ShareThisBy DAVE KRIEGER
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Dead and buried after just two weeks, all that remained was for someone to say Jake Plummer's eulogy.
Stubbornly, his coach refused, insisting the reports of the Denver Broncos' quarterback's death were premature.
Both of them were vindicated Sunday night. Plummer rewarded Mike Shanahan's loyalty by outplaying two-time Super Bowl Most Valuable Player Tom Brady and getting the Broncos a road win that restored their prospects after a soporific first two weeks.
"I just wanted to go out each series and make sure I'm making the right throws, the right decisions and leading the team, managing the game," Plummer said after throwing two touchdowns and no interceptions in a 17-7 win over New England.
"It never crossed my mind that I was 'on.' I was just throwing the ball and completing it. When that's happening, you just keep going. You don't think about it."
What Plummer demonstrated again Sunday night was that adversity does not get him down. After taking more hits off the field than on it in his first two weeks, he bounced back with exactly the sort of game he played so often last season as the Broncos went 13-3.
After all the dissection of what went wrong the past two weeks, it seems only fair to dissect what went right in this one.
Plummer's second-quarter touchdown pass to Javon Walker was a perfect read and perfect throw.
He has talked about throwing the ball up for Walker anytime he finds him in single coverage. With the Patriots playing the run and cornerback Ellis Hobbs isolated on Walker, he had exactly that situation late in the second quarter and did exactly what he said he would.
He threw it up for Walker. Hobbs had pretty good coverage, but Plummer's throw was on the money and Walker came down with it.
This was also a classic Shanahan play call. The Broncos had a third-and-1 from the Patriots 32 with less than a minute left before intermission.
The conventional call was a run to get the first down. That's certainly what the Patriots expected.
So Shanahan, as is his habit, did the opposite.
"Just thinking that we'd probably go for it on fourth-down- and-1 and thought they might be in a man-to-man defense and just go for the long bomb and get a chance to get Javon Walker one-on-one," Shanahan said.
"Fortunately, they were in there pretty tight to stop the run and Javon made a nice catch and Jake made a nice throw."
On a third-and-6 from the Broncos 17 in the fourth quarter, Plummer read a cover-2 defense with cornerback Asante Samuel up tight and backup safety James Sanders deep.
Sanders was in for starter Eugene Wilson, who had cramped up. He had also substituted for Rodney Harrison in the third quarter and the Broncos had gone after him on his first play, earning a 30-yard pass-interference penalty on a pass for tight end Tony Scheffler.
The Patriots would do the same thing in the fourth quarter to earn the first touchdown of the season against the Broncos, going after reserve cornerback Karl Paymah when he replaced Darrent Williams. At the highest level of NFL coaching, you can't get away with a mismatch for even one play.
Anyway, Plummer read the coverage on Walker and threw a perfect ball between Samuel and Sanders as they converged. When Sanders was late arriving, Plummer got not only the completion but the longest Broncos play from scrimmage in two years, an 83-yard touchdown.
"Teams play cover-2 and there's a hole there," Plummer said. "Obviously, it's not supposed to be there if the safety plays over to his responsibility. But throughout a game, sometimes they get a little lazy getting off the hash and there's a bigger hole there. We had called it earlier and it wasn't there but we called it that time and I threw the ball to a spot, really. I didn't see Javon, I just knew the spot I was supposed to throw it."
A younger quarterback might have locked on to Walker too soon. Plummer gave a look up the seam, encouraging Sanders to stay put.
"You've got to look a little bit off to the other side, obviously, to make them hold their ground," he said.
This is the life of the quarterback, the roles of goat and hero interchangeable on a weekly basis. As certainly as he knew he would have man coverage on Walker on third-and-1, Shanahan knew his starting quarterback would bounce back.
"I thought Jake really managed the game well," he said. "Against a defense like this, they really keep you off balance. They do so many things to you, so many different rushes, so many different defenses, they can confuse a quarterback very quickly and make him make mistakes."
The reference to confusion was no accident. This was Shanahan's response to the suggestion that a rookie run his offense.
Normally, those suggestions would be history for only seven days, football being a weekly soap opera. But not this time.
The Broncos have a bye next week. Plummer gets two weeks before he has to prove himself again.
