Tyler Huntley Went 10-for-10 When It Mattered and Did Something No NFL Quarterback Has Done
Baltimore beat Atlanta 30-23 in overtime on Sunday night with Lamar Jackson inactive, and the backup who replaced him put together a stretch of football that has no precedent in the sport.
Tyler Huntley finished 24-of-32 for 201 yards with two passing touchdowns and no interceptions. The record is in the subset of that line. Per OptaSTATS, Huntley is the only quarterback in NFL history to go 10-for-10 or better with a passing touchdown and a rushing touchdown inside the final two minutes of the fourth quarter plus overtime.
What That Actually Means
Strip away the framing and here is the sequence. Atlanta went up eight on a Nick Folk field goal with 2:31 left in regulation. Everything Baltimore did after that had to be perfect.
It was. Huntley led a six-play touchdown drive, Baltimore converted the two-point attempt to tie it 23-23, and then he put together a 14-play touchdown drive in overtime to win it. He did not miss a throw in any of it.
Fourteen plays in overtime, on the road, with a backup quarterback. That is not a fluke drive. That is a quarterback managing a game.
He Has Been Here Before
Huntley has spent most of his career as the answer to a question nobody wanted to ask, which is what happens when Lamar Jackson cannot play.
The answer has usually been competent and limited. Sunday was different. Two hundred yards is not a big passing day, but 24-of-32 with no turnovers and two scoring drives in the last three minutes is the version of a backup quarterback that keeps a season alive.
Baltimore is 4-1. Atlanta fell to 2-3.
The Ending Belonged to Baltimore’s Defense
Atlanta got the ball in overtime after Huntley’s touchdown and the drive ended with an interception. Tua Tagovailoa, who had entered after Michael Penix Jr. was hurt late in regulation, threw it.
So Baltimore won on a Huntley touchdown drive and a defensive takeaway. The Ravens needed both, and the fact that they got the second one off an emergency quarterback should not take much away from the first.
The Larger Point About Baltimore
Teams with elite quarterbacks spend years building rosters that cannot function without them. Baltimore just went into a hostile building on a Sunday night, without the best running quarterback of his generation, and won a game it had no business winning.
That is worth more in October than almost anything else the Ravens could have accomplished. Jackson will come back. The knowledge that this team can steal a game without him does not go away.
Huntley will go back to holding a clipboard. He also owns a record nobody else in the history of the league has, and it came on the night the Ravens needed him most.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
