10) Detroit Lions 22, Atlanta Falcons 21 - Week 8
Okay, this game in no way qualifies as "the best" in terms of these teams' performances, but it sure was memorable for many an inexplicable coaching decision on both sidelines. I mean I can't bring myself to put any Saints games on this list, so I'll have to settle for the kind of Falcons collapse I can revel in until next season. Color me butthurt. Anyway, the long and short of it was that Detroit rallied from a 21-point halftime deficit, but Atlanta was clinging to a two-point lead with the ball and less than two minutes to go. With the Lions out of timeouts, all the Falcons had to do was run the ball twice and punt, in effect giving Detroit 30 seconds and no timeouts to try to drive the ball into field goal range. Much to the contrary, the Falcons got dinged on a holding call and then attempted a pass that fell incomplete on third down, and that gave the Lions a generous 1:45 to kick the game-winning field goal. If that wasn't enough, Atlanta called two timeouts and was charged for another holding penalty during Detroit's final drive, which basically gifted the Lions all of the timeouts they'd already spent. Of course, Jim Caldwell did everything he could to out-mismanage Mike Smith during that sequence, calling two running plays at the edge of Matt Prater's shaky field goal range with no timeouts left. And in an end that would only be fitting in a game like this, Prater actually missed his first field goal attempt but got another try because the Lions were flagged for a delay of game. So anyway, if you're still sore about Pete Carroll's play-calling during the Super Bowl, this is Exhibit A that there are much, much worse ways to lose football games.
9) San Diego Chargers 38, San Francisco 49ers 35 - Week 16
This game didn't ultimately amount to much for these two teams that ended up on the outside looking in when it came to playoff spots. But what a wild game with big plays and a bigger comeback that added to Philip Rivers' "Mr. December" legend. The 49ers did just about everything right in the first half with Frank Gore breaking out for a 50-yard touchdown on the first drive, two more from Bruce Ellington, and two interceptions including a pick six from the Niners defense. With San Francisco going into the 3rd quarter 28 - 7, fans breathed a collective sigh of relief that the playoffs were still in sight and maybe the new Santa Clara stadium locale wasn't as completely cursed as it had seemed. But it was. Rivers was on fire in the second half with three big touchdown drives, and the Chargers defense recovered a fumble in the end zone, eventually resulting in overtime. The 49ers fumbled again on their second play after regulation, which put San Diego in position to kick the game-winning field goal and eliminated any uncertainty that Jim Harbaugh would not be returning to San Francisco next season.
8) Green Bay Packers 26, New England Patriots 21 - Week 13
Remarkably, this game marked the first head-to-head between Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers ever. And both quarterbacks and their teams played an extraordinarily competitive, near-flawless game that left us hoping for a rematch in February. Green Bay got the early upper hand with Rodgers, Eddie Lacy and the leg of Mason Crosby all putting a steady flow of points on the board, but the Patriots willed their way back to what could have been a game-winning drive in the red zone with three minutes left on the clock. Ultimately though, the Packers proved to be too much, sacking Brady on third down to force the Patriots into a longer, errant field goal attempt and then converting a gutsy Rodgers-to-Cobb pass on 3rd-and-4 to keep New England from getting the ball back. Maybe Mike McCarthy shoulda watched this film when the Pack made that fateful trip to Seattle two months later.
It's hard to say where the Giants are headed as a franchise these days, but there can be no doubt their future is a whole lot brighter with WR Odell Beckham, Jr. after a breakout Rookie of the Year season that may have single-handedly saved Eli Manning's career. That breakout began, of course, with The Play of the Year in primetime against the rival Cowboys. With the Giants trailing by 7 in the second quarter, Manning threw a 40-yard bomb toward the end zone. Despite being held by Brandon Carr, Beckham managed to break away for a spectacular leaping one-handed, three-finger catch that broke Twitter and created an instant star. ODB's circus catches have become commonplace in the NFL since that time (and old-hat for LSU fans), but this play will be immortalized on the sports highlight reel for decades to come despite the fact that the Giants actually lost this one amid a disappointing 6 - 10 campaign. But barring an awful jinx on my part, Beckham has all the makings of a Hall of Famer, and we'll be able to say some day that we remember where we were at the moment he became a household name. Now go enjoy some science!
6) St. Louis Rams 28, Seattle Seahawks 26 - Week 7
Before we get into the wild antics of the 2014-15 postseason, I've got to give one more shoutout to an underdog team that continually defied expectations against some of the league's best teams this season. The Rams had big wins against the Broncos and 49ers as well, but none compared to their David-and-Goalith special teams extravaganza against the Seahawks in Week 7. With a third-string quarterback and a mountain of defensive injuries to contend with, the Rams were 7-point home underdogs with little upside against an intimidating opponent. Ironically, that may have given St. Louis permission to throw the kitchen sink into a nothing-to-lose kind of game plan that yielded one of the most memorable upsets of the year. The Rams set up their first touchdown on a 75-yard kickoff return from Benny Cunningham. They followed up with one of the niftiest trick punt returns you'll ever see in which the Rams return team rolled to one side of the field only for Stedman Bailey to sneak past the unsuspecting Seahawks on the opposite side for a 90-yard touchdown. And then finally, clinging to a two-point lead with three minutes to go, St. Louis faced fourth down deep in their own territory, but when the ball was snapped, punter Johnny Hekker threw a perfect spiral to Cunningham to move the chains and give the Rams a very improbable win.
Since 2008, the Patriots and Ravens have combined for 17 playoff wins including four head-to-heads and two Super Bowl titles. Needless to say, this has become one of the best modern rivalries in the league that rarely disappoints in January, and this year was no exception. Joe Flacco & co. came out with guns ablazin' at Foxboro, building a 14-point lead that they held midway into the third quarter. The Patriots' offense looked off for most of the first half with Baltimore getting plenty of pressure on Tom Brady while keeping LaGarrette Blount mostly in the backfield. You could almost taste Pats fans' "Not Again" sense of dread from your couch during what seemed like another disappointing playoff collapse after a great regular season. But then New England abandoned any sense of a conservative game plan by letting Brady air it out for the entirety of the second half, and boy how did it work against the Ravens' reeling secondary. No. 12 was a no-huddle surgeon in leading the Patriots to a stunning comeback, but the play of the game belonged to WR Julian Edelman who lofted a surprise touchdown pass to Danny Amendola to tie the game and put momentum firmly in the Pats' corner for the rest of regulation.
4) Dallas Cowboys 24, Detroit Lions 20 - Wild Card Round
3) Green Bay Packers 26, Dallas Cowboys 21 - Divisional Round
There's no way to get around the obvious: the road to the Super Bowl in the NFC was akin to a monkey paw curse this season. One team's inexplicable fortune one week transformed into a devastating punch to the gut the next week, a curse that first began with the Lions/Cowboys in the Wild Card round and eventually ended in devastating fashion two spots down from this section. But back to the original scene of the crime. Detroit put up a much better game than they'll probably get credit for in their comprehensively heartbreaking playoff history by keeping DeMarco Murray and Tony Romo in check with a top tier defensive effort. But as the Lions were trying to extend a 3-point lead in the third quarter, Cowboys DB Anthony Hitchens was flagged and then un-flagged for pass interference in a bizarre referee reversal several seconds after the original call. (See visual below if you are confused about whether or not this was PI.) Anyway, Dallas ended up being the team to slay its recent playoff demons with a near-flawless fourth quarter comeback, and Detroit fans were left to cry conspiracy on Jerry Jones... until the following week when the Cowboys went to Lambeau. Dallas vs. Green Bay was a neck-and-neck divisional classic between two very talented offenses, and the Cowboys had a chance to go ahead late in the fourth quarter on a gorgeous [seeming] touchdown pass from Romo to Dez Bryant. But Packers coach Mike McCarthy challenged the play and won, reviving the hair-pulling debate about that tricky, very inconsistently enforced "process of the catch" rule that took up tons of media air time before the Dawn of Ballghazi. Green Bay then converted two third-downs to seal the win and send Cowboys fans home crying foul after getting such good comps from the zebras the previous week.
And so it was the Packers' turn to lose in an agonizing turn of events late in a game they unequivocally should have won against the Seahawks. But unlike the Lions and Cowboys, they didn't have the psychic satisfaction of getting to blame this one on the refs. No, after building and hanging onto a 12-point lead with two minutes to go against the reigning Super Bowl champs in the hostile environs of Seattle, Green Bay absolutely blew it in every way imaginable. Mike McCarthy's uber-conservative playcalling deserves the bulk of the blame given that the Packers went for field goals twice from the 1-yardline and tried to run it up the gut for the majority of the fourth quarter instead of putting the ball in MVP Aaron Rodgers' hands. But Green Bay's loss was also a death by a thousand very unlucky papercuts during which they got punked on a fake field goal, botched what should have been an easy onside kick recovery, and let Russell Wilson convert a Hail Mary 2-point conversion that led to overtime instead of a Packers win. It was a historic collapse far more than it was a triumphant comeback in this game we'll all talk about for years to come -- outside of the limits of Wisconsin, anyway. But no matter, the Seahawks would grab the monkey's paw only to be foiled in equally tragic fashion under the bright lights in Arizona two weeks later.
1) New England Patriots 28, Seattle Seahawks 24 - Super Bowl XLIX
Being the Super Bowl isn't usually enough to push a game to the top in the ranks on its own merit, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a much better one than this in recent memory. After yawning our way through the Seahawks' [nonetheless impressive] rout over the Broncos last year, we got a thrilling championship this time from start to finish between a decades-long dynasty and the wave of the NFL future. Trailing by 10 points in the fourth quarter, Tom Brady and the Patriots broke the Legion of Boom over their knees with two unanswered touchdowns, but then the Seahawks fought their way back to the goal line in the final seconds of the game after a miracle catch from Russell Wilson to Jermaine Kearse. But like their NFC brethren before them, the Seahawks were doomed to lose in agony by way of an inside slant route on 2nd-and-goal that Pats rookie Malcolm Butler intercepted, sealing the game for New England and adding an exclamation point to the legacy narrative of Brady and Belichick.
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