Rams coach Jeff Fisher has never shied away from fake punts and other such trickery, but punter Johnny Hekker was still surprised to hear that the coach wanted him to throw the ball from his own 18-yard line with just under three minutes to play in Sunday’s game against the Seahawks.
Hekker said his response was to ask if the coach was serious before heading onto the field to throw a pass to Benny Cunningham, who said he thought the team would have cut him if he didn’t reel in the pass. We’ll never have to find out because Cunningham did catch the ball and the Rams did hold on for the 28-26 victory. After the game, Fisher explained that he didn’t think his defense would have been able to stop Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, who accounted for more than 400 yards of offense, before Seattle moved back into the lead.
“You guys saw the flow of the game, we were having a hard time stopping Russell,” Fisher said, via the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “There was too much time left on the clock right there, and I didn’t want to give the ball back to them. I thought it was our best chance to get a first down.”
Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said the team was prepared for Fisher to pull some stuff out of his hat, but that they didn’t think the fake would come in that situation. He called it a “very gutsy” call, which sounds about right for a decision that would have left Fisher to be hoisted up by his own mustache for handing the Seahawks a win if things had backfired.
As he said, though, Fisher thought his team would lose if they gave the Seahawks the ball with a conventional punt so he chose to go out fighting.