Even after allowing the Buccaneers to battle back in the second half on Sunday, and New York's quarterback sneak fiasco on fourth down with two minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, the Jets still had a chance to stop Tom Brady and win the game.
At the start of Tampa Bay's final drive, Brady was dinking and dunking, picking up a few yards here and there, but typically refraining from pushing the ball too far down the field.
After six completions, taking the Bucs to the Jets' 33 yard line, Brady finally delivered the decisive blow, riffling a strike down the sideline to Cyril Grayson for a game-winning touchdown.
As much as Brady made his latest walk-off look easy, the final toss to Grayson was nearly broken up by Jets safety Elijah Riley.
In fact, if you look closer at the replay—shown in the clip above—Riley is quite literally inches away from getting a hand on it and forcing an incompletion.
He may have been close, but Riley took full responsibility for the lapse in coverage on that final play.
"What it really comes down to is I just need to make that play," Riley told reporters. "There’s not much more that needs to be said about that when it comes down to it. In the final seconds, against a team like this, I’ve got to be able to make that play."
To give Riley some credit, he's had a strong season thus far, filling in after veterans Marcus Maye and Lamarcus Joyner landed on injured reserve. Heck, Riley even playing this week is remarkable considering he was carted off the field in Miami just two weeks ago, suffering a scary concussion.
But that didn't make Riley any happier about the end result, coming up short against the defending champions.
"It sounds cool, but you’ve got to win those games," he said. "Doesn’t matter who you’re playing. We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do and win the game. There’s no moral victories. So what, we played close? We’ve got to finish it and get the win."
With tight end Cameron Brate running a route in the flat, a quick pump of Brady's shoulder got Bryce Hall to step forward at cornerback, leaving Grayson open on his fade route down the right sideline.
Here's what Hall had to say about the fateful play:
"Just credit to Tom Brady and his squad and what he was able to do. Experienced veteran, obviously. Owns the moment. Obviously, we don’t want to give up explosives. Hard to tell, I haven’t diagnosed the film, haven’t seen it, but just credit to him and what he was able to do. We’ve got to be better in that situation, and that’s really it."
Head coach Robert Saleh chimed in as well:
"Unfortunately, the last play, the touchdown, we have to be better from a coverage standpoint. They shouldn’t be getting explosives in that situation. We’re basically in a two-shell and he still managed to catch a fade ball. It’s not good. I felt that with no timeouts, we’d do a good job keeping the ball in front of us. I thought we did a god job a couple of times of tacking in bounds and making sure the clock ran. We had an opp. We just needed to tackle them in bounds one more time and we would have been looking at a last-play effort to win it. Unfortunately, it didn’t get to that."
Who knows what would've happened if Riley was able to tip Brady's pass away and prevent the touchdown. It felt like it was only a matter of time until Brady reached the end zone on that drive—he's always been practically unstoppable in those clutch situations—but there's no way to know for sure.
Riley reiterated that he and the rest of New York's defenders were excited to be in a position to make a game-winning stop. It just came down to facing an all-time great quarterback while failing to execute when they needed to the most.
"We were excited for the opportunity to go out there and win ourselves a game," he said. "At the end of the day, we weren’t able to do that. A couple of things took place throughout that drive that, we could’ve stopped, and ultimately, like I said, that last play, I’ve got to be able to make."
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