One of the football topics I’d love to give a PowerPoint presentation about: the surprise devastation of in-game long snapper injuries. (I did a blog post about it over a decade ago that I still link to all the time.) If a team’s long snapper gets injured before a game, you’re fine — they can sign another guy pretty easily to replace their guy. But if their long snapper gets injured during a game, most teams don’t have an adequate backup, and all punts and field goals become potential disasters.

And if you can’t do punts or field goals … suddenly, you’re losing a winnable game. You’re leaving points on the field and giving your opponent incredible field position. An injured long snapper can be a reminder that even the least important position on the football field can be incredibly important if you replace them with someone who can’t do the job adequately.

The Jaguars almost lost Sunday’s game in London for that reason. The Jags’ usual long snapper is Ross Matiscik, the highest-paid snapper in the league and a Pro Bowler the last three seasons. But he got injured almost immediately on Sunday.

In came Hamilton, a 340-pound defensive tackle who apparently snapped in high school. (He also filled in for Matiscik during a game last year.) Hamilton handled punt snaps fine. The field goal snaps, though, were consistently high.

Cooke kept getting them down. Special teams YouTuber Isaac Punts made a compilation video of Cooke’s saves. Each one is an acrobatic feat:

That’s right — that was a genuine hOLDER HIGHLIGHT REEL.

However, whenever the Jaguars could avoid kicking, they did. They went for it on fourth down twice in field goal range, and missed both.

But the alternative was kicking, and that was dicey. In the fourth quarter, Hamilton had a snap on an extra point that Cooke couldn’t get down cleanly, and Little couldn’t get the kick between the uprights. The missed extra point led to the Eagles taking a 17-16 lead with 8 seconds to go.

Then Ameer Abdullah returned the ball to the Goldilocks Zone:

Abdullah returned the ball 53 yards and was tackled with 1 second remaining. If he’d been tackled earlier, it might have been too far away for Little to hit a game-winning field goal. But if he’d been allowed to run just a few yards longer, the clock would have expired. I doubt any of the players on the field realized they were creating a football miracle as the play unfolded.

(BTW, the play was almost the exact opposite of the end-game situation with the Ravens two weeks ago — then, it made sense for the Cowboys to kick the ball to a returner, since the Ravens had a timeout and Dallas needed the return to take time off the clock. Here, the Jags didn’t have a returner and could essentially only win by returning the ball into field goal range or for a touchdown. Both coaches made the exact wrong decision and lost.)

That set up a game-winning 57-yard attempt from Cam Little ... and another opportunity for Hamilton to potentially mess up. I have never been more nervous about a snap IN MY LIFE.

Honestly, this was Hamilton’s best snap of the game. Still high, but easy for Cooke at this point.

I loved this game so much. It proved how every piece of a football team is filled by a player performing their role to the highest level humanly possible. You might look at the long snapper and see a Jenga block you can easily remove — but nope! Even that block is being filled by someone who executes their role so effectively that nobody else on a roster filled with the best athletes on earth can fill in.

I don’t know for sure whether this was the greatest placeholding game in NFL history. There are no stats on placeholding. I don’t even know if PFF grades the holders. It’s a job that we simply assume will be performed adequately. But at the NFL level, even the holders are acrobats and tightrope walkers.

So if you do know someone who has done an even more remarkable job holding the football than Cooke did Sunday … honestly, I’d love to see it. Drop it in the comments.

The NFL uploaded the entire overtime period to Youtube, like the NTSB releasing the audio from the black box in a plane crash so everybody can know what went wrong. The tape is unkind to everybody: The Giants missed a go-ahead field goal in OT, and Cam Skattebo fumbled the ball in range for a game-winner.

But the real calamity begins with about a minute left on the game clock. The Commanders were really operating with no urgency whatsoever. Even before the final play, they ran the ball with 55 seconds with no timeouts and made no effort to hustle or operate quickly.

My first guess as to what happened here: Surely, the Commanders thought they had an additional timeout, right? Perhaps they forgot that teams get two timeouts in overtime and not three? (A reverse New York Liberty situation!) Or they forgot that they had called their first timeout when the Giants were on offense after an incomplete pass on the second play of overtime?

But I don’t think that’s the case. Replays reveal none of the players on the field or the coaches on the Washington coaching staff are trying to call timeout. And offensive lineman Chris Paul said the team discussed the lack of timeouts in the huddle.

A sliver of the blame probably falls on quarterback Jayden Daniels. This was a pass play, intended to stop the clock quickly with an incomplete pass or a receiver going out of bounds. It looks like it’s designed for Daniels to roll to the left and quickly throw to tight end Ben Sinnott headed toward the left sideline, but the defense takes that away. Daniels quickly realizes he can’t make the throw and decides to scramble, which is an absolute 100 percent no-can-do in this scenario. He has to know to throw the ball away.

But even after Daniels is tackled, none of the Commanders seem to realize how dire a scenario they’re in. The downfield receivers in particular seem to make no effort to get back to the line of scrimmage to run a final play.

And while I’m assigning a small portion of the blame to the players on the field … most of it has to go to Commanders coach Dan Quinn.

Quinn has claimed the goal of the play was “trying to gain more for the kick.” Which makes sense — a 41-yarder isn’t a chip shot, and the Commanders’ kicker is a rookie, Drew Stevens, although he’s hit every kick from under 50 yards this season.

But if you’re going to call a play … why didn’t they communicate the timeout situation as clearly as possible to all the players on the field? It’s the coaches’ job to make sure the players know what they’re trying to do. If the players didn’t understand the situation, that’s just as big a coaching failure as a bad strategy.

Incredibly, “losing a Super Bowl that Quinn’s team led by 25 points in the second half” will no longer by the most egregious game management blunder in Quinn’s arsenal, although admittedly that one was a slightly bigger deal.

The ending was so bad that Commanders part-owner Magic Johnson actually expressed an opinion on Twitter. “I’m in total disbelief my Commanders had such poor clock management in today’s overtime game against the Giants,” Johnson wrote. “All we had to do was kick the field goal and we would have won the game!”

This is the first time Magic has ever said anything negative on Twitter. 99.9 percent of his posts are like “another great win by my @Dodgers! The key play was when Shohei Ohtani hit a 2-run home run to give them a 5-2 lead.”

The loss could have huge implications. To my eyes, the Commanders with Daniels at QB are the best team in the NFC East. With a win here, they would have cut a game off the Giants’ early division lead; instead they stay two games back. Again: A tie will haunt you forever.

There’s a lot of whimsy in watching a bunch of football players scramble around, unsure what to do. But the more I think about this disaster, the more I get pissed off. I just wrote about the Jaguars-Eagles game, where long snappers and holders shone. It was a testament to how an NFL game features dozens of the most talented people on the planet who have dedicated themselves to perfecting extremely specific tasks, putting their bodies and brains through hell in pursuit of victory.

I don’t even care about the Commanders, and I’m angry. It feels so callous to take all that effort and violence required to nearly win a football game and fart it all away through stupidity and carelessness. This tie will follow the Commanders around all season long. Good. They deserve it. This failure should haunt them until they can wash themselves clean.

Obligatory intro: We are once again doing a story about the 49ers’ injuries. On Sunday, Deebo Samuel and Jacob Cowing both left with injuries, leaving the Niners without six receivers. (Previously injured: Ricky Pearsall, Christian Kirk, De’Zhaun Stribling, and DeMarcus Robinson.)

Evans is also hurt. He’s dealt with a slew of injuries this season, including a quad strain and a groin pull in training camp and a hip injury in Week 2, and is still clearly bothered by a pair of broken ribs suffered in Week 3.

Last season’s injuries broke Evans’ 11-year streak of having 1,000 yards in all 11 of his NFL seasons; only Jerry Rice (14) has more career 1,000-yard seasons.

His durability is remarkable. Evans was drafted in 2014, after a Texas A&M career where he made made Johnny Manziel look good enough to get picked in the first round. (Remember that guy? He’s been podcasting and hawking meme coins for years; Evans is still out there balling.)

This is his first season in San Francisco after spending his entire career in Tampa Bay. He seems like an instant fit for everything the Niners are trying to accomplish and an essential piece for an increasingly injured squad.

But with everybody else down, Evans became option No. 1A, broken ribs and all. The Niners offense looked kinda broken against the Seahawks … except for Evans, who had 60 percent of the team’s total receiving yards (113 out of 189).

Evans’ 28-yard catch on that fourth-quarter drive gave him more yards than any other Niners receiver on the entire day; George Kittle was second-best with 24 yards.

Evans also provided one of the most iconic trash talk moments in recent memory. When Seahawks cornerback Trevon Diggs tried to talk smack to him, Evans realized he didn’t even know who he was jawing with. He grabbed Diggs by the jersey and spun him around to read his nameplate:

Evans says this wasn’t trolling; he legitimately didn’t know who he was talking to. I didn’t know Diggs was on the Seahawks either — he’s had a fine career, a former All-Pro who led the NFL in interceptions in 2021, but is well down the depth chart for the stacked Seahawks and has played only 17 snaps so far this season.

To an unchanging immortal like Evans, even an exceptional player like Diggs must feel fleeting. Yes, Diggs was great, for a moment, a few years ago. But would a bird talk smack to the rock he was perched on? Evans persists, worn and weathered, but unbroken.