Yet Another Gem for the HOF Hightlight Reel
We may not be able to enjoy watching Troy Polamalu for much longer, so it’s important to not take him for granted. I believe there has never been anyone quite like him and probably never will be again.
This play from the Cleveland game is a case in point. Most guys act in one role per play. Once that role becomes irrelevant to the play, they stop and just let the play unfold. The better players make a mid-play adjustment based on the action, and those adjustments are often the source of notable plays. A playmaker is a guy who can make an adjustment in the middle of game action to take advantage of the prevailing situation in real time. But here, we see Troy play five different roles in one play. That means he makes four adjustments in a matter of seconds, turning a busted defensive play into something special.
As the play initiates, he is anticipating a run and tries to blitz a gap on the Browns right side. His guess is wrong, as the run is to the left side and the right side gap closes immediately. An ordinary player in this position would continue to push in vain at the offensive line and end up hopelessly irrelevant to the game action. Not so with Polamalu. Almost before your eyes can figure out what is going on, suddenly Troy magically appears three yards back on the left side where he actually has to wait for the runner to smack into him. Troy makes the tackle which is already a great play, but that’s not enough. He then adjusts again and goes for the strip, successfully forcing a fumble. And again, before the brain of a normal human can even tell what’s happening, Troy adjusts one more time, now scooping up the ball at the instant that it is floating free on the other side of the runner. This is just an astonishing display of a combination of crazy athletic ability with an incredible football sixth sense.
Seriously, often he makes his teammates and opponents look like amateurs playing a different sport.
(Thanks to SteelersDepot for the animated GIF).
We gotta talk. I don’t know how you’re inserting video clips and GIFs into your posts.
I agree with you; great play by an all-time great. There was a bit of luck involved though. Ogbonnaya did fumble the ball straight up into Troy’s chest. The ball never actually touched the ground until Troy rolled over on it.
GIFs are easy. Just copy and paste it. This is assuming the GIF already exists, as with the SteelersDepot example above. If you want to create an animated GIF there are some free online tools such as gifsoup.com.
Inserting actual videos is a little bit trickier. When creating the post go to text mode (not visual mode) and insert the following, substituting the youtube file name for zzzzzzzzzzz:
(type greater than symbol here)iframe src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/zzzzzzzzzz” height=”347″ width=”574″ allowfullscreen=”” frameborder=”0″>
For example, this is what happens when you substitute “uVsCwMlUuCM” for “zzzzzzzzzzzz”:
BTW, on the luck comment. It’s true there is luck involved as is the case with most turnovers. The mind bender is that the ball never touched the ground. Watch this clip of the play:
http://www.steelers.com/video-and-audio/videos/Steelers-at-Browns-Troy-Polamalu-fumble-recovery/f3900692-0ae4-4ab9-b8d4-8777abfea5e4
If it’s luck for the ball to find itself in a place where he can get it, that’s fine. But what separates the man from the beast is the ability of the beast to anticipate it, see it, and do it in a split second. We’re watching it in slo mo, which apparently is how he sees it in real time. I can’t comprehend making that play. Anyone else who recovers that fumble would have done it after it already fell to the ground and bounced around a couple of times. Troy plucks it right out of mid air while his body is in mid flight. At that point, the normal brain would still be processing the tackle. A better than average brain would be processing the strip and the fall to the ground. It takes a freak to be two steps ahead to make that mid-air snag.
Crazy.
Agreed on the crazy aspect of him seeing the ball come out and reacting when everything was happening at that speed.
Polamalu wasn’t impressed by the play. Neither was his long-time sidekick at safety, Ryan Clark.
“Nah, that was pretty simple — for him,” Clark said. “You’re talking about Troy. For somebody that was human that would be a great play, but for him that was nothing.
“You know, it’s sad to say,” Clark continued, “but I think we’ve gotten desensitized to it. If another guy makes one of those plays, you think it’s amazing. If another guy jumps over the line for the first time, you think it’s amazing. We’ve seen him do it five times. If another guy scoops the ball off the ground with one hand, in the snow, we think to ourselves ‘Oh, I can’t believe that person made that play.’ If Troy does it, you shake his hand, pat him on the helmet, and we sit down and we all pray. He’s just an amazing talent, but even more an awesome person. You begin to expect those things from him.”
I like the narrative, Copa, that was great. We have all agreed that Troy is special–that’s nothing new–but that play, when broken down to truly understand how it went from the inception to the conclusion with all that happened in between, is nothing short of magical. It’s so easy to get lost in the result (“we got the ball!”), but when you break down like you did, you just have sit there in absolute astonishment.