OPINION / TAYLOR HEINICKE
Everybody loves an underdog, and there is no bigger underdog in the NFL than Taylor Heinicke. He’s the perfect guy to lead an imperfect Falcons team into battle Sunday in New Orleans, with the playoffs on the line.
After a season of ups and downs and twists and turns, the Falcons, somehow, still have something to play for. All they have to do is march into enemy territory, defeat the archrival Saints in front of a hostile Superdome crowd, and hope that the worst team in the league, the miserable, 2-14 Carolina Panthers, upset the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who control their own fate.
The odds of this happening, according to ESPN, are 11%.
So, you’re saying there’s a chance?
Yes, I am. Because the Falcons have No. 4 under center.
I’ve seen this movie before.
Full disclosure, while I root for the Falcons, I’m a Washington fan at heart. I grew up outside the nation’s capital in the 1980s and ‘90s, when Joe Gibbs’ teams were the class of the league, winning three Super Bowls and electrifying the city. Since the last Super Bowl win, I have spent more than 30 years in the wilderness, and my team has started 34 different quarterbacks. None has left a bigger impression on me than Taylor Heinicke.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
I talked to Taylor on Friday, shortly after the Falcons’ practice, and I asked him how he’s approaching Sunday’s game, one of the most important of his career. “I know I am playing with house money here,” he said. And when you’re playing with house money, you’ve got nothing to lose. It’s been that way his whole professional career.
By every standard metric used to evaluate NFL quarterbacks, Taylor is average, at best. He has an average arm and an average build, average stats, and a lifetime quarterback rating of 82.
But if the scouts at the NFL combine could find a way to measure heart, No. 4 would be off the charts. I asked him, when he steps into the huddle, what the 10 other guys around him must be thinking. With a confident sense of modesty he answered, “They know the kind of person I am. They know that I will always fight.” Every time this undersized, underskilled, underestimated quarterback takes the field, he hurls everything he has into the game, and that, in turn makes people believe.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Heinicke was sleeping on his sister’s couch in Flowery Branch, having just re-enrolled at his alma mater, Old Dominion University. He thought his playing days were over. The undrafted free agent had bounced around the NFL for a few years before he was cut by the Panthers in 2019. He caught on with the St. Louis Battlehawks of the XFL, but when that league folded, Taylor headed home. As he remembers it now, “I wasn’t having fun anymore. I had fallen out of love with the game.” But, he couldn’t quit. “I knew I was going to get one more shot, and I wanted to be ready for it,” he told me this week.
And then the phone rang. A few months later, after a stint on the Washington practice squad and the bench, Heinicke was suiting up to start a playoff game for my long-suffering team against the most successful quarterback ever to play the game, Tom Brady, and Tampa Bay. The third-stringer fought and scratched and clawed, and deep in the third quarter, under heavy pressure, scampered past defenders and hurled himself horizontally in the air, crashing into the end-zone pylon for a touchdown. It was one of those plays that makes you jump up off the couch, pump your fist in the air and yell at the TV. It’s one of those plays that gets seared into the memories of die-hard fans.
Taylor separated his shoulder on the play but stayed in the game. There was no way he was coming out.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Washington lost by eight points, as Brady’s Bucs marched to a Super Bowl win. But for 60 minutes, in the midst of a global pandemic, Taylor Heinicke went toe-to-toe with the GOAT, and his guts and his heart gave a beleaguered fan base something to cheer about. Every time he put on a Washington jersey for the next two years, you believed something special might happen. The fact that it never came together said more about the Washington football team than it did their quarterback.
Three years later, here we are again. Taylor signed a two-year deal to come home to Georgia to join the Falcons, fully expecting to spend the season backing up Desmond Ridder. Looking for a spark in Week 8, coach Arthur Smith turned to Taylor, who has been an on-again, off-again starter ever since. With the season on the line, he got the nod again two weeks ago. The results have been mixed. An inspiring win over the Colts in Week 16 was followed by a three-interception blowout loss to the Bears on New Year’s Eve.
Credit: Josh D. Weiss
Credit: Josh D. Weiss
Taylor’s inconsistent play isn’t solely to blame for this dismal season. There are so many open questions swirling around the Falcons’ locker room. Will Arthur Smith be back? Can Desmond Ridder grow to be the franchise QB everyone hoped he was? Can a loaded defense and a wildly talented rookie running back live up to their potential?
But all of these questions can wait. At least for a week. Taylor has the ball again, and there still is a path to the playoffs, winding, and rocky, and narrow as it might be.
If the Falcons were 10-6 and looking to cruise to one last win to secure home-field advantage for the playoffs, I wouldn’t be writing this column. That’s not a Heinicke game. But here he is, playing for the team he grew up watching when he was a kid in Lawrenceville, a team that nearly everyone has written off. He’s played his way off the bench and into the starting lineup. He’ll be lining up against a favored Saints team, on the road, with a menacing defense. He knows that nobody is expecting him to pull off a victory. And that’s just the way he likes it.
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