DaVon Hamilton spent the first three quarters of Sunday’s win over the Philadelphia Eagles proving he had no business touching a football snap; he spent the fourth quarter doing it anyway, correctly, with the Jacksonville Jaguars’ season and a flight home from London both riding on it.
The NFL treats long snapping as a job so mechanically routine that most teams carry exactly one specialist for it and no real plan for what happens when he can’t go. Ross Matiscik found the edges of that plan on Sunday. He hurt his shoulder early in the game and didn’t return, and the job fell to DaVon Hamilton, a 335-pound interior defensive lineman who had been playing well enough on defense this season to draw Pro Bowl speculation, and who had presumably not handled emergency long-snapper duty since high school, if ever.
The results were what you’d expect from a man filling in for a job he doesn’t have. Hamilton snapped high on all three of Cam Little’s attempts with him behind center, one of which cost Jacksonville a point outright on a botched PAT. Three chances, three bad snaps; by any sane evaluation, the Jaguars had a kicking-operation emergency and no obvious fix short of Matiscik’s shoulder healing on command.
Jalen Hurts and the Eagles briefly made that problem look irrelevant. Jake Elliott’s 48-yard field goal put Philadelphia ahead 17-16 with eight seconds left, the sort of lead that is supposed to survive eight seconds. Then Ameer Abdullah returned the ensuing kickoff 53 yards to the Philadelphia 39, the clock got corrected from 0:00 back up to one second, and the Jaguars had just enough field and just enough time for one more kick.
That kick needed a snap. The snap needed to come from Hamilton, the same man who had gone 0-for-3 on accuracy already, now asked to deliver it from 57 yards out with the game compressed into a single tick of the clock. He snapped it high again. Cam Little’s 57-yard walk-off field goal split the uprights anyway, as time expired, and the Jaguars won 19-17 on a kick engineered by the player least qualified on the roster to engineer it.
https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/2109332560883118196
None of this is a story about a clown stumbling into heroism. Hamilton has anchored Jacksonville’s defensive line for years and was, by the same account, playing well on defense in the very game he nearly lost with his hands. The issue isn’t Hamilton. It’s a sport that builds entire position rooms and coaching trees around far harder jobs than placing a ball into a kicker’s hands from eight yards away, then leaves the one task considered too simple to need a real contingency plan to whoever happens to be standing closest when it breaks.
Jacksonville will file the box score and move on. Trevor Lawrence threw for 331 yards and two touchdowns on 24-of-39 passing, with 25 more yards on the ground, while Hurts kept pace at 220 yards and a touchdown on 21-of-40 for Philadelphia. Neither quarterback’s afternoon will be the one anyone brings up from this game.
What they’ll bring up, if they bring up anything specific at all, is that the gap between a clean road win and a humiliating collapse in London came down to a defensive tackle getting a kick snap right immediately after getting three wrong, under more pressure than the first three carried combined. Ross Matiscik’s shoulder injury in London will heal on its own schedule, and Hamilton presumably returns to the defensive line this week. The Jaguars are a game better for it, sitting inside an AFC South race that looked all but dead a month ago, and somewhere in Jacksonville’s equipment room there is a long snapper’s practice jersey that has never been less necessary and never been more relevant.
