Pumped up kicks

I promise I’m not purposely making every column from here on out named after a song, but they just continue work out that way. At least I’ve now changed genres.

If you watched last week’s “Thursday Night Football” game, you saw a shootout between the Denver Broncos and Los Angeles Chargers — both gunning for a playoff spot late in the season. Both divisional rivals in the AFC West (although neither has a chance of winning the division so long as the Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes still exist).

Denver, who hasn’t made the playoffs since its Super Bowl win in 2015, has seen a resurgence with its rookie QB, Bo Nix. The Chargers, under first-year head coach Jim Harbaugh, are looking to do more than squeak into the playoffs and fizzle out shortly after, as their MO has been as of late.

The Bolts came out on top after a second-half surge took them past the D-Town Donkeys, but it was something in the first half that caught my attention — as well as most of America’s — and I just knew I had writing material for your pre-holiday reading pleasure.

Something happened on the final snap of the first half that I have been preparing for since high school. I had an offensive coordinator who also served as our government and current events teacher. In the middle of rural Ohio, when you’re the offensive coordinator at a small high school, and you have to teach government and current events, you get sidetracked sometimes, or so was the case with Coach Auggie.

Sometimes (most of the time), we would watch game film — whether you were an athlete of his or not, it didn’t matter — and find obscure rulings for abstract scenarios in the game of football. One such abstract scenario was this: you receive a kick of some sort (whether a kickoff or punt doesn’t matter) at the end of either of the two halves. If you signal for a fair catch on the kick, you can elect to either take the snap, or you may kick from the exact spot where the fair catch was caught, uncontested, and lined up like a kickoff.

Our coach absolutely dreamed of this scenario. He wanted it to happen, just so he could flex his knowledge of the game.

And for the first time in 48 years, the Los Angeles Chargers made a fair catch free kick in an NFL game last Thursday.

A peculiar sequence of events led to it, but for the first time in my life, I got to see something that I had only ever heard of or seen secondhand.

Denver was faced with absolutely terrible field position at the end of the first half and couldn’t dig themselves out of the mud. Time wound down for them, and they punted it away as time was coming to a close and the teams were about to hit the locker rooms. Los Angeles’ returner called for a fair catch and was hit on the play. The bad field position to begin with didn’t help Denver’s punter trying to pin them deep, and the 15 added yards to the return gave it to the Chargers at Denver’s 40.

Faced with the decision to either go for a hail Mary, kneel out the clock, or utilize the seldom-used loophole, Jim Harbaugh went for the long, uncontested kick. And Cameron Dicker nailed the 57-yard field goal, the longest fair catch free kick in NFL history.

Sean Payton, the head coach of the Broncos, was interviewed at halftime, and he told the sideline reporter that his own team practiced scenarios like that, so it’s not uncommon in the NFL to be aware of the situation, apparently.