Smartest Plays in NFL History (Same Coach Fell For The Top 2)

They catch the Jets napping. Pickpocket doesn't need strong hands. He needs you looking at the wrong one. Inside the game. These are the 12 smartest plays in NFL history, and the same coach fell for the top two, 20 years apart. The first one cost him his job. So which play was the smartest? And how does one man end up on the wrong end of both? The NFL spends billions stacking the biggest men alive across from each other, and some of its biggest knights got stolen by a punter, A rookie nobody drafted, and a quarterback pretending to trip over his own feet. Nobody on this list won with muscle alone. Somebody got 11 grown men looking at the wrong hand. Third quarter in Chicago. Lions comfortably ahead, and Jared Goff trips over his own feet coming out from under center. Keep your eyes on Gibbs, not Goff. Regained composure, regained his grip on the football, and then threw it down to a wide open Sam LaPorta for a touchdown. Gibbs hits the grass like he's recovering a fumble, and the line screams, fumble! Why does that work? Because every defender's eyes go to the ball, and the ball is still in Goff's hands. He stands up and flips a touchdown to a very lonely Sam Laporta. Ben Johnson lifted it from Jordan Love's real bobble against the same Bears, so Chicago was basically the training footage. That's a play that every team runs. We just happened to put a little hot sauce on the ball handling. Faking a fumble is cute. The next quarterback fumbled for real, on purpose. 10 seconds left, the Raiders are behind, and Ken Stabler is about to be buried on the Chargers 14. So he shoves the ball forward. Banaszak bats it toward the end zone, and Dave Kasper kicks it, falls on it, and scores as the clock dies. In any backyard in America that ends the game, and maybe the friendship. In the NFL, it's six points. Stabler admitted afterward that it was a fumble on purpose. I mean, what else was I going to do with it? Throw it out there, shake the dice. The league's thank-you note came the next offseason, and it was a rule. Late in a half or on fourth down, only the fumbler can advance the ball now. That fix took a year, and the next one took under three months. Playoff game against Baltimore, and New England lines up with four offensive linemen. Shane Vereen is out wide like a receiver, and the referee announces that he can't catch anything. Defensively, even though that guy is ineligible, it's going to be hard not to cover him, just instinctively. A player with an eligible number reports as ineligible, so the defense should ignore him. Baltimore covered him anyway, because every instinct says to, and got fooled by honesty. John Harbaugh was furious. That was the deception part of it. It was clearly deception. Brady's reply belongs on a mug. Maybe those guys gotta study the rulebook and figure it out. I don't know what's deceiving about that. This one died that spring, when owners banned eligible numbers from reporting ineligible and lining up out wide. Sixteen seconds left. Buffalo has just kicked a field goal to go up one, and all Tennessee has to do is catch the kickoff. He throws it across the field to Dyson. He's got something. He's got something. He's got it. Tennessee called it home run throwback. What the broadcast never showed is the sideline in the seconds before the kick, where Fisher goes looking for Kevin Dyson, nicknamed Dice. I grabbed Dice and I said, did you pay attention on Saturday, home run throwback? He goes, coach, I not really didn't pay attention. Dyson ran 75 yards while the Bills chased the first man. Bills fans insist it was a forward pass, and honestly, I'd side with them. But a ruling beats an opinion every time. Rams against the reigning champions Seattle. And Seattle is punting. Forget the ball and track Tavon Austin, the man who isn't catching it. Even faked our cameraman out. That is great preparation by the special teams of the Rams. Austin jogs one way with his arm up and most of the coverage team follows him. The ball lands on the other side in Stedman Bailey's hands and he runs it all the way back. The whole stadium was looking at the wrong hand. Austin doesn't touch the ball on this play and he's the best actor in it. The coach on the other sideline was Pete Carroll, and the loss left his champions 3-3. Pete Carroll's still trying to figure out what happened to his guys on that one. That season was about to cost him far more than a game, and the bill came three and a half months later. The Chiefs named a play after a fairground snack and won two Super Bowls with it. Year one, fourth quarter against the Eagles. Kadarius Toney goes in motion like a jet sweep, turns back, and Philadelphia's defender keeps going. Wide open, year two, overtime, three yards from the title, and San Francisco has seen the film. Reid knows it. Tom and Jerry Wright, one-way play. We don't have a lot of one-way plays, but this is it. We built Corndog in, saying for sure they'll cover Corndog. So he sells them the Corndog on purpose. The 49ers cover it, then collapse on a shovel pass, and Mecole Hardman is standing alone. See this motion? As soon as that happens, Ward's eyes go to the next guy inside. And at that point, he's outleveraged." The Eagles lost their man chasing the motion, and the 49ers lost theirs on the shovel, which makes two different ways to be wrong. Hardman wasn't even the first read. Super Bowl, second-half kickoff, Saints trailing by four. Sean Payton calls an onside kick, and Peyton Manning is stuck on the bench. Thomas Morstead steps into the football and it's an onside kick, and it's going to be He called it ambush, and told his rookie kicker at halftime. The idea was simple. Peyton Manning can't throw a touchdown from the bench. You're hearing the music, but I told him too early, he had to sit on that, like he had to sit on that for 30 minutes. Damn. If that ball goes the other way, Manning gets a short field and Peyton's a punchline for life. People file ambush under guts, the president included. I'd file it under film study, because Payton had spotted the Colts' front line leaving early. I never decided on an onside kick in the second half of the Super Bowl. That took some guts. That is the ballsiest play in Super Bowl history. Four that nearly made it. Belichick let Ahmad Bradshaw score on purpose in Super Bowl XLVI, and Bradshaw spent his own touchdown trying to fall down. Cameron Dicker kicked a 57-yard fair catch field goal for the Chargers, the first one made since 1976, because Jim Harbaugh actually knew that rule existed. In the snowplow game, a man on work release from prison cleared the kicker's spot, and the Patriots won 3-0 on a field goal. The league banned that, too. Back in 2003, Belichick, losing 24-23 and punting from his own one, had his long snapper fire the ball out of the end zone, gave up two more points on purpose, and still won. Belichick keeps turning up on this list. He isn't the coach from the title, he's the reason that coach would rather not watch this video. Everything so far was a trick. This one was the oldest play in football, and the first people it fooled were Bart Starr's own teammates. 13 below at kickoff, Packers down three, third and goal from the one, 16 seconds left and no timeouts. An incomplete pass stops the clock and keeps a tying field goal alive, while a stuffed run ends the game. So everyone expects a pass, until Starr tells Lombardi the backs can't get any footing. Well, then run it. Let's get the hell out of here. I'm not here. Starr never told his backs. The call was a handoff to Chuck Mercein, and Mercein took off thinking he had it. I suddenly realized after about a step and a half that I wasn't going to get the ball. Bart just sort of shuffled his feet and snuck into the end zone himself. The block was the real design. Kramer had spotted in film study three days earlier that Jethro Pugh rose out of his stance, so he and Bowman doubled him. The smartest things on that field were a lineman who watched film and a quarterback who didn't tell his own fullback. When you think about all the clutch plays he made to get them to the one-yard line, and then the intelligence and the courage to go over to the sidelines and tell Vince Lombardi, no, Vince, we're not running that play. Let's run this play. To me, I don't think you can define clutch any better than that. Eight plays down, and we still haven't reached the two plays that Coach fell for. Super Bowl, under a minute left in the half, fourth and goal from the one, and Doug Peterson isn't kicking a field goal. Look for the quarterback, he's not where quarterbacks go. The snap goes to the running back, who pitches to a tight end, who throws to the quarterback. New England's whole defense is staring at the wrong hand, and the right one belongs to a tight end. Earlier, New England ran the same kind of stunt with Tom Brady catching it. He dropped it. The myth says Foles invented it. He didn't. But he did ask for it, by name, on a live mic. You want Philly Philly? Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. You draw up a trick play with levels of deception, and your backup quarterback catches it for the touchdown. There's a statue of that Foles and Peterson sideline chat now. A legal trick gets a statue. A trick that works too well gets a rules committee. Super Bowl XLVII. The Ravens lead in the last minutes, and their punter, Sam Cooke, wanders around his own end zone eating clock until he takes a safety with four seconds left. Sam Cooke, oh yeah, take your time. This is how you take a safety, kids. Almost four years later, against the Bengals, the Ravens did it again with 11 seconds left. Count how many Ravens are grabbing a Bengal. Just about every single Raven on the field committed holding. I'm not exaggerating with that. A game can end on an offensive foul, but not a defensive one. And the Ravens were the offense. So they held every Bengal rusher while Cook ran the clock to zero and stepped out of the end zone. Who was fooled? Nobody. There was no wrong hand to look at. The Bengals knew exactly what was happening and couldn't stop it, which makes it the most honest trick on the list. Asked what separated that from the Patriots' formation he'd called deception, Harbaugh had one answer. I don't want to get into all that. Fair enough. The league answered the next spring with 15 yards and a clock reset. The Jets are up three, Miami is at the Jets' eight, and Dan Marino starts screaming for the clock. Every team stops when the quarterback yells clock, and the Jets did. Then, Marino threw to Mark Ingram in the corner. Rookie cornerback Aaron Glenn hesitated, and he was the one they picked on. That is something I've got to give credit to Bernie Kosar. Bernie is the one that brought that idea. Think about the clock play. Think about the clock play. We decided to pick on the rookie. I give Bernie all the credit for that, although I did throw it. The Jets coach that day was 43, in his first head coaching job, Pete Carroll. Yes, the same one from number eight. That's the only guy I'm glad for, that he pulled it off. The Jets lost their last five and finished six and ten, and Carroll was fired. New England hired him two years later, and on one January morning in 2000, the Patriots fired him again. That same day, the Jets named Bill Belichick their head coach. The next day, Belichick quit. In a handwritten note, he signed, H.C. of the N.Y.J. I've decided to resign as the head coach of the New York Jets. New England paid a first-round pick for a man who'd quit the Jets job in a day, and he filled Carroll's old job. Those two would meet one yard from the end zone. Fourteen days before this Super Bowl, Carroll made one of the smartest calls of his career. Down 16 to nothing, fourth and ten, his punter throws a touchdown pass to a right tackle. That man is not afraid of a trick. Brady has made it 28-24, and Seattle drives. Jermaine Kearse makes a catch on his back off a deflection by Malcolm Butler, and Lynch runs to the one. Across the field, the man who took Carroll's old job in New England has two timeouts and doesn't touch either one. I'm not going to take them off the hook here by taking the timeout if they want to use it. One of his assistants kept asking for it and got nothing back. It was a very lonely moment for me because he wouldn't talk to me. He wouldn't even look at me. He was just kind of staring across the field. You know, the clock is running. Seattle's side of it was simple arithmetic. You knew that one of those plays there, you're going to have to throw it because you need to stop the clock so that you can get the other two plays running. I'd have run it anyway. The route itself was no surprise. Butler had already lost to it in practice when the scout team ran it and Jimmy Garoppolo threw to Josh Boyce. Pass is... Seattle stacks Kearse in front of Lockett so Kearse can clear the way. Brandon Browner hits Kearse at the line, Butler breaks from deep in the end zone, and his path is open. Just kept seeing him look that way. He kept looking. And I say, something ain't right." An undrafted rookie from West Alabama made that play. ...a guy who might have been number nine on the secondary depth chart at the beginning of the season making the interception." ...you've got a guy that's been borderline unstoppable in this part of the field. I can't believe the call." Lynch, who watched the biggest carry of his career turn into a pass from one yard out, walked straight up to Carroll with his helmet off. I hit his a** with the biggest a**. Three and a half months after St. Louis, the bill arrived. So here's my number one. And it isn't really Butler's play. It's Belichick standing there with two timeouts doing nothing. And what beat Pete Carroll both times was the same thing. In 1994, Marino yells clock, and Carroll's defense believes him. In 2015, Belichick lets that clock run, and Carroll, trying to manage it perfectly, throws to save it. 20 years, two teams, and both times the wrong hand was the clock. Nobody on this list was stronger. They just knew where the other guy was looking. Somewhere, a coach is reading the rule book for the next one, and the league's lawyers are reading right behind him. Which one would you have at number one? It was the worst call ever. It was the worst result of a call ever. The call would have been a great one if we catch it. It would have been just fine and nobody would have thought twice about it.