Original sin
In the end, yesterday demonstrated that my memory wasn’t wrong. Jake Plummer will always be Jake Plummer.
You see, some people in Denver called him “No Mistake Jake” this year, after a long drought without interceptions. He was starting to look like Joe Montana, capable of impossible feats of scrambling to force a completion and eating up yards in gigantic chunks. He didn’t look like the Jake the Snake I remembered, from when he played for the Cards. No, sir. The Broncos were to within a game of the AFC championship under Jake the Snake.
But, lo and behold, the Jake the Snake I knew showed up last night. When Jake played for the Cards, from 1997 to 2002, ol’ Jake brought them to two playoff appearances. One was nigh on legendary, a 20-7 win over the Cowboys in the wild-card round, but the following appearance against the Vikings was vintage Jake the Snake, full of dramatic and disastrous interceptions, fumbles, misfires, miscues, and dropped passes.
I was reminded of just that game last night.
You see, the Denver defense essentially allowed Jake to outlast the Pats last week — something for which I am intensely bitter — in spite of his performance, which wasn’t all that impressive great. (15/26 for 197, a TD and an interception?) If the Patriots had engineered a comeback, it would have truly looked like the Plummer of old, and that’s beside the fact that it would also have become known as the greatest comeback of all time by probably the greatest team of all time.
But last night, all of Jake Plummer’s very heavy past came back to bite him. Plummer threw two interceptions, lost two fumbles, was sacked three times, and did not perform well under pressure. At all. Several of his passes ought to have been interceptions and luckily were tipped away or miraculously caught; to put it generously, he struggled to keep up with Pittsburgh’s defense. The answer? A 34-17 shellacking by Bill Cowher’s Steelers, who now can earn, as everyone in Pittsburgh says, a ring for the thumb. (If they beat the Hawks, it would be their fifth Super Bowl victory.)
I just can’t help thinking that there’s more to it. This is just the Jake the Snake of old, if you ask me. One bizarre, improbable loss after another, when it counts. It’s almost as though somehow, he has sinned against the gods of football. If he is indeed condemned, like Sisyphus, to repeating his career over and over again, Plummer will now lead the Broncos to a season of painful, brutal, heart-wrenching loss after loss after loss, following up a season in the playoffs with a season so far removed from the playoffs that he might shave his ridiculous “beard.”
Oh, Jake. Just when everyone thinks you can’t make mistakes — you always find a way to in the end. That’s why you’ll never be Joe Montana. And that’s why Ben Roethlisberger is the one wearing John Elway’s number.
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