HUBER’s MESSAGE: After his Bengals-record 208th game turned out to be one of the damndest, punter Kevin Huber, now the oldest player on the active 53-man roster, had a message for his mates before Wednesday’s practice.
“By the end of the year, it’s going to be a blip on the radar,” said Huber of the inscrutable 23-20 overtime loss to the Steelers. “We can’t get caught up in this game too much. We didn’t win every game last year and we started 1-1.”
Just go back to Huber’s first Bengals game. Ever. The Immaculate Deflection. Gus Johnson screaming on CBS, “Brandon Stokley, Brandon Stokley.” Broncos 12, Bengals 7 on Opening Day, 2009, in this same building.
The Bengals were winning, 7-6. Denver was backed up on its 13-yard line and Bengaldom was celebrating with 28 seconds left. Quarterback Kyle Orton flung it down the left sideline for Brandon Marshall, Bengals cornerback Leon Hall tipped it and the ball somehow went yards backward to Stokley and there was nobody behind him. The 87-yard carnage took 17 seconds and is the longest winning TD pass in NFL history with less than two minutes left in a game.
Devastating, right? Unforgettable, right?
“I don’t remember my first game at all,” Huber said. “Who did we play?”
Told Denver, there was flicker of recognition. “The game the ball deflected off the defender?”
Right. Point made. The Bengals went on to sweep the AFC North that season and won the division in a sea of Cinderella seasons.
As he looked back on Sunday’s blip, Huber stands by his decision not to eat the high snap on third down and see if emergency snapper Mitch Wilcox could get one better on fourth down as Evan McPherson teed up the winner in overtime from 29 yards out that was yanked left. The only thing Huber wishes is that he and McPherson weren’t so “urgent.”
“I think we were after what happened on the first kick when they blocked the extra point,” Huber said. “I went with my instincts. We’ve practiced a thousand snaps that were worse than that and I was able to…
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