With 12:32 to go in the third quarter of Sunday’s Texans-Buccaneers game, C.J. Stroud took the ball at his own 25-yard line trailing 20–10. About 27 game minutes later, he had the rookie single-game passing yards record, four more touchdown passes and possibly the most improbable late-game comeback of the season, with the Texans’ having about a 10% chance (according to ESPN’s win probability metric) of clinching the game after Tampa Bay went up by four points with 46 seconds remaining.
We did not learn anything about Stroud on Sunday that we haven’t already seen throughout his incredible rookie season, but we did see the suddenness with which he could make it happen; how quickly he can, in a difficult game against a very good defensive-minded head coach, transcend his circumstances and throw his team out of multiple deficits.
That, more than anything, should be the most haunting takeaway from watching Stroud, if your job involves slowing him down or cheering against him for the next decade. Not even Connor Stallions with two weeks of prep time and a Groucho Marx costume can stop this.
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Like any game that produces gaudy numbers, Stroud had help and a lot of yards after the catch. For example, the pass he threw at the 12:32 mark was to Noah Brown and it went 75 yards for a touchdown. One nearby defender was legally picked out of the way and another took a horrific angle to the ball, resulting in a trip. Brown was barely touched en route to the end zone. Or, there was a third-and-11 a few minutes later in which Stroud artfully navigated a minefield of a pocket and hit Dalton Schultz over the middle. Schultz broke a tackle, converted the first down and rumbled for 25 yards.
But, for the most part, Stroud, like other elite quarterbacks, became completely, robotically absorbed in the moment. He was throwing like one of those blindfolded archers who uses one arrow to split another. Scientists call it the flow state. Coaches in the AFC South will come to call it: this freakin’ thing again.
The difficulty of Stroud’s touchdown throws and the circumstances leading up to the scores themselves made his moment on Sunday impossible to dismiss. With 6:02 left in the third quarter, he hitched despite an oncoming interior rush, padded himself with the backside of an offensive lineman and threw a ball to Tank Dell in the back of the end zone that could not be described in any other way but perfection.
Early in the fourth quarter, after another precision pass to Nico Collins on a fade route that was ruled out of bounds, Stroud chucked a fourth-and-5 strike to Schultz that was ideally out of the way of Schultz’s defender, in the only place where Schultz could secure a touchdown. If that seems elementary and a precursor to being an NFL quarterback, look back at all the abysmal play we’ve seen so far this season. Most quarterbacks are capable of making that pass, but few outside of the established upper-tier possess the innate cool it takes to do it on a relatively long fourth-and-goal (a few minutes later, Stroud would make another version of this throw to Schultz while on the run that fell incomplete by just a hair).
With 10 seconds to go? Stroud threaded bracketed defenders and placed the ball in Dell’s hands just as he slid out of bounds. The Texans had no timeouts. The Buccaneers were in two-deep coverage and there was only one place that ball could have gone to give Houston a chance of winning the game,
With six seconds to go? He looked off a safety long enough to hit Dell in the back of the end zone.
This is the difference between a great game or a historic game, and a game in which all of those superfluous records are still set but the quarterback also solidifies himself unquestionably as one of the eight best at the position in the NFL right now and, very likely, previews a future where he is much better than that.
This is the difference between being a curiosity and being terrifying. The inevitable Offensive Rookie of the Year award is one thing. Ten years of clobbering good defenses is another.
