pass. It’s really really REALLY close but it’s also clearly forward.
That said, I can also see how the refs would have ruled it a lateral as in real time on the field it would have been an impossible call and the replay was – as I said – close.
Agreed. I expect the officials concluded it was “probably” a forward pass with the replay rules understandably not allowing for overturning a call on the field due to “probably”. It certainly was much closer than it initially appeared on television, which is why the refs on the field ruled the way they did initially.
Everyone is going to believe what they want to believe, but it sure looks like a lateral to me: https://i.imgur.com/1i2vEpu.png
This is what always sold me. You might be able to argue the ball went directly sideways, but if you look at the position of Wychek’s arm when he releases the ball, it’s about as far extended forward over the line as possible, and Dyson catches it slightly further back. As always, the position of the players is irrelevant, it’s only the ball that matters. The ball was released over the line, and appears to be caught slightly closer to the line
I agree with blueberries below that nobody is going to be 100% clear either way, but that’s the best angle we get, and it appears to lean lateral far more than it leans forward pass.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/F80Guzj93mQvYuvFFrJWfvpqnpQ=/1600×0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/16678053/Lateral.gif
I’m confused. In the span of a few sentences, you go from seemingly being flabbergasted that anyone would think it’s anything BUT a forward pass, to calling it clearly a forward pass, to calling it really really REALLY close, to saying the refs in real time wouldn’t be able to distinguish it, so you understand why they called it a lateral. Which is it?
My take has always been that based on the footage we have, there is absolutely no way to say for certain what it was (but the image BartyMae links below is certainly the closest I’ve seen to something definitive). The video footage we have all show ANGLES, and depending which angle you’re viewing from, the perspective and perception of the ball’s depth are radically different. I certainly don’t understand how anyone would come to the conclusion that it’s CLEARLY anything. “It seems” to be a lateral, or “I think” it’s a forward pass, sure. But CLEARLY? I’m not sure how you arrived there.
I think if you do a Dan Marino lateral, you should do it in the style of one panel per year of his playoff failures, like you did with Aaron Rodgers, or (not playoffs, but) Joe Thomas.
This one hurt. As a Broncos fan I have a special affinity for Wade Phillips for being the architect of the 2015 Broncos defense (AKA the reason Cam Newton still wakes up screaming every night).