The Colts’ second-year coach would be returning to Raymond James Stadium for the first time since the Bucs fired him 22 months prior. This one’s gonna be big.Īnd, wouldn’t you know it, the game happened to fall on Dungy’s 48th birthday. He felt them bubbling up the minute he got a peek at the Colts’ 2003 regular-season schedule, earlier that spring, when he saw what was on tap for Week 5. Everyone below is identified by their title on the day of the game: The scene This story includes interviews conducted both then and now. No team before and no team since has matched what Manning and the Colts pulled off that night. This is the story of the most impossible comeback in NFL history, a game that, 16 years later, still defies football logic. “But from the Tampa game forward, everything was just different.” “Before then, he was very good,” the exec said. It also was, in the words of one high-ranking Colts’ executive, the night Manning took the next step. It was Manning and the Colts, an offensive juggernaut inching into its prime, squaring off with the reigning Super Bowl champs, Jon Gruden’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a team led by a historic defense at the peak of its powers.īy night’s end, it was one of the most memorable Monday Night Football games ever played - not to mention one of the most controversial.
6, 2003, the fifth game of Manning’s sixth season, stacked in storylines and set to play out on the national stage. We won the game, and in a few months when it’s playoff time and y’all are asking me for tickets, I’m gonna remember who went to bed and gave up on us.” “I wanted to tell them my head’s just fine.
All my friends are telling me, ‘Really sorry you guys lost. “Since we played on Monday night, we got back really late, and I remember checking the recorder around 4 a.m. “This was way before texting, so you’d get home and have a bunch of voicemails on your home phone,” Manning explains. Then everyone woke up the next morning - half the city of Indianapolis, the players’ parents, team employees, even the head coach’s mother-in-law - and they read the score, and they read it again, and again, and they still didn’t believe it. Who could blame them? It was Buccaneers 35, Colts 14 with four minutes left in the game. In fairness, so had the rest of the country. They’d gone to bed, every last one of them, thinking the Colts had lost. Waiting for Manning when he returned home that night: a handful of voicemails on his home phone, friends telling him to keep his head up. He remembers Marvin’s magic and Dungy’s cool. He remembers the name of the play they added to the game plan that week, and how it paid off with everything on the line. He remembers feeling like they could do nothing right, then feeling like they could do nothing wrong. He remembers the buildup, the early mistakes, the doubt creeping in. Tampa Bay settled for a short field goal after Nyheim Hines fumbled a punt return.Colts quarterback Peyton Manning helped engineer an amazing comeback vs.
#BUCS COLTS SCORE SERIES#
for the ball on Indy's next series and Brady wasted no time converting that mistake into Jones' go-ahead score. Six plays later, Fournette scored on a 4-yard TD run.Īntoine Winfield outfought Michael Pittman Jr. Indy led at halftime, but the Bucs swung the momentum when Shaquil Barrett sacked Wentz early in the second half, ripped the ball out and recovered it at the Bucs 35.
''I don't know how many times we can turn the ball over against a good team like that, that many times, and still score that many points. ''It is frustrating,'' Wentz said after going 27 of 44 with 306 yards, three touchdowns and two interceptions. But Carson Wentz's first pass fell incomplete and the second was picked off near the goal line. Indy (6-6) had five and Brady made them pay every time except for the interception on the game's final play.Īnd somehow despite all the errors, the Colts still had a chance to force overtime when Isaiah Rodgers returned the final kickoff 71 yards to the Bucs 32-yard line with 20 seconds left.
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