The Commanders-Giants showdown between old NFC East rivals just didn’t want to end on Sunday afternoon in Washington.
Then it finally did end in the weirdest, craziest, wackiest way you could ever imagine. It ended in a 27-27 tie, and the visitors from New York were pretty happy about it.
That’s because the Giants had already given the Week 5 game away multiple times in the overtime period, missing a field goal on their first possession of the OT and then fumbling the ball away to the Commanders in Washington territory, with victory seemingly in hand.
But victory wasn’t in hand for either team on a Sunday afternoon in the nation’s capital that won’t soon be forgotten, maybe for all the wrong reasons. After New York’s fumble in OT, the momentum swung back to Washington, a Commanders team that had blown a 27-13 fourth-quarter lead just a short time earlier.
The first-place Giants literally had fumbled away an overtime win, Washington took possession and drove the ball into New York territory, all the way down to the Giants’ 24-yard line. There were 12 seconds left, which seemed like plenty of time for the Commanders to run 1 more play before setting up for a potential game-winning field goal.
It was all there for Washington, until it wasn’t. Former LSU star quarterback Jayden Daniels, who is now the signal-caller for the Commanders, was ready to steal a win for his team in his much-anticipated return from a left elbow dislocation suffered in Week 2.
But the quarterback who has been in so many big situations, both at LSU and in the NFL, mistakenly took the snap on a 2nd-and-8 play that should have been the last play from scrimmage before a field-goal attempt, and instead of throwing the ball away with no timeouts left Daniels ran it up the middle.
The problem with that was there was not enough time to set up and spike the ball — not even close to enough time. The announcers on the FOX telecast were in disbelief of how it all went down. The clock ran out in Washington with the score deadlocked, and some Giants players were actually celebrating in relief that they at least weren’t going to lose the game.
Here is the video of the play that surely won’t go down in Washington Commanders lore:
With the craziness of Sunday’s ending in Washington, the NFC East is up for grabs more than ever. Here is what the Kalshi market is currently saying about who has the upper hand in the odds to capture the NFC East crown when all of the chaos is sorted out:
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
