With 10:32 to play in the third quarter of a Week 7 game between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers, Brock Purdy settled under center with his offense on the opponents’ 1-yard line. Purdy tapped his helmet, which caused fullback Kyle Juszczyk to also tap his helmet, likely to confirm the play to running back Jordan Mason was still on. The 49ers had their backs in the I-formation, with one tight end to the left and two tight ends to the right, all of them on the line of scrimmage.
Most Chiefs defenders looked like track runners at the starting line of the 100-meter dash. Their legs were twitching and all six down linemen were rocking up onto their fingers in preparation for a short-range collision to try to prevent San Francisco from taking the lead. At that moment, the 49ers were the league’s seventh-best offense in the NFL in terms of EPA per play, while the Chiefs were the 10th-best defense along with the 10th-best red zone defense.
Steve Spagnuolo, the most decorated NFL coordinator in history, was calling the Chiefs’ defense against Kyle Shanahan, one of the league’s most innovative offensive play-callers. It was a two-time Super Bowl rematch, including the most recent one played.
When the ball was snapped, though, Purdy simply walked forward into the end zone behind his center, completely untouched and—I say this after watching the play countless times after it was highlighted on the Twitter/X account of play-design guru Dan Casey—seemingly before many of the Chiefs’ players knew the play was over. My obsession with this moment began first with its aesthetic. It’s like watching a robbery in broad daylight with no arrest. It’s like watching an ocean part for someone to simply walk through. There are plenty of plays in the NFL where someone scores untouched, even at the goal line when a quarterback runs a bootleg off a fake for a touchdown, but not from the 1-yard line on a QB rushing play up the middle. This is literally one of the most crowded spaces in all of sports, up there with a rugby scrum or a contested rebound with time expiring.
My obsession continued with a thesis: that Shanahan had invented the anti-tush push. Instead of assembling all of the team’s heft into one place and smashing the quarterback into the end zone like a stuck remote control button, the 49ers utilized some theatrical, backfield window dressing to make the play look like one thing before sneaking Purdy in through the front door of a great defense. Why risk your quarterback being barreled underneath a ton of humanity when you don’t have to?
But after showing the play to a number of coaches, the reality is far more interesting and goes deeper than a Reddit wormhole on the toxins contained in your frying pan. This one-yard Purdy touchdown is a window into how thorough a team’s preparation truly needs to be for a given week. It’s a window into the do-or-die theory behind situational goal line football and, ultimately, a window into just how hard it is to gain one yard in the NFL. As expected when reporting a story about the minutiae behind a 2024 quarterback sneak, it also obviously led me to an interview that resurfaced a nearly quarter-century-old accusation tied to Spygate.
This is the story of my favorite one-yard play, and how it traveled from an alleged drawn-up-on-the-sidelines middle finger to modern day social media showstopper that made one Ivy League coordinator tell his wife days before he called it: “If we hit this, it’s going to go viral.”
