At first, Kerry Collins couldn’t make out what was going on inside his helmet. There seemed to be some kind of strange discussion, an on-the-fly debate, emanating between the static in the speaker.
“I wasn’t really sure why anyone was saying anything,” he would say a few hours later.
This was the afternoon of Sunday, Sept. 29, 2002, inside a sunny, 90-degree hotbox known as Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Ariz. The 2-1 Giants led the 1-2 (and bound for 5-11) Cardinals 7-0. There were 14 seconds left in the first half. The Giants had the ball on their own 32-yard line.
The Giants had struggled to find offense those first four weeks of the season, scoring exactly one offensive touchdown in all four. The tools were in place to put points on the board, but they hadn’t clicked yet. The notion they’d do anything meaningful in 14 seconds was preposterous, even to a confident quarterback like Collins.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
