National Football League

Mr. Hail Mary! Aaron Rodgers throws another shock TD to stun Giants at end of half

Published Jan. 8, 2017 6:42 p.m. ET

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Chris Chase

Most quarterbacks go their whole lives without completing a Hail Mary. Aaron Rodgers is not most quarterbacks.

For the third time in the past 13 months, the Green Bay Packers QB converted a prayer touchdown pass at the end of a half or game - this time as the clock expired in the opening half of Sunday's wild-card playoff against the New York Giants. With 6 seconds on the clock, Rodgers took the shotgun snap from the Giants' 42-yard line, drifted back while rolling right then heaved the ball more than 60 yards to find Randall Cobb in the back of the end zone after the receiver had inexplicably gotten behind the New York defense. Touchdown. And they made it look easy.

It capped a stunning 6 minutes of play in which Green Bay went from down 6-0 with 29 yards of total offense to up 14-6 and feeling like it had just delivered a knockout blow. Even 30 seconds before the two-minute warning, the Packers still had a zero on the scoreboard. The 14 points all came in a 140-second stretch.

Ironically, it was a packers failure that led to the Hail Mary success. On third-and-2 with six seocnds left, Rodgers threw a bullet to Jared Cook, who got his hands on the ball but dropped it after contact from New York defenders. If the tight end had caught the ball, the Packers would have gotten a first down but because the clock would have kept running, getting off another play would have been impossible. Without Cook's drop, there's no Cobb touchdown.

For most of the half, it was impossible not to think the Packers were lucky that the Giants only had a 6-0 lead. It could have been so much worse. That's an old cliche ("they're lucky to be still be in this game!") and more often than not the luck eventually reverts back to the mean and the deficit becomes what you'd expect. Sometimes though, the team hanging around makes them pay.

Rodgers has become something of a Hail Mary virtuoso in the last season-and-a-half. Last year, he threw a game-winner in Detroit to beat the Lions on a wild Thursday night game. Then, in the divisional playoffs, Green Bay was able to push Arizona to overtime on the strength of a 41-yard Hail Mary that beat the clock at the end of regulation. (Arizona would win the game on the first OT drive though.)

Those plays were great, almost lucky, catches made by receivers who managed to time their jump perfectly to peak over the scrum just as the ball came in. This time, Cobb slipped behind the pack - tough for many reasons, least of all that it was positioned about eight yards deep in the end zone. Letting a receiver get behind you on a Hail Mary is a football sin on par with jumping offsides on a fourth-and-1 hard count.

The one thing each play had in common: a perfect throw from a football master.

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