With a surprising win over the Dolphins, the Titans end an NFL chain of 767 games without a win.
With 2:40 left to play, Titans rookie quarterback Will Levis led a nine-play, 75-yard touchdown drive and scored the extra point to get within a touchdown of the Dolphins’ lead.
In the next play, the defense forced a three-and-out. Levis then led another score drive that ended thanks to a Derrick Henry 4-yard run. The Dolphins as well as the rest for the NFL world were shocked when Tennessee won this game 28–27.
ESPN said that the Titans were the initial team to win a game after being down 14 points with less than three minutes left. Before the Titans’ win, teams had records of 0–767.
The huge return was the biggest surprise of the season. The underdogs beat the Dolphins by 13.5 points, which hurt their chances of becoming the No. 1 seed in the AFC. The Baltimore Ravens (10-3) are now the only team in first place.
Somehow, the Titans beat the Dolphins, who had been tied with the Ravens for first place in the AFC going into Week 14.
With just over two minutes left, quarterback Will Levis lead the Titans on a four-play, 64-yard drive which began at their 36-yard line.
Derrick Henry scored on a 3-yard run to end the drive and give the Titans a one-point lead. It was his second touchdown of the night. This was Levis’s first drive to score from behind in the fourth quarter.
The 327 yards Levis threw were the most by a rookie in “Monday Night Football” history and were his first 300-yard game.
The Levis brand kept standing in the pocket even though the pass rush was coming at him, and he still threw the ball into the field.
On a deep 45-yard pass, he hit receiver DeAndre Hopkins. He also had a strong arm and pushed the ball to the sideline in out-breaking routes. Hopkins got 24 yards on another one of his passes that went through three players.
Levis had good touch on a pass to Tyjae Spears that went 25 yards through the air. That’s the second-most yards for a running back this season on a catch.
The Miami Dolphins lost to the Tennessee Titans 28-27 on Monday night, even though they were ahead by 14 points with less than three minutes to play. This was one of the most awful late-game collapses I can remember.
Mike McDaniel, the head coach of the Dolphins, said after the game that the team failed in every way.
Miami only completed 4 out of 13 third downs, threw for an average of 5.5 yards per pass, and quarterback Tua Tagovailoa was sacked five times.
CNN’s Marcel Louis-Jacques reported that McDaniel said, “This was as much of a team loss as you could get, in my opinion, prior to watching the tape.”
ESPN says that since 2016, teams with a 14-point lead with less than three minutes to play have won 767 of the last 867 games.
Wide receiver Tyreek Hill missed most of both the second and third quarters because of an ankle injury. The Dolphins’ offense was very inefficient, which wasn’t like them at all.
The Dolphins had a hard time scoring in the red zone. Tagovailoa and company scored only twice in five trips inside an Titans’ 20-yard line.
“You can point to that as the No. 1 reason we failed to win the game,” McDaniel stated. “For me, you call plays that should have worked, but they didn’t.” We lost because we did things that were not like us.
The loss in prime time dropped Miami to 9-4, which hurt its hopes of beating the 10-3 Baltimore Ravens for the top spot in the AFC. This made it possible for the 7-6 Buffalo Bills to make a last-minute run at the AFC East title.
Then Levis, a second-round pick who was making his sixth start of the season, took over. After nine plays and 75 yards, which took 1:54, he finished the drive with a touchdown pass of 3 yards to DeAndre Hopkins and a pass for two points to Nick Westbrook-Ikhine.
The Titans made a stop, and Levis went to work right away. He hit Hopkins for 28 yards as well as Chigoziem Okonkwo for sixteen yards to put the team in score position.
The Titans were ahead by one point after Derrick Henry scored upon a 3-yard run and the extra point.
There were no more timeouts for the Dolphins, so they took over and got to their own 45. But Harold Landry III hit Tagovailoa to end the game.
Today was the first night this season that Miami lost at home. They had won three straight games before this loss.
The Ravens now have a better record than any other team in the conference by one game. Miami played most of the game without their star receiver Tyreek Hill, who hurt his ankle in the first quarter and missed most of the second quarter and third.
It was Jason Sanders’ 31-yard field goal that tied the game after he came back and caught passes of 23 and 25 yards.